Given this omni-coverage, and proliferation of texts that could easily be construed as paratexts (or vice versa), it’s hardly surprising that showrunner Steven Moffat has recently remarked in Doctor Who Magazine: “I dreaded this month, because… how do you pitch it at the right level. How do you make sure there’s enough Doctor Who without making people vomit with it all being too much? But it seems to be about bang on, I think”.

However, Doctor Who’s November ascension to the heights of hype brought with it a few unhappy voices: aggravated letter-writers and email-senders complained to the BBC’s Newswatch programme that BBC News coverage constituted advertising for a Corporation product rather than media/entertainment reportage, whilst The Radio Times’ letter section (14—20 Dec) included the following gem, from one Stephen Thompson: “Having enjoyed Doctor Who as young people in the 1960s and again as parents in the 70s, my wife and I decline to go along with the hype surrounding the 50th-anniversary ‘special’. Like the little boy who watched the king parading in his new clothes, we did watch it, but we found it incomprehensible… Labyrinth, also featuring John Hurt as a centuries-old survivor, though panned by the critics, was much better!”

The ‘hype of the Doctor’ becomes a thing in itself for these members of the public, inciting them to critique and reject excessive promotion from a public service broadcaster. The show’s production team were aware of this potential danger, however, with Moffat observing that there “has been more hype than I thought possible, and vastly more than I thought (in my weaker moments) wise.” For, as Jonathan Gray has noted, paratextual promotion’s mere existence can devalue a text. Hype indicates a text’s industrial and commercial roots all too obviously for some audiences.

Doctor Who is perhaps unlikely to be deemed ‘art’, but it can certainly be positioned as a public good linked to historical worth and cultural value. The Director-General of the BBC, Tony Hall, got in on this act when he aligned Who with the “nurturing” values and virtues of the BBC in a piece written for the anniversary edition of the Radio Times (23—30 Nov): “If I may be allowed a small plug, it was the BBC that brought William Hartnell to that scrapyard in 1963. The BBC who nurtured [the series]… and invented the miracle of regeneration to explain cast changes. And after the decision to cancel the show was reversed, it was the BBC who reinvented it with some of the best acting and writing on television, anywhere in the world. And you can now watch the Doctor …in 206 territories… Each has fans tuning in and buying the merchandise. …All that helps the BBC generate income to spend on high-quality programmes at home.”

Setting aside how this objectifies “the decision to cancel” the show, whilst attributing agency to the BBC for keeping Who alive via regeneration and reinvention, “plugging” something usually means selling it. And hype conveys a version of the same thing – it’s generally construed as a blatantly commercial practice. Likewise, members of the public who complained about the BBC “advertising” its own wares under the guise of entertainment news were also hurling a devalued discourse of commerce at the Beeb.

Doctor Who’s explosion of paratextual incarnations across November thus risked casting a market(ing) shadow over the BBC’s status as a public service broadcaster, over-writing royalty with revenue-generation. Though Tony Hall was quick to point out that Who’s money-making would help to fund public service productions, by aligning the show with a kind of blockbuster paratextuality, the BBC unwittingly cast itself as a hype merchant as well as the custodian of a valued creation loved by generations.

Meanwhile, getting 3D cinema tickets or entry to the BBC Worldwide-led Celebration event became neoliberal exercises in consumer sovereignty. In the first instance, punters had to compete amongst themselves to secure bookings, with a Celebration ballot only subsequently being run. Sitting in the front few rows at the ExCeL required a higher fee – a VIP TARDIS ticket – giving the impression that profits from the fan market were being keenly maximized by BBC Worldwide.

Whilst sections of fandom might embrace neoliberal common-sense, this ultimately leads to calls for Doctor Who’s merchandising/ticketing profits to be fed straight back into the show. Fan magazine SFX says in its review of ‘Day of the Doctor’, “More than half a million people watched it globally in cinemas, and it made £1.7 million in UK cinemas alone! Let’s pump that cash right back into Who, eh Beeb…?” But this is not something the BBC could ever entertain without fatally undermining its public service principles. BBC Worldwide is probably already putting amounts of money into the series – but little information on such funding has made it into the public domain. Just how much of Doctor Who’s budgeting can now – directly or indirectly – be traced back to Worldwide and its various commercial operations?

As if to distract from questions of profiteering, the global ‘simulcast’ was immediately badged with a Guinness World Record, awarded on Sunday November 24th. This had obviously been pre-arranged as a photo opportunity (and as a way of persuading paying customers at the Celebration that they were participating in an “historic moment”). Articulating the episode with a grandeur of reach, ‘The Day of the Doctor’ was paratextually inflected here by a preferred BBC interpretation; as a record-breaking achievement rather than a money-making activity.

The BBC also addressed Doctor Who fandom via “red button” and online provision. ‘The Night of the Doctor’ and ‘The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot’ both blatantly catered to fan agendas whilst being made available at no charge. Were these texts or paratexts? Marketing for the Who brand, or gifts to fandom? I’d hazard that such ‘extras’ were liminal (para)texts, permanently caught in mid-regeneration between market and gift economies.

Whilst trying to make itself a kind of social glue uniting the nation (and multiple territories) around special event programming, the BBC consistently found itself enmeshed in commercial discourses of revenue, profit and (excessive/blockbuster) promotion. November’s week of the Doctor, and the hype of the Doctor, demonstrate an undecidability of commerce/public service, as each is caught up in the other, tangled together in an inseparably mixed economy. Throwing the Royal family, World Records, One Direction, and red button mockdocs into the paratextual mix, the BBC wants to be read as a source of public value: a giver of gifts rather than a shaper of hype. But like ‘The Day of the Doctor’, which rewrites the show’s back-story and yet fits into established continuity at one and the same time, the BBC’s celebration of the 50th anniversary rewrites the extent to which commercial operations can be built onto a licence fee-funded property, whilst still fitting into traditional PSB continuities of nation-building and community-serving.

