Watching this in the company of fellow viewers at Bad Wolf 2009 in Birmingham this week really struck home how this series of Torchwood has been a compulsive, if not uncompromising, television experience.

The idea of sacrifice has been one of the strongest themes in both the new version of Doctor Who and Torchwood and the closing episode of Children Of Earth was perhaps the ultimate statement in this 'slaughter of the innocents' dramatic trope, the series own use of the 'death of one to save all' motif. What Day Five clearly demonstrates is the unflinching courage of writers Russell T Davies, John Fay and James Moran to travel into the abyss and conduct a reportage from the front line. I didn't think we were going to get a satisfying ending and I honestly thought that the idea of using a reset might just have made it into the episode as a way of writing themselves out of the various corners they'd arrived in. But they reveled in those dark corners and went further, pulling no punches as they went.

It was striking to open with Gwen narrating the end of the world in similar fashion to Rose's eulogy in Doomsday and it suggested that this was indeed the end of Torchwood itself and that all was actually lost even before the episode unfolded. The structure of the episode cycled back to this reportage and opened it out to feature Rhys filming Gwen in the barn with the children they had rescued from Rhiannon's house. This was not the end, merely a prelude to it. And the children, who were always the focus of the story and had been the beginning of the narrative through their possession by the 456 were also, very fittingly, and in the nature of this circular narrative, their end.

But what an end. As the government, hostage to American General Pierce, carried out their cull of 10% of the child population, those that indeed served its modus operandi in the end realised that they were propping up something so ugly and heinous they understood that only by switching sides could they affect the outcome of the 456 demands. Johnson (we never find out her first name) who has been the cartoon villain in the midst of the narrative finally reveals herself to us and to Alice, Jack's daughter. She's as real as all the other characters and just hides behind her duty. She finally becomes a lynchpin in the desperate solution that removes the 456 from the Earth.

The interesting aspect of Day Five is how it does pick the stories of Johnson, Alice and Clem and makes them integral to the conclusion of the story. Thinking their narratives had drawn to a close in Day Four, it's a surprise and a relief to see how they affect the outcome of the story. Clem's death isn't for nothing because the cause of his death is the way that Jack cruelly hoists the 456 with their own petard; Johnson effectively rescues Jack from incarceration to fulfill this narrative purpose; Alice provides a son, a lamb to the slaughter. It's a fantastic opening out of the narrative and it's chilling in the way Jack uses these separate threads. Jack very much becomes like the untempered 10.5 version of the Doctor, dangerous to himself and others by acting on the knowledge that he has to kill a child in order to save millions more. He doesn't flinch from the operation even though that child is his own flesh and blood. It's Biblical in scope.

Jack, as I discussed earlier, is not a very pleasant person to be around and it is truly shocking to see him go to these extremes. He has to become as monstrous as the 456 and Prime Minister Brian Green, be as ruthless as they are to accomplish the goal of eradicating the threat and saving those children. It's as gut-wrenching as Bernard Quatermass and his daughter setting off the nuke to banish the alien threat in the 1979 Euston Films series. There are great parallels here between both series about human sacrifice as well as the raison d'etre of the alien incursion. In Quatermass, humanity is being harvested as a condiment to a greater meal, here the 456 are simply drug addicts who want to get a good deal on the merchandise and get high on kids. That there was still yet another, darker twist to the 456's purpose in the story added to the complex political metaphors. Here, it's about the demands of the free market.

At the centre of this bleakest of codas is that utterly chilling scene in which Frobisher, ordered by Green to publicly offer his own children up to the 456 as a sop to a government demanding a positive spin on their policy of 'the first born must die'. In that perfectly realised confrontation between Frobisher and Green, where Green can barely raise his eyes from the paperwork on his desk and look Frobisher in the eye whilst telling him to bury bad news, it's Capaldi's performance that succinctly signals to the audience just how dark this is going to get. I can't praise Capaldi high enough and his performance in this epic saga is probably one of the elements that has propelled Torchwood from what could arguably considered cult status to a full blooded serious drama that can hold its own in a prime position in BBC1's schedule. When he kills his own family, the sequence is brilliantly cut together with the scene of Bridget talking to Lois in her cell about him being 'a good man' who 'worked hard' which again touches on the themes of class, the social pecking order and how that refers to Johnson's observations about the desire to remove certain kinds of kids from our street corners whilst the 90% who are 'good' and 'work hard' are spared.

The sequences where the troops arrive to take children away are painfully reminiscent of the ethnic cleansing activities reported from various unstable regimes from around the globe. Euros Lyn connects to this viscerally through rough and ready hand held camera work, adding a searing verisimilitude to the drama. Children Of Earth has clearly shown that Lyn has a blooming career in major films if he so chooses and his contribution to the series should not be underestimated. His visual judgement and his obvious attention to performances has paid off and if Torchwood did return then the notion of allowing a single director to hold the reigns wouldn't be a bad idea at all.

