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The Doctor and Rose come back to the Powell Estates to learn that things are not great in the modern day: strange shifting shapes are being brought to life for a few minutes every few hours all over the world, and are using psychic energy to come across as ghosts of people's loved ones. It's caused a massive and funny shift in world culture -- ghosts appearing as characters on soaps, that kind of thing -- but the Doctor, Rose, and Jackie soon figure out that they're being brought through by Torchwood, now located in Canary Wharf. An attempt at recon goes awry, and all three are captured, along with the TARDIS. A guided tour of the facility provides much explanation -- Victoria's decree in 1879 has grown into a full-fledged paranoid NSA against the aliens, particularly the Doctor -- and a few more interesting tidbits. The first is the Doctor's immediate understanding that the ghost shifts are doing terrible things to the walls between realities, and the second is a mysterious sphere which was created to sail from universe to universe. The ghost entities get control of several Torchwood staff, activating a final ghost shift, and the mysterious sphere starts to open, just as Mickey Smith reveals himself to be working undercover at Torchwood on a mission from the Steel Age. The Doctor and Jackie realize that the mysterious ghosts are actually an army of Cybermen as they finally come through clearly all over the world, and begin to march. And inside the strange sphere? Daleks, of course. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Planet Earth. London. Where she was born, and where she died. Rose sits on a city bus, shoving chips into her mouth, wearing her Little Red Hoodie, looking glum. For the first nineteen years of her life, nothing happened. Nothing at all. Not ever. Rose sighs, forehead against the window glass. You can hear her grinning when she speaks: "And then I met a man called the Doctor." He took her hand and he said, "Run." But the first thing Rose ever said was "Goodbye," buying lottery tickets with her coworkers at Henrik's: hoping for magic, along with everybody else stuck in the world. She ran with him. A man who could change his face, who took her away from home in his magical machine. A legend, woven throughout history: when disaster comes, he is there. When she met the Doctor, even her boyfriend turned to plastic. He brings a storm in his wake. And he has one constant companion. If you plan on going on an epic quest, there are some things to look out for, like a guy with magic powers who appears out of nowhere, and seems to be a nutter. He'll walk down the street with you, holding hands, and you'll be happy. He'll show you the whole of time and space and you'll think it would never end. The Doctor and Rose stood, the TARDIS just beside them, on a rocky alien planet, watching the sunset. "How long are you gonna stay with me?" he asked, and she smiled Excellently at him and said, "Forever." And they smiled.
"It's like when you were a kid. The first time they tell you the world's turning, you just can't quite believe it, because everything looks like it's standing still. I can feel it." He took her hand and looked into her eyes. The TARDIS sounds like somebody hauling a long length of chain, a few feet at a time. "The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, and the entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour. And I can feel it. We're falling through space, you and me. Clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go..." He let go her hand and looked at her, hard. "That's who I am."
"Forever." Cut to Rose on a desolate beach, all blue and gray and black. "That's what I thought. But then came the army of ghosts. Then came Torchwood, and the War. And that's when it all ended." She looks out to sea, not moving. Barely breathing. "This is the story of how I died."
Credits. Episode by Russell T. Davies. The TARDIS materializes in a playground -- could it be the one from "Father's Day"? Where she picked apart her fantasy of "the best man in the world," and saw the love and weakness, the stupidity and youth underneath? The Peter Alan Tyler that resides behind the image, behind the ghost. The quest isn't a metaphor for therapy; therapy is a metaphor for the quest. And he became a hero, finally: restoration of the divine. How can you say any of this is a mistake? Rose steps out of the TARDIS with her sack slung back. It is red. The Doctor follows, and together they head into the Powell Estates. They're almost dancing.
Jackie Tyler's doing laundry when she hears Rose calling from just inside. She hurries to the front as they're coming in, just exasperated, overjoyed. Lonely: "Oh, I don't know why you bother with that phone! You never use it!" Rose gathers her up, grinning, and her mother tells her, again and again, how much she loves her. The Doctor tries to get past, but Jackie's too quick for him. She grabs him against weak protest and kisses him right on his wonderful mouth: "Oh, you lovely big fella! Oh, you're all mine!" He begs her to put him down as things get more and more domestic. "Yes, you are!" she says, overjoyed and exuberant, and kisses him again, heading back into the house. The Doctor follows, wiping his mouth like a little boy.