You may well have noticed that this year is Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary. A number of the show’s prior anniversaries have featured what fans like to call “multi-Doctor” stories in which different incarnations of the good Doctor team up to fight evil together. “The Three Doctors” (1972—3), “The Five Doctors” (1983), and “Dimensions in Time” (1993) have all contributed to this subgenre of Time Lord entertainment, but the multi-Doctor story hasn’t just been a birthday gift. TARDIS Wikia lists some 77 such stories, many of them hailing from officially-licensed comic strips and short stories. Indeed, the Big Finish Short Trips series accounts for some 20 or so multi-Doctor stories just by itself. What gets counted, and what gets left out, remains a matter of debate in this exercise: for instance, TARDIS Wikia rather pointedly includes unmade “The Dark Dimension” and excludes “Dimensions in Time” (infamous for upsetting long-term Who fans with its EastEnders crossover and almost total incoherence).

These “specials” may appear to be in danger of becoming slightly less special in 2013, however. Arguably, there are no less than four multi-Doctor stories currently on the go or pending: “The Day of the Doctor” on TV for the anniversary day of November 23rd, and Big Finish’s audio adventure “The Light at the End,” along with IDW’s licensed “Prisoners of Time” and Big Finish/AudioGO’s “Destiny of the Doctor.” The latter two efforts don’t need to involve actors who played the Doctor – just their likenesses and descriptions – whilst Big Finish’s own special release features all of the “classic” Doctors via performance or technological trickery. Finally, the BBC TV special looks set to involve Matt Smith and David Tennant, plus John Hurt as a previously unknown incarnation, as well as possibly another “classic” Doctor.

Multi-Doctor stories are special to fans for a variety of reasons. They help to bind together Doctor Who’s vast narrative world, suggesting that rather than a series of different eras and production phases, all the Doctors are simultaneously whizzing through time and space, and might bump into each other at any moment. Converting production contingencies into a co-present Whoniverse is a handy trick, but multi-Doctor TV stories also emphasize what Paul Booth calls in Time on TV a “temporal displacement” of incarnations. Assorted Doctors are taken out of their timestreams and timelines (in production terms, the 1960s through to the noughties) and combined in potentially nostalgic confections. Amy Holdsworth’s book Television, Memory and Nostalgia ends by taking “Time Crash” (2007) as emblematic of how TV engages with past and present: “Time Crash” is, we’re told, “not a collapse of past and present but an affectionate evocation of television’s significance to our understanding of and relationship to both.” All this, and a decorative vegetable too.

But Holdsworth is right to draw attention to how past and present are set in new relationships by these time crashes or collisions. Indeed, it could be argued that returning actors, re-inhabiting roles they may not have played on TV for quite some time, are likely to create pastiches of prior performances, mannerisms, and catchphrases. And as Richard Dyer has so eloquently noted, at its best pastiche allows audiences to know themselves “affectively as historical beings.”

A small number of Doctors get their “Day”?

So, does “The Day of the Doctor” look set to work in this way? I would suggest not: its publicity poster (pictured above) stresses Smith and Tennant, with Hurt relegated to a far smaller image. Rather than audiences being inspired to reflect on their relationship to some fifty years of pop-cultural TARDIS travel, only a production span of seven years or so is called to mind (2006—13), making this both a curiously compressed relationship between (recent) past and present as well as one which focuses strongly on more youthful Doctors. Hurt’s older figure seems likely to be a villainous version of our protagonist, as well as representing a new face rather than a reminder of earlier productions. Of course “The Day of the Doctor” resonates, as a title, with the anniversary date and its global premiere along with #savetheday hashtag. Youth-orientated media culture seems well served here, as does a kind of event TV “presentism” that’s slightly at odds with a special assumed to commemorate fifty years. It’s not about decades of the Doctor, it’s about a “day.” And it’s not about ageing actors cueing memories of past Who, it’s about two fresh-faced TV stars and a guesting big name thesp. Peter Capaldi’s imminent tenure suggests the show isn’t afraid of older Doctors, but on the strength of “The Day of the Doctor” and its current paratextual presence, you’d be hard pushed not to feel that it wants to brush Doctor Who’s age, and the passing of production time, under the carpet of Rassilon.

And then there’s the matter of multiple multi-Doctor tales. Rather than cohering across media platforms, these seem to float in their own islands of quasi-canonicity. “The Light at the End” can presumably only feature Doctors one through to eight as a result of Big Finish’s standard license, while Big Finish/AudioGO and IDW get a shot at “the eleven Doctors.” Perhaps comic book readers are felt to be more attuned to “team-up” stories, but each of these audio/comic adventures feature monthly releases focused on a different Doctor, eventually layering into a sequence featuring all incarnations (and perhaps allowing greater interaction between them as the anniversary year comes to a head). Instead of primarily uniting Doctors in a magical, memory-spanning collision of past and present, these reunions and recombinations seem driven by medium-specific release patterns (an audio or comic a month makes industrial sense: a TV episode a month ranging across incarnations would be extremely quirky scheduling). And alongside industry release patterns, these multi-multi-Doctor “specials” are also conspicuously delimited by commercial licensing deals: Big Finish can unite “classic” Doctors in “The Light at the End,” even if the TV series seems intent on limiting itself to current and previous incumbents (more temporal compression than temporal displacement). The outcome seems surprisingly fragmented for what could be a grand bridging of all eras.

“Classic” Doctors reunited.