Depressing as it was, the 'final solution' in which Jack kills his own grandson also offered us very decent performances from John Barrowman and Lucy Cohu, as Alice Carter. I was pleased that Alice's story was continued beyond her simply being held in a cell and that there was a conclusion of sorts to the Jack/Alice arc, even though Russell T Davies took it to perhaps one of the darkest extremes he's ever taken his writing. It's also interesting to compare the actions of Jack and Frobisher - Frobisher executes his own family and technically one could argue he's a coward for not facing up to the 456 or even attempting to get his kids out of harm's way and Jack, shell-shocked from all the death and destruction he's instigated, buggers off six months later after a final goodbye to Gwen and Rhys. Technically, is he also a coward for not starting over? Jack's journey could be seen as similar to that of Homer's Odysseus - a hero that undergoes a series of tragedies and moral struggles in striving for a sense of place. Jack flees the cause of his pain for the home of imagination - in this case abandoning the Earth because he observes it as a sterile and futile waste land. Several times in the poem Homer describes Odysseus's quest as a desire for re-birth - a rising from the dead that can only occur when he reaches his home. Jack is now clearly looking for that home.

Torchwood ends as it should. You can either accept it as a well realised conclusion to the entire Torchwood saga or you can see it as the end of this particular phase of the programme and, if a fourth series is given the go ahead, a new beginning, potentially with an entirely new cast. For now see this as a vindication of Davies faith in the series as a modern, adult drama and as the Torchwood we always hoped we would get three years ago.

3:40 in, with 1:20 to go. That's when Torchwood finally sprang into action.

It was a long time coming. Too long, as I've complained before. But maybe the irrelevance of Torchwood to the first two thirds of this story is not a bug but a feature. Because I swear, the moment Lois said "Torchwood," and everyone panicked, my heart skipped a beat.

Despite the tragedy at the end of the episode, the darkest hour of the story is the centerpiece of the episode, as they argue over which ten percent of the children have got to go. We're dealing with two different kinds of terror here: The alien monsters, and the human monsters. It's the same kind of compelling, gripping drama we had in Midnight, only this time it's on a scare where millions are at stake, not just half dozen tourists.

These are the scenes that really sell the relevance of Torchwood. In the absence of the Doctor, somebody has to step in to stop this. And if the dubious quality of the first two series of Torchwood left you in doubt as to whether Jack, Gwen, and Ianto are the ones you want handling the situation, then surely, in that moment, you must have been a convert. The first three and a half episodes of Children of Earth seem designed to get us to this point where the viewer needs Torchwood as badly as the fictional world of the story does.

Day Four has some problems, of course. Clement's death, while dramatic and sad, leaves me feeling underwhelmed by the character's role in the story. And Jack's family, which I was hoping would play a more complex role in the story, at least with regard to Jack's character arc, seem reduced to little more than standard hostages. And more important to Jack than the imprisonment of his family is the big death in this episode.

RTD wouldn't use cheap tricks to get himself out of a corner. Would he?

The loss of Ianto is painful but, perhaps, necessary. For two seasons Ianto made Torchwood tolerable and was easily the best thing about the program, but that's simply no longer the case here. Killing Ianto takes the training wheels off while simultaneously providing one of the saddest death scenes I've seen in a long time. Killing the entire freaking building would have been sufficient, but taking out Ianto Jones makes it personal. It's shocking because at the end of series two, I never expected them to kill both Tosh and Owen, and with that wound still fresh in the program's memory I honestly thought Gwen and Ianto were both safe for this outing. But RTD has done nothing short of out-Whedoning Joss Whedon here, with the random unexpected death of a character who simply doesn't deserve it.

But is Ianto really going to stay dead for long? Cheating death has been a running theme throughout the first two series of Torchwood, with Jack being the most obvious example and Owen being another notable one, but let's not forget Suzie Costello or Eugene from Random Shoes. But Russell T Davies wouldn't write himself into a corner and then use cheap tricks to get himself out of it. That's beneath him. Isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it?

Which touches upon my greatest fear for this series: that Russell will drop the ball where it matters most. If Day Five sucks, then none of the excellent four that preceded it will matter one jot and history will remember this as the Torchwood series that was almost good. Which won't be accurate, because regardless of what comes next the first four episodes have been spectacular.

So how's it going to end? A surprise cameo from the Doctor? A reset button that brings back Ianto (and Tosh and Owen)? The revelation that Mr. Dekker is a Time Lord (perhaps the War Chief)? A big musical number? Regardless, it'll all be over in a couple of hours and we'll be crying or cheering or heckling or whatever.

Sweet. Mothering. Sunday.