Rose is in the sitting room with a sackful of laundry and a tiny beautiful bottle for Jackie: "It's from the market on this asteroid bazaar. It's made of...um..." The Doctor gives her the information as he flicks through magazines: "Bezulium." She nods: "Bezulium. When it gets cold, yeah? Means it's gonna rain. When it's hot, it's gonna be sunny! You can use it to tell the weather!" Jackie's lit inside by something else, and can't wait to share it. "Got a surprise for you and all," she says. Rose blows her bangs: "I get her bezulium, she doesn't even say thanks!" But Jackie's not listening: "Guess who's coming to visit? You're just in time, he'll be here at ten past! Who do you think it is?" It's Father's Day. Rose doesn't know: "I hate guessing. Just tell me." Jackie's shining like Christmas; like Rose on Father's Day: "It's your Granddad. Granddad Prentice! He's on his way, any minute!" Rose stares at Jackie, and she vanishes back into the kitchen for tea. The etymology for the name "Orpheus" is really hard to pin down. "To be deprived"; "to put asunder, to separate." "Darkness," orphanos, "to lament, sing wildly, cast a spell." Orpheus was defined by loss and the failure of faith. You look back -- at the end of life -- and if you're not willing to give it up at that moment, you never deserved it in the first place. He couldn't cut the cord, couldn't let it lie, couldn't be strong unto himself and say goodbye with his back straight. Jackie's more practiced in looking back at what's been taken than most people. She got hard; she grasps at shadows. Rose stares at her and the Doctor, grinning; if Jackie's gone mad, tell me something new. "Granddad Prentice, that's her dad," Rose tells the Doctor. "But he died, like ten years ago." The most wonderful man in the world.
Rose and the Doctor stand in the kitchen doorway. "Mum?" says Rose. "What you just said about granddad?" Jackie stands in the kitchen, beautiful and overjoyed: "Any second now!" Rose is gentle. She knows about Father's Day, and about holding onto things. She remembers the Lady Cassandra O'Brien Dot Delta Seventeen, and all that she wrought. Everything changes and everything ends. "But he passed away," says Rose, worried. "His heart gave out. Do you remember that?" Jackie giggles. Of course she does. "Then how can he come back?" asks Rose. Jackie, exasperated, overjoyed: "Why don't you ask him yourself? Ten past...Here he comes." A shadow, a living shadow from across the Howling, appears in the kitchen and goes for a stroll. It stands on two legs; its feet are shaped like shapeless feet. The Torchwood theme begins to play. Rose and the Doctor stare. "Here we are, then!" says Jackie. "Dad, say hello to Rose. Ain't she grown?" Seeing her like this. In love with a monstrosity, that idiotic smile on her face, dancing with shadows. They only really get me with Jackie.
No speaking, just a cut to the Doctor and Rose, bursting from the estate block at a run. The Doctor stares around, confused: "They're everywhere!" And so they are -- an army of them, standing about like ordinary people, nobody noticing them, a group of boys playing with a ball. In the middle of a shift of ghosts; in the middle of history grown hard. Rose gasps as a ghost walks right through the fluid Doctor. It's uncomfortable, but there's no pain. Just adjustment. "They haven't got long," says Jackie, joining them. "Midday shift only lasts a couple of minutes. They're about to fade." The Doctor's eyes bug out, the way they do: "What do you mean shift? Since when did ghosts have shifts? Since when did shifts have ghosts?" Since Hell went walking, a hundred soldiers abreast. Since the afterlife was incorporated. "Oh, he's not happy when I know more than him, is he?" Jackie giggles. He can't even feel sorry for her. He's just scared: "But no one's...running, or screaming, or freaking out..." Jackie wonders why on earth they should, and checks her watch: "Here we go. Twelve minutes past." She looks at Rose and smiles, biting her lip in anticipation. If the world is full of wonders, then Rose's life isn't so great after all. And most of it's the idea that maybe she'll stay this time, most of it is pulling at the ghost of Rose, but some of it is getting her own back. Those left behind, finally touching magic. Not so special now, is it?
Now to France, where the President is doing...something having to do with my shitty, horrendous French, and the ghosts wandering around the Eiffel Tower. India, where ghosts are milling around the Taj Mahal. Japan, where the Doctor puts his head in his hand and three proto-ganguro scream and show us their Hello Ghostie t-shirts. The Doctor shakes his head: "It's all over the world!" Back to EastEnders, and this is funny once somebody explains it to you. And by "you," of course, I mean me. Barbara Windsor's character, Peggy Mitchell, stands at the bar of the Queen Victoria (!) having what they call a "go" at a ghost: "Listen to me, Den Watts, I don't care if you have come back from the grave. Get out of my pub! The only spirits I'm serving in this place are gin, whisky, and vodka. So? You heard me! Get out!" Which is good dialogue, I think, but is especially funny because the character she's yelling at died in the '80s, came back after fourteen years and got murdered again by Chrissie Watts...who was played by Torchwood Yvonne! Making him a ghost! Whatever, the Doctor's had enough. He turns off the TV and demands to know when all this started. "Well, first of all, Peggy heard this noise in the cellar, so she goes down..." Rose smirks. I looove Jackie Tyler. "No," says the Doctor, and not unkindly. "I mean worldwide." Two months ago, it "just happened": everybody woke up, there were ghosts all over, "we all ran round screaming and that," the whole planet was panicking, the Doctor (she notes) was nowhere to be found, and they all got used to it quickly enough: "Took us time to realize that...we're lucky." Rose asks why Jackie thinks it's Granddad, and she shrugs: "Just feels like him. There's that smell, those old cigarettes. Can't you smell it?" This is why LINDA made me nervous. If you don't do this part right, you end up crazy. "I wish I could, Mum, but I can't," says Rose, gently as can be. Jackie supplies the information: "You've got to make an effort. You've got to want it, sweetheart." The Doctor's ears perk up: "The more you want it, the stronger it gets?" Yeah. The more you want it. "Like a psychic link. 'Course you want your old dad to be alive, but you're wishing him into existence. The ghosts are using that to pull themselves in." Expressionless, drugged, but verging on a Jackie Tyler wobbler: "You're spoiling it," she says. Quieter than she's ever said anything. Inside wishes are plutonium. The last thing you want is sunlight on a wish. But that's what the Doctor does: wakes you up, whether you're done playing or not. "I'm sorry, Jackie, but there's no smell, there's no cigarettes. Just a memory." Rose wonders what they are, if they're not ghosts; Jackie points to how obviously human the ghosts are. Rose nods, although they're blurry, but the Doctor's not convinced: "Maybe not. They're pressing themselves into the surface of the world. But a footprint doesn't look like a boot." He stands.