There is a more celebratory interpretation, mind you: perhaps Doctor Who’s big day has not fallen entirely prey to marketing ploys, event TV presentism, and BBC Worldwide licensing deals. Perhaps the decision to focus on a smaller number of Doctors than fans might have expected isn’t such a bad thing (“The Day of the Doctor” could almost be entitled “The Two Doctors” or “The Three Doctors,” depending on your view of the John Hurt/missing incarnation revelation). After all, “The Five Doctors” has been criticized by Jim Leach for a “breathless and diffuse” narrative resulting from the effort to cram in so many protagonists, while Keith M. Johnston accurately describes ‘Dimensions in Time’ as “Doctor Who reduced to visual spectacle… dispens[ing] with narrative logic to offer the programme’s ‘greatest hits’.” The spectacle of seeing many Doctors on screen – an unusual special effect, to be sure – apparently works against narrative. By focusing only (or primarily) on Doctors Ten and Eleven, “The Day of the Doctor” implicitly responds to generations of fan disappointment and critique aimed at multi-Doctor stories. It’s concerned with telling a strong story rather than providing excessive “Doctor porn” (a lot like “continuity porn,” but focused on the Doctor’s different guises). Fans incessantly engage in aesthetic debate over what makes good Who, and “The Day of the Doctor,” written by a producer-fan, strikes me as highly cognizant of previous fan discussions and aesthetic commentaries (spectacle over narrative; incoherence over structure) that have surrounded the “multi-Doctor” category.

Mannequin mania?

In the end, what may be particularly special about all these “specials” is the extent to which they combine industry sense (release patterns; licensing; promotional “stings” and hashtags; restricted paratextual publicity) with fannish critique (“too many Doctors spoils the TV storytelling”). And this epic collision between fandom and brand management offers a different kind of multiplicity altogether.

In the slower-moving world of TV Studies, meanwhile, scholars have been theorizing different stages in television’s history. One way of contrasting TV’s past and present is offered by John Ellis in the (2000) book Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. Ellis contrasts an earlier age of “scarcity” with the contemporary phase of televisual “plenty” (2000:39).

Bringing these two worlds together for a moment: what can the re-discovery of previously lost Doctor Who tell us about different moments of TV? Today’s Who is readily available, whether via iTunes, or illegal downloading, on DVD or through TV repeats – it’s not so much on-demand as always-there. The notion of this version of Doctor Who being ephemeral, or being lost after its broadcast, seems absurd. By powerful contrast, 1960s and 1970s Doctor Who wasn’t just part of an era of scarcity, it was sometimes worse than scarce, becoming effectively non-existent in some cases, other than as telesnaps, audio tracks, and fan-made reconstructions. In the era of digital plenty, Doctor Who‘s participatory audience can mash-up, remix, and create fanvids… but even in the age of scarcity, fandom was already a pre-Internet participatory culture. Amongst other things, analogue fandom could involve making reel-to-reel tape-recordings of an episode’s audio. Yesterday’s fans didn’t typically mash-up or remix; instead they recorded, archived, and preserved the TV culture of the day even when broadcasters themselves failed to do so. So although the re-emergence of two episodes of 1960’s Doctor Who dramatically brings different ages of television into collision, the conjunction also highlights how today’s participatory audience culture had its own analogue forty or fifty years ago. Scarcity versus plenty: it sounds like a binary, but it’s one which hides shared patterns in fan activity as dedicated audiences pursue ways of replaying and commemorating their beloved fan objects.

At the same time, the discovery of old Who also illuminates vital changes in audience activity. For it is not only television itself which has shifted from “scarcity” to “plenty”, or from what Mark Bould (2012:148) has recently termed “good-enough” TV (complete with William Hartnell’s “billy-fluffs”) to “quality TV” (single-camera, composed, ‘perfected’ drama). Audience interactions have also mutated and shifted; 1960s and 1970s fandom would itself have been scarce and “good-enough”; some fan knowledge was later proved to be wrong, as people mis-remembered story details and repeated them in print until they became fan lore. Fan interactions were also relatively scarce – restricted to slow-moving print culture or arranged meetings, shepherded by fan clubs and  similar fan institutions. Today’s fandom is a web whirl of “plenty”, a 24/7 always-on digital experience. On the day of the official announcement that more episodes had been returned to the BBC – Sunday 11^th December – I encountered this news via Facebook status updates and comments, and through the iteration of many, many tweets: fandom was buzzing with developments, minute-by-minute. Real-time speculation and anticipation of a 5pm BBC announcement meant that fans were on tenterhooks – just like today’s television of plenty, there was a similar abundance of audience chat, debate, squee, and swirling rumours.

The irony is that while a flurry of fan comments circled around ‘Galaxy Four’ and ‘The Underwater Menace’, always-on social media was absorbing into its orbit two episodes of black-and-white Doctor Who which once belonged to a very different culture: an on-off TV world, where after it’d been viewed then a programme was gone, perhaps never to be repeated, never to be seen again. By surfacing online in Facebook and Twitter feeds, ‘Galaxy Four’ and ‘The Underwater Menace’ were travelling in time, in a sense, staging a clash of two cultures: today’s always-on social media versus yesterday’s on-off, here-today-gone-tomorrow telly.

But perhaps this tendency to create eras, and narratives of change, is itself somewhat misleading. Fans like to do this just as much as TV Studies’ academics, of course (instead of scarcity/plenty, we could just as well debate “the Russell T. Davies era” or the “Hinchcliffe-Holmes years.”) All these narratives, these ways of seeing television (and its audiences) are only partly true  – they blind us to the fact that culture is always somehow time-travelling, always rediscovering the past in new and old ways, always threading continuities through historical, technological, creative changes. Yesterday’s analogue fandom was perhaps even more crucially participatory than today’s digital fandom; and yesterday’s “good-enough” TV, errors and all, finds itself mirrored in the fact that even today’s “quality TV” is marked by occasional continuity errors, blind spots, and inconsistencies. Eras are forever impure, marked by their predecessors and by traces of the past which can’t be exterminated. “Lost” Doctor Who is never entirely lost. And newly found episodes are never simply “found”, for that matter, instead being read through and in relation to pre-established fan knowledge.

The tantalising return of two episodes of early Doctor Who deserves celebration. But perhaps the tempting notion of two cultures or past/present eras of TV deserves a measure of critique.