Towards the end, I suspect like most people, I was thinking that they're not going to gas the entire building - they're going to merely open the doors and quickly reveal in half Tweet's worth of flimflam that the gas would lose its effectiveness as it met the polluted London atmosphere. Or there would be a handy suck label on a less than convenient air-con lever that our heroes would locate and throw just in time (after traversing an obstacle course of inappropriately positioned locked doors, abandoned tea trolleys and discarded ministerial red boxes). But no. They actually all died.

He's dead.

And Ianto. If this entire series wasn't good enough they actually killed off Ianto. Of course, you sit there thinking, bet he's taken his anti-gas pills this morning and he'll be right as rain. Or his gentleman's relish sessions with Jack has resulted in some immortality rubbing off (so to speak) onto him. Or he reveals, in the mildly humours coda at the end that, of course, he was the Porthcawl Buttlins' breath holding champion for 6 summers running. Oh how we'd laugh. And throw our fists through LCD screens. But no... Just when you thought things couldn't get any better, they killed him. They killed them all. All apart from the people in the Cobra room and Dexter.

No... he really is dead.

The Cobra room as basically an amateur dramatics retelling of what happens in the Deal of No Deal Banker's mind every time he mulls over the latest offer to make to mugs with boxes (except, with slightly less Nick Briggs). Earlier, the meeting with the PM and military figures was full of the sorts of recriminations and backbiting a partner might be subject too if their other half were to find a piece of suspicious underwear in a compromising position, ie on the end of a car radio aerial. "You should have told us you'd had dealings with The 456 before - oh why didn't you tell us", the Americans asked jealously. I'm surprised at that point the PM didn't through the entire back catalogue of Target novelisations at them and ask for 367 other incidents to be taken into account. What was the UNIT chap doing as all these discussions were going on? Thinking to himself "Please don't mention the Yeti. Please don't mention the Yeti. Please don't mention the Yeti.". A bit like Ianto's shock at Jack not telling him about events from his past. I'm surprised he stopped at the existence of Alice and Stephen and didn't as for another 367 incidents, at least, to be taken into account.

He's still dead. He ain't coming back. He is stone dead.

Whilst the trip into the tank might have taken a little bit of a shine off the threat (revealing a less than menacing load of latex) at least death on a massive scale will always trump bad alien prosthetics (and why am I being constantly reminded of the Jed Mercurio epic Invasion: Earth when it comes to the alien threat?). Even if the death was mostly down to that old standby - sheer bloody-minded Torchwood arrogance.

There is no returning from this one. He's definitely not coming back. He's as dead as crushed nylon three-quarter slacks with an embroidered Chuckle Brother on each knee. He... is... DEAD.

What will they do tonight? Catapult the Isle of Wight into the heart of a sun? Orchestrate the destruction of the eastern seaboard of the United States by turning the Atlantic into a bath of acid? Or simply crack open the planet like a Kinder Surprise and play keepy-uppy with the molten core as humanity fizzles into blistered nothingness in the vacuum of space?

Whatever happens, I can't wait. And that's the most surprising thing of all...

Or John Fay sticks the boot in.

Did you feel it repeatedly go into the already bloody and battered body of Labour's gloriously tarnished Third Way? Torchwood does politics in Day Four and Fay has at the centre of his script a depressing but horribly realistic satire on how far-right thinking fills the vacuum left by a failed centre-left liberal agenda. He piled everything in there and it was breathtaking: a government's abject inability to communicate to the working classes, the poorly educated, the disenfranchised and the failed asylum seekers is turned into a Daily Mail wet dream of a policy to placate an equally fascistic alien invader. And while they're at it they devise a cunning scheme to use school league tables, a system of figures already proven to be inaccurate and heavily fiddled, to weed out the potential failures...er, units...and hand them over to the 456. How supremely ironic and how apt then that Nick 'voice of the Daleks' Briggs gets to play one of these self-interested kleptocrats who can only see it as a good thing for the planet's resources. Are we sure that isn't Nick 'voice of the BNP' Griffin continually throwing up and draining the life energy out of a child in that smog filled chamber?

Small gods and big sacrifices. Jack does not come out of this mess smelling of roses. In a bid to avert a 1965 swine flu type pandemic he 'sacrifices the innocent' in order to buy time and a cure and packs 12 children (who won't be missed, just like all those failed asylum seekers) to the 456 in a remote part of Scotland. His female colleague hits the nail right on the head and says 'we need someone who doesn't care', simultaneously damning Jack and Prime Minister Green's government. In fact, Jack's a bit of a fool because even if he's immortal he's no god, he can't go dashing into a crisis and face off with an alien threat as if he was the Doctor. He's out of his depth and stunningly naive, a common trait within Torchwood, and he gets people killed in the process. Fay's script is bleak because it suggests that even righting a wrong just isn't enough to combat a foe that feeds on the bodies of children. Even Ianto witnesses a version of Jack he's never really seen before and it foreshadows his own fate.