Gareth pulls Adeola down a deserted corridor that is clearly under reconstruction, shadowed behind plastic sheeting. "Come on, it'll be all right down here. Just two minutes!" I'd go for it. But Addie's a bit of a better employee than I have been: "This is out of bounds...." Gareth nods; that's the point: "It's completely safe!" She doesn't think it's worth getting caught, just for a snog. He's right, she's wrong. "It is," he laughs, pulling her in beyond the veil. She smiles, but pulls back. He tsks and takes off through the veil alone. She smiles uneasily at two workmen, who come and carry a ladder away, and then, alone, whispers after Gareth. There's no reply. "Gareth?" Addie laughs and presses up against the veil: "Now don't be daft, where've you gone? Gareth? Look, I'm gonna head back, I'm seeing you tonight anyway...Gareth?" And she steps through. Just barely. "I'm gonna go back to work..." Silence. Addie keeps pushing; her voice edges toward fear: "Now stop it, Gareth! I'm not kidding, just stop it!" Remember Rose at Henrik's; it's never a joke. There's a figure just beyond the veil. Human, if blurry. "Sorry, I'm just looking for my friend..." says Addie. It doesn't reply. Addie pulls back the veil, revealing a Cyberman -- the new style, from the Age of Steel -- and it advances on her. She screams. Things proceed, as they will.
Rose brings a newspaper into the TARDIS, where the Doctor is wedged under the console as usual: "They've elected a ghost as MP for Leeds!" She looks down at him. "Now, don't tell me you're gonna sit back and do nothing?" He pops up from under the floor beneath her feet, jumpy and excited, with a fake Ghostbusters accompaniment, a strange device in one hand and a makeshift proton pack: "Who you gonna call?" he says, in an annoying accent. "Ghostbusters!" Rose replies kindly, and the Doctor duck-marches out the door, with the accent again: "I ain't afraid of no ghosts." That's how they get you.
Rose follows the Doctor out of the TARDIS, giggling, and they meet Jackie, waiting outside. In the playground where you peel your wishes apart, he arranges three short cones upon the ground, asking Jackie about the shift. "Quarter to," she says, checking her watch. Terrified of losing it: "But don't go causing trouble. What's that lot do?" Triangulates their point of origin. Rose asks if maybe it's the Gelth, but she and the Doctor both know it's not. (Funny that you mention that, though. The Rift in Cardiff is intimately tied with the ghosts of our history, and with Torchwood.) Pity the Gelth, and pity the poor serving girl who saved the world, and nobody ever knew. Even after she died, a hero. "They were just coming through one little rift," says the Doctor. One tiny little rift. "This lot are transposing themselves over the whole planet. Like tracing paper." Jackie gets cross as the Doctor imparts the information: "You're always doing this, reducing it to science." Somebody says to Orpheus that the dead stay dead: what do you think he said? "Why can't it be real?" asks Jackie. Begging for his assent to this, this little piece of magic in the Powell Estates after so long with no magic at all. For the return of love. The Doctor ignores Jackie. "Just think of it, though!" she tells him. "All the people we've lost, our families coming back home. Don't you think it's beautiful?" He spares her a glance, for the first time: "I think it's horrific." Jackie closes her mouth with a click. The Doctor gets back to work, Rose following. They plug things in and whatnot. Jackie steps inside, closing the door behind her. The Doctor and Rose joke around at the console, about how she should press this button and not that one, and not that one -- "Now you've just killed us," he grins, and she giggles -- and he hands over his screwdriver to her into the bargain. Jackie stares at them and calls time again. Two minutes to ghost shift. Two minutes to Earth Death.
"Two minutes to the shift," says Yvonne. "Let's make it a good one, people." Addie and Gareth come back; Yvonne grins at them as though they were schoolchildren. Adeola apologizes for being late, and Yvonne's sweet: "Save it 'til later....And: powering up!" The techs pull levers up, the shift begins, Adeola and Gareth turn to their computers, earpieces bleeping, faces unnaturally blank.