Taking these moments in turn: the sense that Jack’s plan is laughable, and that he’s failed to consider the bipolar nature of the Blessing, represents an intriguing piece of plotting. It makes solid use of the entire Torchwood team, here pretty much divided into its old school and new American contingents, with Oswald being the odd man out. The solution to the Families’ plot proves to be something that a lone hero could never achieve: this narrative requires bilateral action rather than singular agency. As such, this deliberately binary conclusion (Shanghai/Buenos Aires) challenges individual heroism – Jack cannot be in two places at once; by definition, no individual could defeat the Families’ scheme. And so Russell T. Davies and co-writer Jane Espenson avoid there being a big ‘reset button’ by entering into a game of reset inflation. Instead there are two reset buttons that basically need to be pressed at the same time.

A bipolar threat requiring two climactic stand-offs also helps to generate narrative guessing games – will both Jack and Rex die? Will Gwen go ahead and shoot Jack for the greater good? What of Esther’s fate? Audiences are made to compare Gwen and Jack’s decisions with the actions of Esther and Rex, as a UK/US binary is created and exploited. Ultimately, it is the American wing of Torchwood which saves the day by injecting new blood into proceedings – without the US newbies, Torchwood would have been so much matchwood.

If ‘reset buttons’ are multiplied to create a novel, bi-reset narrative structure, then ‘The Blood Line’ also takes a new stance on any sort of deus ex machina ending. Because here the morphic-field-generating ‘god’ is in the Earth rather than in any ‘machine’. As Gwen says: “we’re so used to these things being extraterrestrial, but this might be the most terrestrial thing of them all”. Just as the bipolar ending deconstructs rugged individualism – with an ensemble show getting an ensemble resolution – then the Blessing likewise deconstructs the ‘human versus alien’ binary. This is a tale which takes Torchwood‘s prior typical reliance on SF threats, teases the audience by with-holding alien baddies, and finally argues that we are alien, bound together by a morphic field which makes planet Earth itself a fantastical, science-fictional entity. Existing in symbiosis with humanity, the Blessing ultimately represents a sort of Gaia Agenda, but it remains outside Jack’s knowledge, with Davies throwing in a jumble of Doctor Who Racnoss/Silurian references to maintain the Blessing’s mysteries. If it could simply be named in SF terms – “oh, it’s a Bleb, they live inside planets” – then the Blessing would be too pinned down, too classified, to provoke fan speculation. Instead, it remains unexplained, an ineffable narrative gap that is itself “the gap in between”, as Jack notes.

But the Blessing’s revelation of Gwen, Jack and Oswald’s souls to them – after all the build-up – amounts to precious little: each character simply shrugs off the experience and carries on regardless. In fact, the whole idea of people seeing their own true selves proves to be a rampant red herring since it fails to form any significant part of ‘The Blood Line’. It could perhaps be suggested that Oswald’s self-sacrifice is, in part, fuelled by his having gazed into the Blessing. Yet his narrative role remains extremely awkward. In structural terms he is redeemed – blowing himself up to allow Torchwood’s escape while burying the site – but redeeming such a “monster” seems absurd, so at the same time Oswald dies while screaming out to his child victim, Suzie, to “run faster”. Danes’ story is thus neatly book-ended, referring back to his villainous words from the very opening of Miracle Day. But despite this writerly trick, his fate remains uneasily and queasily ambivalent: he performs the narrative role of a “self-sacrificing hero”, but in a defiantly monstrous way. Beyond Good and Evil? Perhaps Miracle Day attains Nietzschean resonance after all. Amid big explosions and lipstick-smearing fights.

Then there’s that final scene. Having enacted a story about the necessary failure of individual heroics, it makes sense that Jack’s “fixed point” would be doubled. It’s still a rather curious gesture, though, implying that Torchwood is now definitively a US-UK coupling, as well as potentially allowing the show to continue without Captain Harkness. It’s a final jolt meant to provoke yet more guessing games, but one that can also be readily ignored if Torchwood‘s future requires it. Children of Earth Day Five felt like an ending: this closing twist feels like a shout-out to Starz executives: look, we gave the CIA guy a co-starring role, just think of all the story possibilities offered by immortal-espionage-a-go-go!

Miracle Day‘s behind-the-scenes publicity hasn’t had anything much to say about series one and two’s head writer Chris Chibnall, being largely focused pre-transmission on Russell T. Davies, and on Jane Espenson across transmision. But “with thanks to Chris Chibnall” appears in the closing credits here, suggesting that Chibnall has been hidden at the core of this storyline all along, mysteriously concealed in the gaps between production credits, and secretly infiltrating the writers’ room. It’s a final reveal of sorts, though we don’t yet know exactly what Chibnall’s involvement was, nor whether Torchwood will continue under either of its two showrunners. Say what you will about the Blessing, the guessing isn’t over yet…

This column is, however, so I hope all those who’ve followed it, or dipped in over the weeks, have found something of interest. All together: press those reset buttons…. now.

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

So argued philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, and it’s become something of a staple epigram for gothic fictions, as well as informing a television trope or two. Here, we finally get to discover what The Blessing is, and it literalises this Nietzschean aphorism. Could Russell T. Davies – whose highly recognisable voice begins the ep via a newsreader cameo – possibly not have had this infamous Nietzsche quote in mind when he pitched the idea: it’s a monstrous abyss, right through the centre of the Earth, which shows you your own true self. But if this is meant to provoke discussion over Miracle Day‘s philosophical stance it feels too on the money, and as yet too undeveloped, to really do so. Added to which, we’re very much not beyond good and evil in ‘The Gathering’. Instead there’s a depiction of banal villainy in the figure of the Category 1-hunting Finch, whilst Oswald’s status as a “monster” is again bluntly reinforced, and the CIA mole is little more than a ‘baddie’ cipher. So we’re given a Nietzschean CGI chasm that’s contradicted by non-Nietzschean, conventional moralities. “Institutional murder” referred to by newsreader/showrunner Davies raises the spectre of a society no longer capable of separating out ‘good’ and ‘evil’, but as an audience we’re clearly meant to be appalled by “Day 61 of the Great Depression”. What could have been a challenging representation of social (dis)order thus seems rather cartoonish as a consequence.

About midway through this series I pondered whether it would offer a sort of ‘Gaia Agenda’, and I’m tempted to put that option back on the table now that the Phicorp logo has surrendered its secrets. Not once did I think ‘why is that the logo?’, despite it being plastered all over the place, and the revelation of something “hidden in plain sight” feels dramatically satisfying in this case. Less so the discovery of the antipodean twist, though, which hinges on Rhys happening to have an inflatable globe to hand at the vital moment. Given the amassed talent of the writers’ room, could a more elegant route to this plot point not have been found? But the big reveal of the Blessing does raise one inevitable, intriguing question: just what will the Magical Crack in the World reveal to Captain Jack?

This episode hails from John Fay, the only other writer carried over from Torchwood ‘s prior UK life by showrunner Russell T. Davies. For my money, Fay penned one of the strongest episodes of Children of Earth, and also has form in the TV thriller department thanks to his ITV miniseries Mobile from 2007. Like Davies, Fay has combined work on UK soaps with social realist and genre fare; also like Davies, Fay has tended to root his TV writing in regional geographies (Mobile focuses partly on Liverpool-Manchester rivalries, for example). And Fay delivers some tense sequences in this episode, expertly hybridising kitchen-sink drama with the stuff of global conspiracy. All the sequences set in that Swansea house feel both very Davies-esque, and yet also of a piece with Fay’s writerly voice. Indeed, John Fay seems to enjoy combining the down-to-earth with outlandish fantasy – Mobile made pronounced use of one character’s fixation with bathroom fittings within its tale of murder and mesmerism; here, Fay fuses what’s required of him – key plot points and societal beats – with musings on Geraint missing his own bed, Rhys’s bathroom time being disrupted, and other details such as the value of storytelling, whether as a source of clues (The Devil Within) or as something vital to the Families (Jilly’s recruitment). The ordinary, the homely, and the human are repeatedly contrasted with extraordinary events.

One of the strongest ideas in this episode, however, lies in the CIA’s investigation and Charlotte’s analysis that they have “6 million suspects” – something like twice the population of Wales. This is a stunning concept: how could a force of so many millions ever be defeated in CSI-style or 24-mode? Just as Torchwood wasn’t designed to deal with politicians, how could it ever deal with a collective monster indistinguishable from the social fabric itself? But the notion is too subversive to be explored in any depth, and instead it’s quickly glossed over. Torchwood can’t fight society, or the system; its monsters need to be far more localised in order to be defeatable – like an abyss, which even if it runs through the Earth’s core can at least be tracked down, travelled to, and (presumably next week) gazed into by the Torchwood team. Davies’s solution to creating a ‘global’ TV drama, akin to his apparent use of Nietzsche, is to literalise, literalise, literalise – hence mistranslation is the Families’ favoured tool of concealment, and the globe itself hides or contains the Blessing. When TV screenwriting manuals advise that a global menace is needed, I’m not sure they’ve ever meant a CGI chasm running globally from pole to pole. But with this concept Davies definitively pre-empts any Fox or Starz executive giving him a note along the lines of ‘we like Miracle Day, but it needs a bigger scale of threat’. The miraculous Blessing, it turns out, is textbook global drama.

Pre-Miracle Day Torchwood has been criticised by some writers for its “lack of originality”; in the recently published book Cult Telefantasy Series, Sue Short argues that the show never convincingly found its own identity instead typically coming across as a mix of The X-Files and Buffy (2011:179—180). This episode seems to take that refrain and play with it – look, there’s Nana Visitor from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Oh, and there’s The Next Generation‘s Q, John de Lancie, almost effortlessly stealing the show. And look, it’s co-written by Jane Buffy, Battlestar Galactica etc Espenson. This week, links to other telefantasy shows are not only front and centre as fans of American telefantasy are treated to a parade of cameos – such links simultaneously dare the viewer to ponder what, if anything, they’ve ever seen that’s remotely like this. The essence of the world is altered by one flooring underlay; characters magically discuss their escape with guards standing all around them; a celebrity paedophile requests a prostitute of legal age and tries to will himself into a different identity. Where have you seen that combo served up before?

Mind you, 24-style plot beats are all present and correct – Jilly being offered promotion by the Families; Shawnie infiltrating Oswald’s set-up and then being discovered; Charlotte acting as a Family mole within the CIA. But surrounded by Star Trek star guests and re-contextualised by Miracle Day‘s quirks, these plot points feel as if they’ve fallen through a rift in space-time and found themselves mysteriously embedded here, a veneer of generic content plastered over rampant strangeness.

Because it’s a square of flooring that’s the narrative star of the show in this ep. Unlike Henry James’ The Figure in the Carpet, this bit of floor covering surrenders its secret meanings rather than remaining forever elusive. James’s novella challenged reviewers – implying that authors could evade and escape their readers’ understanding – and this episode also throws down a gauntlet to its reviewers: Angelo’s floor may have promptly given up its mysteries, but can you find the Families? Hidden “in plain sight”, everywhere and nowhere, they are the Jamesian motif – the metaphorical figure in the carpet – through which the showrunner’s secret currently outruns his audience, tantalising with the lure of meaning yet to be unearthed. How can their names never have existed?

Angelo’s under-floor tech is sufficiently important that tie-in novel Long Time Dead by Sarah Pinborough takes specific care to integrate its recovery from the Hub. In this recently published Miracle Day prequel, one character enters the devastated Hub back at Cardiff Bay:

“he laid his torch down on the floor, idly noting an unfamiliar name stencilled on an empty packing crate: ‘Colasanto’” (Pinborough 2011:238).

It’s all rather self-referential: Jack inspired the search for immortality last week, and this week flotsam and jetsam from the good old Hub offers a way out of deathlessness. At this rate, the mysterious three men at the historical head of the Families will prove to be part of some 1920’s American Torchwood spin-off (Torchwood in Manhattan?), and the Families will have vanished themselves using time-travel shenanigans stolen from a travelling Time Lord. Personally, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that things don’t get any more self-referential across the next few weeks.