Rose shoves the screwdriver into the console; outside, the Doctor presses his device into one of the cones. Like a well-oiled machine, these two. He runs around to the other two cones, shouting in to Rose: "What's the line doing?" Holding. The line is holding. Jackie stands inside, watching over Rose's shoulder, wondering at their work: "You even look like him?" Rose thinks, and smiles. She supposes that she does. "You've changed so much," says Jackie, forgetting about the ghosts of the shift and remembering the ones she used to talk to. Rose shrugs; for the better, she's changed. Jackie shrugs, whispering: "I suppose." Rose turns to her mother, ready to begin this fight once more: "Mum, I used to work in a shop!" Jackie gets defensive: "I've worked in shops. What's wrong with that?" Rose declines to draw the diagrams of saints: "No, I didn't mean that." Jackie knows full well what she meant: "What happens when I'm gone?" Rose is shocked, and tells her not to talk like that. "No, but really. When I'm dead and buried, you won't have any reason to come back home. What happens then?" Rose doesn't know. "Do you think you'll ever settle down?" Rose doesn't know: "The Doctor never will, so I can't. I'll just keep on traveling." And keep on changing. We get hard. "And in forty years' time, fifty, there'll be this woman, this strange woman, walking through the marketplace on some planet a billion miles from Earth. She's not Rose Tyler. Not anymore. She's not even human..." And before the Doctor interrupts, let's take a second to...nope, Jackie's got it covered. She's right, Rose is wrong. The Doctor interrupts, and Rose shouts back out to him: "The scanner's working, it says Delta One Six." He stands shouting at his triangle of cones, 3/5 of a pentagram, crackling with excitement. "Come on, you beauty!"
Yvonne puts on her shades: "And...we're into ghost shift." The computer is online; the veil is lifted. The ghosts descend. History makes a visit.
The Doctor's triangle manifests a ghost, right in the center. The points of the triangle connect, forming a pyramid of electric blue science over the ghost. You don't have to reduce it to science: that's all magic is, science we don't know. Every week a séance, every week an exorcism. As far as you can take it. And every week somebody goes home, or into death.
The Torchwood light shines brighter and brighter; Adeola's expressionless.
Jackie and Rose stare. The Doctor puts on a pair of 3-D glasses, red and blue, to watch the ghost. A quick adjustment on his equipment makes a green light blip.
Torchwood's alarms go off, startling Yvonne. She heads to Matt's computer, looking over his shoulder: "What've we got?" Something's interfering with the ghost field. Something close, something within the city.
The Doctor continues to adjust as the ghost shudders and groans: "Don't like that much, do you?" To himself, he whispers, "Who are you? Where are you coming from?" The ghost sends the Doctor a shock and he stumbles backwards, suddenly: "That's more like it! Not so friendly now, are you?" Wishes contain plutonium.
Yvonne urges the scientists to close it all down, to bring down the veil, and they comply, pulling levers; the computer goes offline; the ghost continues to shudder and jerk within the Doctor's diagram; the scientists get the levers into place, and the ghost shift ends; the Doctor's ghost disappears; the Doctor jumps forward to grab his shit.
Yvonne turns to Matt, who's got it sorted: "It was a very specific excitation of the ghost field, and that makes it easy to pinpoint...South London, southeast 15...It's a council estate. The Powell Estate. SU15 7GO. It was a public area." Yvonne orders CCTV, Matt follows, and the camera turns, just a sec too late as the Doctor ducks inside the TARDIS. Still, it catches the TARDIS before she disappears, and they both geek out. "Is it him?" asks Matt. Yvonne -- did I mention I adore her? -- moans and whatnot. It's him. Torchwood meets Doctor Who. Finally.
The Doctor shucks his jacket in the TARDIS, shouting that "those ghosts have been forced into existence" for one specific reason, which he can figure out or whatever, and "Allons-y!" Let's go! Fantastic! Everybody drops on his or her trans-European ass as the TARDIS shudders into action. The engine rises and falls. Rises, then falls.
The TARDIS dematerializes right in front of Yvonne and Matt, on the video. She stands, disbelieving what she's seen, but identifying him correctly. "He's coming," she breathes, and laughs, shocked. She checks out; Addie and Gareth look darkly at each other. Out in the hall, Yvonne's yelling on her Bluetooth: "Rajesh, it's him!" And Rajesh looks up at the awful sphere: "Now we've got you."
The Doctor twiddles knobs on the console, nattering away about how one day he would like to say "Allons-y, Alonzo!" to someone named Alonzo, and Rose stares at him with a smile on her face that doesn't mention the fact that Jackie's up in the gantry of the TARDIS, her legs dangling, looking like a child. "If we end up on Mars, I'm gonna kill you," grunts Jackie, folding her arms. The Doctor stares; Rose smirks.
The TARDIS materializes in a large storage area at Torchwood; soldiers are even now bursting in assuming position. They have guns. The Doctor, Rose, and Jackie observe on the monitor; the Doctor mourns the loss of the advantage of surprise, but heads toward the door anyhow: "Stay in here, look after Jackie." Rose is mortified by that, and the Doctor's like, "You brought her!" Jackie indignantly insists that she was kidnapped. Rose throws herself across the TARDIS door, so that he can't get past: "Doctor, they've got guns." And he hasn't. "Which makes me the better person, don't you think?" he replies. "They can shoot me dead, but the moral high ground is mine." He deftly picks Rose up by the waist and deposits her elsewhere, and steps out with his hands raised.