Livetweeting the episode, co-writer Espenson noted that its heroes felt vulnerable and real to her; Jack doesn’t know exactly how to deal with the null field, just as Esther doesn’t know how to help the wounded, mortal Jack, and Gwen clearly doesn’t know how best to deal with Shapiro. Some have playfully interpreted this as Torchwood’s absurd incompetence (both the organisation and this series), but I’m tempted to read it more positively. Rather than omnipotently dealing with the Families’ scheme, our protagonists don’t quite cut it as action heroes: all are fatally flawed, whether by lack of field experience (Esther), lack of smooth diplomacy (Gwen), lack of knowledge (Jack) or lack of empathy (Rex). Muddling through, and doing the best they can, if this Torchwood team are victorious then it won’t ever be as a result of their pure shiny professionalism.

Of course, it’s a remix of Doctor Who: amateurism and human improvisation against monstrous worlds of managerialism, evil capitalism, and techno-industrial control. Torchwood is all about its character and organisational flaws; it always has been. Even when series one manically badged itself with hexagonal ‘T’ logos this never quite seemed convincing – as if Torchwood was trying to persuade itself of its professional standing by madly imprinting that brand everywhere. But whether flawed or floored, this serial continues to provide a rich sense of oddity and originality.

Forget the alien, though. The real pay-off this week isn’t a sci-fi creature at all, but rather three men joining arms to form a triangular motif. Yes, the spinning-triangle baddies have their apparent origins in a pact sealed with the manly grasping of wrists. Because these three men acquired the rights to none other than Captain Jack himself. The Miracle, and all its corruption of humanity, seemingly stems from treating Harkness as a commodity to be bought, and owned, and cashed-in. He’s given religious meaning by the crowd that repeatedly torments and kills him – a “miracle” and a “blessing” – but only before a price is put on this sacredness. Welcome to the land of the free.

Oh, the delicious irony, the implicit subversion of co-branding and international TV partnerships. Russell T. Davies must have been chortling – insert various “hoorays” here – when he first pitched this storyline to Fox executives (Starz later stepped in, of course), waiting to see whether they were buying. And whether they’d get the subtext. Because on my reading, the meat of this episode is that moment when American (immigrants?) purchase Jack: the ultimate villains of the piece are those who assume they can own a piece of Harkness’s distinctiveness, manipulating him as a commodity to their own ends, as well as satisfying their own desires for a shortcut to immortality. Theirs is the sin; the immorality of assuming that everything can be bought and sold.

It’s an odd story to decide to tell when attempting to sell Torchwood, as a commodity, to American TV executives. Or perhaps it was the only story for an auteur to focus on when writing for new imagined paymasters, and looking to hawk Harkness to new global markets. The spinning-triangle baddies even have their own logo that pops up when they’re in touch via telecomms, rather like a TV network, say. Perhaps all that earlier stuff about US-UK cultural differences was just a distraction from the fact that Miracle Day is actually about itself at a deeper, narrative level. And about what can be done with Captain Jack as (a) property.

In Stacey Abbott’s excellent edited collection, The Cult TV Book, there’s a piece by one Jane Espenson entitled ‘Playing Hard to ‘Get’: How to Write Cult TV’. Among many observations on the importance of cult TV’s storylines and characters, Espenson includes the following:

Captain Jack Harkness is as complex a character as you’re likely to find… Moral shadings and unexpected weaknesses, and the way a character evolves over the course of a show, these all help make complicated people. When an audience has to bring contradictions into focus as they try to understand the totality of a complex character, they cannot help but get involved. Characters that defy easy analysis invite investment (2010: 49—50).

And ‘Immortal Sins’ – written by none other than Jane Espenson – restores Captain Jack to narrative centrality and complexity in a series where he has sometimes seemed to be an afterthought, competing for screen time with new additions Rex, Esther, Jilly and Oswald, as well as being rendered less powerful by his newfound mortality.

But this week is all about Jack.

In reality, it’s always been all about Jack, but to keep viewers (and US TV execs?) guessing, the unfolding storyline has presumably had to hold that fact back for a while. (It was hinted at in eps one and two, only to be set to one side once Phicorp took precedence in the narrative game). Following her own advice in ‘How To Write Cult TV’, Espenson sketches out a complex Jack who comes back for his lover and companion Angelo Colasanto, but who tells Gwen he’ll rip the skin from her skull if it means he gets to live on. And this Jack cannot forgive Angelo’s mistakes, despite his immortality. Angelo is likewise depicted with deft vibrancy. His religious beliefs come into conflict with his sexuality, ultimately causing him to radically misjudge Jack and fear him as a sort of devil. Religion and capitalism: twin devils of the Davies-verse.

There are also many wonderful Espenson moments: Jack not knowing the name of Gwen’s mother; that initial seduction scene as Jack and Angelo discuss their passion in a het-coded way; the fleeting lifecycle of a firebird. And there’s a real sense of Jack being on a mission-of-the-week, meaning that the flashback feels somewhat like a throwback to Torchwood series one and two. Jack’s history reminds viewers of the programme’s history. But although Espenson was writing about audience and fan devotion when she noted that characters like Jack Harkness “invite investment”, in the end it’s a different and more literal investment that Jack invites here by unwisely sharing his secret with a mixed-up bootlegger. This series was initially entitled Torchwood: The New World before morphing into Miracle Day. Somewhere out there, faithful viewer – perhaps in Russell T. Davies’s mythical bottom drawer – I like to imagine there’s an even earlier draft. Torchwood: Bought By American Baddies.

Episodes one to nine will, by definition, be gradually decoded bits of narrative machinery encountered en route: enigma after mystery after puzzle. This week, for instance, we get the Shanghai operative who joins the 45 Club within moments of its introduction: whatever he saw on that secret Phicorp site was evidently grotesque enough and bleak enough to provoke immediate ‘suicide’. At the heart of any thriller there’s a gap, an invisibility, a blankness promising significance and meaning. Imagination fills that gap: what do you think he saw? How bad could it have been? What the hell was it?

This episode poses other questions; are Phicorp executive Stuart Owens and overflow camp boss Colin Maloney both just ‘middle men’? Both are caught up in a system that they can’t clearly understand or effect. Phicorp’s control over the Miracle is thus akin to penpusher Maloney’s control over the San Pedro modules, suggesting a symbolic coherence of sorts. Indeed, Owens’ account of the build-up to the Miracle is a dialogue highlight. He tells Jack that this doesn’t betray any perceptible force at work, just carefully hidden and artfully dispersed networks of accountability implicating everyone and no-one. A truly powerful conspiracy would never be visible… so the failure to find any sign of unknown forces at work is evidence of inconceivable, omnipotent forces at work. Writer John Shiban sells this mad logic by dressing it up in the form of actor Ernie Hudson; conspiracy paranoia in a three-piece suit.

However, Shiban can’t quite decide how to handle the concentration camps storyline – this episode wants to indicate that team Torchwood secure a moral victory by exposing what’s going on, but then also wants to undercut their triumph by showing that the political system simply carries on. The former perspective exaggerates Torchwood’s action-adventure agency – the Holocaust as Monster of the Week? – as well as overplaying the role of social media in a rather self-congratulatory way. The implication appears to be that in a world of uploaded video, there could be no Holocaust because the truth would always get out there (either on a video-camera or via magic contact lenses). And the latter perspective – “Torchwood wasn’t designed to fight politicians”, Jack solemnly intones – broaches a melancholic worldview where easy fixes (and genre resolutions) don’t work, and where reality is a more complex system. It’s a murky world which leaves Torchwood‘s heroes stuck in the middle too.

But what of the show’s audiences? Are we stuck in the middle in another sense – watching the sixth of ten episodes and still not understanding what’s going on? As literary theorist Lars Ole Sauerberg has argued, suspense in the thriller hinges on concealment and protraction: withholding crucial narrative information (who’s behind the Miracle? Why?), and “stretching an issue and its result as much as may be tolerated” (1984:83). There are two ways of achieving protraction: prolongation and shift (ibid.). As examples, Sauerberg refers to a countdown (prolongation) and a flashback that changes the story’s setting (shift) – a textbook example of the latter looks to be episode seven, judging by the ‘Next Time’ trailer. In short, Miracle Day is placed within a genre which hinges on not giving away key narrative information until perhaps the closing scenes of the closing episode; we edge closer to the final reveal, but encounter numerous layers of implications, hints, and clues along the way – with “The Blessing” being added this week to previous weeks’ mentions of “the families” and special “geography.”

Because we’re ‘The Middle Men’ and women, Torchwood‘s viewers who assent to the thriller’s rules and go along for the ride. Sure, we expect twists along the way – but the end of episode five did that, as did this week’s ending, whilst episodes one and two largely set up the show’s premise and the new Torchwood team. Eps three and four consolidated the post-Miracle world, building up Phicorp’s role and prefiguring the overflow camps via ‘Dead is Dead’. I can’t see any of this as “treading water” – but if you try to read a thriller as episodic TV (with a tidy resolution or a big reveal allocated to each week’s narrative) then it will look slow, whether you’re talking about The Shadow Line, Edge of Darkness, State of Play or Torchwood: Miracle Day. Moving even closer to the thriller format than Children of Earth, this year’s Torchwood wants its audience to spend nine weeks asking questions and imagining answers rather than being handed them every fifty-or-so minutes. I’m still hoping that the final reveal will be breathtaking enough, challenging enough, and bold enough to have richly deserved weeks and weeks of speculation over cryptic phrases. But ultimately any thriller’s labyrinthine plotting – where those stuck in the middle are “just following orders”, and where our heroes can’t instantly bring down a political elite – is about transforming opaque, incomprehensible systems into legible, significant patterns of meaning. Miracle Day‘s genre contract involves the promise of meaning – delayed, deferred and withheld via concealment/protraction, yet promised nonetheless. You have to tolerate being stuck in the story’s elongated middle in order to appreciate eventual revelation.

By wearing its (great)coat of allegory so conspicuously, Miracle Day creates a problem for itself. Because it isn’t just symbolically coding the Holocaust, it’s also doing something else at the same time: creating a science-fictional mystery about who’s behind Phicorp, and what they stand to gain. This means that the Holocaust parallels are muddled, if not undercut. The likes of Maloney may be petty bureaucrats intent on coming in “under budget”, and the modules’ purpose may be opaque to many of those involved who shrug and say “ask admin”, but all those renderings of ‘just following orders’ beg the question – what’s the point of it all? What do Phicorp’s controllers stand to gain? And this level of meaning runs somewhat counter to ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ by implying an as-yet-unknown fantastical explanation for events. Vera speculates that the category 1 patients may be used as petri dishes to breed new diseases, but burning them doesn’t immediately or obviously benefit Phicorp.

What, then, is the value of presumably still-living ashes to the spinning-triangle Baddies? Has all this happened before, and so somewhere on earth (or beyond) there are special areas of geography where the soil is already sentient? Perhaps “the Families” used to have names because they are now living molecules, dispersed into the environment, but still interconnected by morphic fields (and that’s been mentioned enough times it’s clearly going to come back in the eventual reveal). I’m tempted to ponder whether, following the Holocaust parallels, there’s going to be some sort of Gaia agenda, with living earth being (re)created on Earth. But the fact that, as a science fiction fan, I’m considering such questions and mysteries suggests that Torchwood‘s coding of the Holocaust could be so much more powerful – and so much more hard-hitting – without accompanying layers of SF mystery. The fact that this is science-fictional allegory gets in the way of what’s being connoted, rather than simply helping to smuggle challenging material into primetime TV.