The soldiers cock their guns at the Doctor as Rose and Jackie watch through the door. Yvonne comes into the room at full speed, aimed straight at the Doctor: "Oh! Oh, how marvelous!" She claps and claps; the soldiers follow suit. "Oh, very good! Superb! Happy day!" The Doctor stares at them, confused, and begins to lower his hands: "Um, thanks. Nice to meet you. I'm...the Doctor?" They all applaud again. "Oh, I should say! Hurray!" It's really bizarre and very British. Yvonne finally explains that, basically, if not for him, none of them would even be there: "The Doctor and the TARDIS!" She chokes up and starts the applause once again. The Doctor doesn't hate it. Finally, he gestures for silence, and asks who she is, who they are. Names again. "Oh, plenty of time for that. But according to the records, you're not one for traveling alone. The Doctor and his Companion. That's a pattern, isn't it? Right?" If you were remaking the series based in canon continuity, you could do a lot worse than basing your story around that fact: the Doctor will have his Companion. Yvonne's voice drops into a scary register for just one tiny second: "There's no point hiding anything. Not from us." And then again, all smiles: "So where is she?" The Doctor snags Jackie in the TARDIS, and pulls her out basically by the face: "But here she is: Rose Tyler." How many older ladies this season, with Rose left to her own devices? "She's not the best I've ever had. Bit too blonde, not too steady on her pins. A lot of that..." his hand makes a chatty yakking staccato and Yvonne laughs. Jackie glares. "And just last week, she stared into the heart of the Time Vortex and aged fifty-seven years. But she'll do." Jackie protests that she's forty; the Doctor makes a sad moue: "Deluded, bless. I'll have to trade her in. Do you need anyone? She's very good at tea. Well, I say very good, I mean, not bad. Well. I say not bad...anyway! Lead on. But not too fast. Her ankle's going." And Yvonne does lead, and they follow, and Jackie murmurs murderously to the Doctor, as Rose watches them disappear: "I'll show you where my ankle's going."
They head through a doorway and into a huge factory floor full of artifacts and scientists working on them. "It was only a matter of time until you found us," says Yvonne, "and at last you've made it. I'd like to welcome you, Doctor. Welcome...to Torchwood." The Doctor identifies a Jathar Sunglider, which apparently "came down to Earth off the Shetland Islands ten years ago." He asks if it crashed, Yvonne shakes her head: "No, we shot it down. It violated our airspace. Then we stripped it bare. The weapon that destroyed the Sycorax on Christmas Day? That was us!" Neither Jackie nor the Doctor is pleased to hear about that one. "The Torchwood Institute has a motto: 'If it's alien, it's ours.' Anything that comes from the sky, we strip it down and we use it. For the good of the British Empire." Jackie protests that there isn't a British Empire; Yvonne nods: "Not yet." Yvonne borrows a gun from a soldier named Sebastian, and the Doctor stares: "That's a particle gun." Yvonne jerks it away from Jackie's hands and ignores her: "Took us eight years to get it to work," she says, proudly. "We must defend our border against the alien." She gives it back and asks the soldier's name: "I think it's very important to know everyone by name. Torchwood is a very modern organization. People skills, that's what it's all about these days." Smiling smugly: "I'm a people person." Jackie rolls her eyes. The Doctor asks if there's anybody named Alonzo working there. There isn't. Yvonne finally gives up her name, as the Doctor pulls a large device from a box: "Ah, yes. Now, we're rather fond of these. The Magnaclamp. Found in a spaceship buried at the base of Mount Snowdon. Attach this to an object and it cancels the mass. I could use it to lift two tons of weight with a single hand. That's an imperial ton, by the way. Torchwood refuses to go metric..." (Except like three seconds ago when she measured the ghost energy in gigawatts.) Jackie grins and notes that she could use a Magnaclamp to carry her shopping, and Yvonne is both patronizing and irrelevant: "All these devices are for Torchwood's benefit. Not the general public's." Whatever. The Doctor looks through a magnifying glass and asks about the ghosts. They're a side effect, Yvonne says, but not of what: "All in good time, Doctor. There is an itinerary, trust me."
Men drive the TARDIS through the factory floor on a large truck. "If it's alien, it's ours." The Doctor assures Yvonne that she'll never get inside it, and Yvonne is arrogant and whatever. As the Doctor watches the TARDIS pass, Rose opens the door a crack and peeks through. The Doctor nods at her encouragingly, and looks away. In the Doctor's coat pockets, bigger on the inside, Rose rummages for the psychic paper. Finding it, she grins, thinking of all the ways she can use it.
Adeola IMs Matt to come and see "something good." He follows her, uneasy.