Worse, though, the revelation that we’re dealing with a version of the Holocaust comes at Miracle Day‘s midway point, suggesting again that there are further, bigger reveals to come. There’s a breath-taking kind of allegorical grade inflation here: the Holocaust somehow only merits an AA+ allegory rating, with the triple-A-rated stuff yet to come. Holocaust parallels as a kind of midseries game-changer? Didn’t anyone dare question this in storylining terms? Because it raises the question of what, if anything, could possibly be worse. And it simultaneously raises an ethical question: should an historical event of such magnitude and implication be used to furnish a rather muddled set of half-time, second-tier connotations?

This episode also focalises its trauma via Dr Vera Juarez’s fate. But Torchwood has killed off so many lead characters across its run, that to (seemingly) kill a character we’ve only seen in 5 episodes lacks the impact of Ianto Jones’ death, say, or even those of Tosh and Owen back in the days of series two. It feels comparatively less significant this time, which is surely again a difficulty: for long-terms fans, at least, Miracle Day is potentially pulling against the show’s history in order to realise its intended impact.

Intertextually (Vera is no Ianto), narratively (coming at the end of episode five rather than climactically at the end of episode nine), and generically (what about the Big SF Mystery?) Miracle Day‘s allegorical coding of the Holocaust is lessened, weakened, and reduced. It should be plain heartbreaking. It really should be utterly, utterly devastating. What we get are cuts from stadium lighting at the Miracle Day Rally to flames surrounding Dr. Vera. The bright lights of media celebrity visually rhymed with concentration camp death; different shades of (extra)ordinary humanity. It’s a startling piece of editing and intercutting, to be sure, its meaning-making also strongly aestheticised. But it’s yet another layer of distraction, pushing the audience to think about Oswald’s loyalties while the San Pedro module fires up. In fact, this episode pulls its punches in so many ways that I’m tempted to conclude the Holocaust parallel is made obvious only to the extent that its impact can be warded off, guarded against, and contained. Perhaps ‘The Categories of Life’ would have been more shocking, and more potent, if its allegorical coating had been that bit thicker, and its connotations just that bit less obvious. By wanting to announce its audacity, Miracle Day calls into question its own narrative ethics – globalised TV drama may ask tough questions about what humanity is capable of, but should it evoke real-world global traumas as second-order shocks, subordinated to a science fiction story-arc? The show’s undoubted success this week lies in provoking questions not just about man’s inhumanity, but also about Miracle Day‘s own narrative and allegorical form.

Viewed, as yet, without that larger context, episode four still feels attenuated. It’s the protraction – the you-don’t-know-yet – that thrillers need. A scary mystery man pursues Torchwood. And he gives enigmatic clues about what’s going on, bless him, embodying a hackneyed device that’s even older than Captain Jack, and which the writers hang a sizeable lampshade on by way of deflecting criticism; “oh great, he’s cryptic”, Gwen tells us just in case we’d not noticed. But this is where it gets interesting. Because Miracle Day has made a big show of its socio-politico-medical extrapolations – what would happen if nobody could die? Breeding infections; the ‘Dead Is Dead’ right-wingery; Oswald Danes as a Phicorp mouthpiece, etc. ‘Look’, the series says, ‘look at how carefully we’ve thought about what this would do to the skin, and flesh, and bone and sinews of the world.’ Dr. Vera attends various medical panels, as further consequences are computed and considered. Everything changes, as they say.

And then we get the following narrative gambit: scary mystery man (C. Thomas Howell) is about to spill the beans on his scary mystery paymasters. And he gets shot before he can do so. Doh! But wait a minute – nobody can die now, so this cliché shouldn’t work any more. Like macro world-changing extrapolations, the conventions of thriller narratives also need to be extrapolated from, shifted, and destabilised by the writing team. But instead clichés are replayed with just a veneer of difference. The Baddies want rid of Ellis Hartley Monroe. They can’t kill her, so instead she’s crushed inside a car, leaving her a compacted cube of baleful eye and engine parts.

Or, in old money: she’s bumped off and out of the story.

Likewise, scary mystery man can’t be silenced by his untimely death. Oh, wait, no, he’s been shot in the neck by Rex and so now can only gurgle and froth even more cryptic sounds. But Team Torchwood could surely still get him to write down the answers to what’s going on. Pen and paper to save the world. The story doesn’t seem interested in pursuing this line, though, because in narrative terms he’s been bumped off too, as per thriller conventions.

In short, what this episode illustrates is that Miracle Day is characterised by a schizophrenic, divided premise: it makes a big show of altering social/political/medical logic, yet soldiers on with pre-Miracle narrative logic and all its associated cliches. The result is a series that feels torn in two.

Whether the writers’ room intuited this or not – and I’m guessing it did – episode four does something rather marvellous. It appears to set out two distinct story strands: Rhys and baby Anwen are back in Swansea, whereas Gwen is on a Torchwood mission in Venice Beach. Rhys calls at inopportune moments, and the US-UK time difference is toyed with; “it’s already tonight”, the poor fellow protests. The separateness of these two worlds is reinforced. Then, just as the overflow camps are discovered, we find that what have been constructed as two divorced realms collapse together to create a new level of jeopardy for Gwen’s family. This unexpected dovetailing is well crafted, leaving the viewer with a feeling that things are, at last, coming together. But the merging is partly a feint; by crafting a storyline with such a strong unifying impulse, ‘Escape to L.A.’ covers over the fact that it remains structurally split between an altered diegetic world and unaltered thriller tropes.

Oh, and the spinning-triangle Baddies know Captain Jack of old. Who are these evil geometry fiends? The hokum quotient puts me in mind of Russell T Davies’ 1991 TV drama, Dark Season, although that was BBC kids’ television rather than a big, global, grown-up conspiracy drama. And yet there’s something oddly child-like about Miracle Day‘s adherence to the reassuring familiarity of unreconstructed action-adventure. While humanity stumbles toward ruin, there are shadowy figures behind the scenes pulling all the strings. Ontological shock meets old school. Forget US/UK tensions. This, I’d say, is the most powerful culture clash currently underpinning Miracle Day: a startling science-fictional novum strained through thriller clichés.