Yvonne, the Doctor, and Jackie stride down a corridor, flanked by armed soldiers. He's worrying at the fact that, in all the time he's spent on Earth, he's never heard of Torchwood. "But of course not," says Yvonne. "You're the enemy! You're actually named in the Torchwood Foundation Charter of 1879 as an enemy of the Crown." The Doctor puts it together. "1879...That was called Torchwood, that house in Scotland." Yvonne: "That's right. Where you encountered Queen Victoria and the werewolf." Jackie swears that the Doctormakes half of this stuff up; Yvonne smoothly continues: "Her Majesty created the Torchwood Institute with the express intention of keeping Britain great. And fighting the alien horde." So does that mean the Doctor's a prisoner? Yes. But she says it in a light tone: "We'll make you perfectly comfortable. And there is so much you can teach us. Starting with this..."
Yvonne key-cards them into Rajesh's sphere room. He straightens his jacket at their arrival, running up to the Doctor, who is staring up at the sphere and barely takes note of Rajesh. "What is that thing?" asks Jackie. "What's wrong with it?" Rajesh asks what makes her ask that, and she can't say. The Doctor darts up the stairs toward it. "The sphere has that effect on everyone. Makes you wanna run and hide. Like it's forbidden." The opposite of jumping; the opposite of disobeying. That's clue number one right there: in the usual way of things on this show, "forbidden" and "run and hide" are opposing concepts. The Doctor once again puts on his 3-D glasses to look at the sphere. "According to our instruments, the sphere doesn't exist," says Rajesh. "It weighs nothing. It doesn't age. No heat. No radiation. And it has no atomic mass." Jackie points out that, well, you can see it, and Rajesh says that this is why it's upsetting: "It gives off nothing. It is...absent." The Doctor calls it a Void Ship: "Impossible for starters. I always thought it was just a theory, but...it's a vessel designed to exist outside time and space. Traveling through the Void." (Outside time and space: connected to nothing. No Time, no Relative Dimension In Space. An anti-TARDIS. That's your second clue.) The Doctor explains again about the Void: "The space between dimensions. There's all sorts of realities around us, different dimensions; billions of parallel universes all stacked up against each other. The Void is the space in between. Containing absolutely nothing. Imagine that: nothing. No light, no dark, no up, no down. No life. No time. Without end. My people called it the Void; the Eternals call it the Howling. But some people call it Hell." I call it trying to find a Wii. So why build one? Rajesh wants to know. "To explore," says the Doctor. "To escape. You could sit inside that thing and eternity would pass you by. The Big Bang, end of the Universe, start of the , wouldn't even touch the sides. You'd exist outside the whole of creation." Anti-Bad Wolf, even, then. Yvonne's just pleased as punch to know that there's something inside after all, and the Doctor is, it turns out, capable of being even less impressed with her: "We send that thing back into Hell. How did it get here in the first place?" Yvonne explains that it just came through one day, and the ghosts followed after. The Doctor demands to be shown, and exits left into the main corridor. "No, Doctor," Yvonne calls, and he abruptly walks back the other way. It's funny.
Matt is getting irritated by Adeola and the mystery of the curtained area. She tells him to head left, and there's a red glow coming from the left. No, Matt. But he can't hear you. "Just go to the left," she says. He walks in, and doesn't come out again. Adeola heads back downstairs, to the sound of screams and drilling. You will be like us.
Rose steps out into the factory floor, dodging two guys and then grabbing a leftover lab coat. She walks bad-assedly through the complex, and follows one guy at random.
Adeola's back at her computer, where Yvonne is showing the Doctor the great white wall where the light comes from, on ghost shift. "The sphere came through here. A hole in the world." He runs his hand along the wall. It's just a wall: smooth and white and featureless: "Not active at the moment. But when we fire particle engines at that exact spot, the breach opens up." Breach, n.: An opening, a tear, a rupture; a gap or rift; a violation or infraction, as of a law, a legal obligation, or a promise; a disruption of relationship; estrangement; the leap of something huge, from the deeps and into the light; the breaking of a wave. Well-named: it is all of these in turn. "How did you even find it?" Warning signs, for years: "a radar black spot." So they built Torchwood Tower. The breach was six hundred feet above sea level when they found it. The Doctor puts on his 3-D glasses again: "You built a skyscraper just to reach a spatial disturbance? How much money have you got?" Enough, says Yvonne. The only answer that ever makes sense. She walks away, leaving the Doctor to stare at the blank wall; Jackie takes the human and common step of looking out the window: "Hold on a minute...we're in Canary Wharf! Must be! This building, it's Canary Wharf." One of the coolest things about urban fantasy is the warping of the day-to-day. Every kid in Cardiff can look up at the Millennium Center and think of the Rift, you know? Wonder if it's not true. Hope there's magic. "That is the public name for it," sniffs Yvonne. "But to those in the know, it's Torchwood." The Doctor: "So you find the breach, probe it, the sphere comes through. Six hundred feet above London, bam. It leaves a hole in the fabric of reality. And that hole, you think, 'Oh, shall we leave it alone? Shall we back off? Shall we play it safe?' Nah! You think, 'let's make it bigger!'" Yvonne explains the reasoning: as a massive source of energy, it could be harnessed to get free of Middle East oil: "Britain will become truly independent." Just like in 28 Days Later...! "Look, you can see for yourself. ghost shift's in two minutes." The Doctor tells her to cancel it, and Yvonne, of course, blows him off. His voice gets hard, and she gets in his face: "Oh, exactly as the legends would have it. The Doctor, lording it over us. Assuming alien authority over the rights of Man." Yvonne kind of has a point, even though he's right. The Doctor: "Let me show you."
The Doctor takes his sonic screwdriver out and stands in Yvonne's office, on the other side of the glass. "Sphere comes through," he says, sonicking the glass a bit, until it cracks. The cracks extend out slowly, like ice, as he speaks. "But when it made the hole, it cracked the world around it. The entire surface of this dimension, splintered. And that's how the ghosts get through. That's how they get everywhere. They're bleeding through the fault lines. Walking from their world, across the Void, and into yours. With the human race hoping and wishing and helping them along! But too many ghosts, and..." The Doctor touches it, just barely, and the whole thing shatters, falling out onto the floor. "Well, in that case, we'll have to be more careful. Positions! Ghost shift in one minute." It's all walls this year. Rather than doors, or cages, it's walls. Between you and me, between worlds and worlds, between creation and nothingness. Hell is the distance between two hands, not touching; a wall is just a door that can't open. The Doctor: "Ms. Hartman, I am asking you. Please, don't do it." She scoffs that they've done this a thousand times; he begs her to stop at a thousand. "We are in control of the ghosts," says Yvonne. "The levers can open the breach, but equally they can close it."
Yvonne and the Doctor stare each other down for a while, wills battling fiercely, and he abruptly drops the fight. "Okay," he says lightly, and snags a chair from Yvonne's office. "Never mind! As you were." Yvonne's flummoxed. "Fair enough," the Doctor explains. "Said my bit. Don't mind me. Any chance of a cup of tea?" Adeola calls ghost shift in twenty seconds. "Mm! Can't wait to see it!" says the Doctor. Yvonne gets more and more suspicious, he blows her off and calls "Rose" over. Jackie stands with her arm across the back of the chair, closing ranks with him, smiling impudently. A Companion. "You can't stop us, Doctor..." says Yvonne. The Doctor shrugs and grins, raises an eyebrow. Yvonne holds steady until there's just one second to go, and then cancels the shift. "Thank you," says the Doctor, sincerely. She tells him it's only until they get more information, and he offers to be of any help he can. "And get someone clear up this glass," she adds, staring down at the Doctor. "They did warn me, Doctor. They said you like to make a mess." She heads into her office. The things that Adeola, Matt, and Gareth now are exchange glances, come to a joint conclusion, begin typing at their terminals.
Rose -- this is cool -- finds her way to the sphere room and uses the psychic paper on the key-card reader, kissing it first for luck. Keys and doors. She stares up at the sphere, taken and repulsed at once; Rajesh arrives and she barely notices him. "Try not to look," he tells her. "It does that to everyone. What do you want?" She stammers that she's from Personnel: "They said some man had been taken prisoner. Some sort of Doctor? I'm just checking the lines of communication...did they tell you anything?" Rajesh asks for her authorization, and she hands him the psychic paper. "That's lucky," he says, and Rose smiles. "You see, everyone at Torchwood has at least a basic level of psychic training. This paper is blank. And you're a fake." He bluetooths for Security and seals the room: "Samuel? Can you check the door locks? She just walked right in!" Samuel turns, and it's not Samuel. It's Mickey Smith. Rose stares, and Mickey puts a finger to his lips over Rajesh's shoulder, grinning wildly. Rajesh asks Rose to take a seat and she does so, completely at a loss. Mickey Smith!
Yvonne and the Doctor assemble knowns: the ghosts must have built the sphere, he thinks: "Aimed it at this dimension like a cannonball." Rajesh comes up on Yvonne's webcam: "We've got a visitor. We don't know who she is, but funnily enough, she arrived at the same time as the Doctor." The Doctor's face twitches slightly, and Yvonne turns the laptop around to show him Rose. She stares out cutely. "She one of yours?" asks Yvonne. The Doctor swears that she isn't. "Good!" says Yvonne. "Then we can have her shot." The Doctor rolls his eyes and takes his feet off Yvonne's desk: "Oh, all right, then, it was worth a try. That's Rose Tyler." Rose waves, apologizing, and they smile sweetly at each other. They discuss the Jackie aspect in depth -- "When Torchwood comes to write my complete history, don't tell people I traveled through time and space with her mother" -- and just then, the ghost engines start up, pissing off Yvonne. "Everyone? I thought I said stop the ghost shift." They ignore her, staring straight ahead. The levers in the white room are rising of their own accord. Yvonne demands that the guys stop typing, step away from their desks, stop the levers; nobody does anything. Two other scientist run for the levers, but the three people who aren't people anymore don't even acknowledge her. The Doctor goes to Adeola and snaps his fingers in her face. "She can't hear you," he tells Yvonne, and reads from Addie's screen that they are overriding the system. Everyone turns to the white, blank wall. "We're going into ghost shift," the Doctor says, and the light gets brighter.
"We had them beaten, but then they escaped," Mickey explains. "The Cybermen just vanished. They found a way through to this world, but...so did we." Rose notes that this is impossible, and Mickey stares up at the awful sphere: "Yeah, well, it's not the first time he's been wrong." Rose asks, Excellently, what's inside, and Mickey shakes his head: "Cyber Leader? Cyber King? Emperor of the Cybermen? Whatever it is, he's dead meat." Rose nudges Mickey's shoulder, says it's good to see him. It really, really is. He smiles back. The smashing and crashing continue.
The Cybermen escort Yvonne and the Doctor, hands behind their heads, back through Torchwood. The Doctor, frightened, screams orders at any humans in earshot: "Get away from the machines! Do what they say, don't fight them!" They shoot a scientist in the white room dead; Jackie freaks out. "We are the Cybermen. The ghost shift will be increased to 100%." Now speaking is a Cyberman with black handlebars on its helmet, the Cyber Leader. They don't call him that, but the black handlebars are a dead giveaway, and he was credited as such. He clangs a fist on his metal chest, and the lever rises once again. The computer goes online. The light gets brighter. "Here come the ghosts," says the Doctor.
On the factory floor, the ghosts step out of thin air, accompanied by the sound of Cybermen marching; on the Powell Estate, they appear as well. Ghostwatch reports: "It's extraordinary, there are more ghosts than we've ever seen before..." Big Ben. Taj Mahal. "And it's happening all over the world!" A policeman (David Warwick, from the Fourth Doctor story "The Pirate Planet") notes that, so far, the increase in ghost activity is harmless. At Torchwood, rows and rows of Cybermen march out of the light and into the white room.
Rajesh calls again and again into comms and the webcam, getting no response. He's panicking. The shuddering and booming cut out suddenly, and the sphere stops shaking. Rajesh joins Rose and Mickey, the latter of whom takes off his lab coat and pulls off his earpiece: "Here we go." Rajesh puts his glasses on; the sphere begins to crack open, smoothly, separating into sections, light spilling out.
Jackie's confused: "These Zybermen, what've they got to do with the ghosts?" The Doctor rolls his eyes, frantic: "A footprint doesn't look like a boot!" The Cybermen march out from the light, getting sharper and more distinct. "Millions of them. Right across the world." They clarify out into Cybermen: on the factory floor, on the Powell Estate. People scream and start to run, as though noticing them for the first time. In Paris and at the Taj Mahal, complacency dropping, psychic links severed. Nobody told them this was war: they had to see it for themselves. The host of Ghostwatch gets killed on camera. The policeman urges everyone to stay at home. In one small house, a Cyberman breaks through the door -- the family members are cowering at the bottom of the stairs, and a little boy tries to run up and get away, but there's a Cyberman upstairs as well, blocking his way.
The smartest thing this New Series ever did was put the Doctor/Companion relationship front and center: to interrogate, radicalize, investigate the ways that Doctor and Companion work together. Season 1 was about coming together: raise the Companion ever higher until her power eclipsed the Doctor's for one moment. Everything since then has been an ongoing question of what happens : the regeneration of the Doctor. The introduction of Torchwood: a reversal of the Doctor and everything he stands for, a linguistic game as much as Bad Wolf ever was. The return to New Earth and Lady Cassandra, to see how much we've changed, and how much more we can touch. The loss of Queen and country, at Torchwood House. The Companion as broken human individual, building a life from scratch. The possibility of love, doors instead of walls. The death of the mother and the loss of a lover, on the other side of Hell. The return to facelessness at the end of the adventure. ACTUAL LITERAL SATAN telling truths nobody wants to hear. The ones left behind, not touched by Companion's magic. The selfishness inherent in Peter Pans, and in their Wendies. And now the grip of history, that black gravity, pulling you back into horror; history nobody can escape, even a Time Lord. It's fun to one-up last season's finale: to say "Instead of one terrifying enemy, we shall have two!" But it's more intelligent to bring back one to fight the Doctor, and one to fight his Companion. The Doctor's fear is extermination of life, his oldest enemy and greatest victim in one. Brutality -- what happens when you draw the line from mercy to justice and just keep drawing, off the page and onto the desk and out into the dark places. But the Companion's fear is different: it's hitting ground, touching the earth again. Dying from the stars: you will be like us. The ramp up and the ramp down. Change feels like death because it is. This story is just as inexorable as last year's, proceeds from its ingredients just as elegantly and just as heartbreakingly; it's just a story nobody wants to hear. "Et in Arcadia, Ego": even in Paradise, there is death. Even the Bad Wolf has to go home sometime, whether or not she's done playing.
"That's not Cybermen," says Mickey, as four Daleks glide smoothly from the sphere. One is black; they're all scary like only Daleks can be. Rose calls on God. "Location: Earth. Life forms detected." Mickey aims his gun at them. They begin to scream.