Gareth David Lloyd and John Barrowman have their work cut out for them in ensuring that Ianto's death isn't tokenistic or overly sentimental and I think Fay and Barrowman get to explore Jack's attitude to those who will not only die before him but those who will die because of his actions. It's been an ongoing theme in Torchwood and Clem sums it up well: 'The man who sent me and my friends to die can't die himself'. It's this that makes Jack an anti-hero who, unlike the best anti-heroes, is very hard to sympathise with at all. What makes it more difficult here is that he's also trying to deal with Alice being held hostage by Frobisher and he's kept it to himself until Ianto dares to push him.

Day Four pretty much dispenses with the capers and absurdities of Torchwood's bluff methodology and concentrates on how a government might attempt to placate an enemy that simply wants to cull a tenth of the child population and the COBRA cabinet scene reminded me of the equally powerful drama Conspiracy which fictionalised the meeting at Wannsee, outside Berlin, in 1942, when the administrative apparatus of the Third Reich set in motion the detailed plans of the Final Solution. There are sprinklings of humour to lighten the atmosphere: Gwen's observation to Clem, who has just witnessed Jack returning from the dead yet again, 'look at it this way, you can shoot first and ask questions later'; Rhys mistaking the FAS file for an SAS file 'now you're talking'; Jonny thinking the kids are chanting 'lottery numbers or what'.

Director Euros Lyn drives this ahead relentlessly, barely letting the tension sag, and doesn't fail to disappoint when it comes to getting the camera inside the 456 chamber to give us further glimpses of the beast and the unforgettable, if bizarre, image of the child it has hooked up to itself. It's a truly arresting moment, emphasising the monstrousness of the creatures and the cruel form of immortality, something Jack recognises about himself perhaps, that they bestow on their victims. It's of course at this moment that the whole house of cards that Frobisher has been trying to protect finally comes crashing down.

What's been curious and interesting in the series so far is how Torchwood has been disassembled and, after Jack's rescue, placed on the sidelines of the plot. It's this structure that has helped shift the tone of Children Of Earth, away from a sort of Buffy alien threat of the week comic book to something resembling a 21st Century Quatermass where the fantastic supports a harder edged social commentary within an epic canvas. In the final third of this episode, Torchwood swings into action having recorded evidence of the cabinet meeting to force their way to the negotiating table and a confrontation with the 456. But there really isn't a plan to deal with the 456 and it has devastating consequences. Jack's gunboat diplomacy simply doesn't work because the 456 just decides to gas everyone in the building. He even quotes the slogan used by the International Workers Of The World at the creature and it simply flags up the fact that the human race blithely accepts the death of its children every day.

There's also the rather horrible death inflicted on poor old Clem just as Johnson finally acquires a conscience after witnessing a government held to account by Torchwood's recordings. Ianto's death is foreshadowed in that phone call to Rhiannon, as it was in all that fluff with Jack about being a 'couple' in Day One, and really, in the end, what did Jack expect? It's a bittersweet departure, drawn out slightly too long, but it's also a devastating moment to end the episode on. Once again, director Euros Lyn, the lead actors and guest artists keep up the high standard and make this gripping and compelling. Ben Foster also pulls out the stops with his score, using some spectacular choral music to great effect. Only one episode to go and crucially it has to resolve this story without resorting to a dumb Deus Ex Machina. Can they pull off a satisfying ending? Will anyone from Torchwood make it to the end of Day Five?

"Six thousand, seven hundred units.  Deal or no deal?"

I didn’t cry.  Not this time.  This time I was shouting at the injustice of it all, as in “How dare they…” (‘they’ being the writers and production team rather than the 456) “How dare they kill Ianto?”  I swore, a lot, only pausing to hear his final lines of dialogue ‘enjoying’ the extra resonance provided by Jones’s speech from his final radio appearance, The Dead Line, about Jack remembering him, and the repeated sentiment here.  I was waiting for the last minute reprieve, the only testing speech from the 456.  Then I remembered that this wasn’t Doctor Who and realised that he was gone.  Then we unexpectedly saw the body (as if to give the viewer visual evidence). 

Then Gwen straightened his tie.  Then I cried.  If one were to look for a reason why Torchwood has gone from being a show that you love to hate to must see television (at least this week) it's that it now has the time to include the small moments, imperceptible perhaps, that collectively add to a whole picture.  Like the discussion, so beautifully acted, about putting a positive spin on the selling out of the children, which in a few short sentences crystalised the inhumanity of what was being proposed which also happened to be acted by Nick Briggs otherwise voice of the Daleks.  Johnson numbed by what she’s just heard realising that she’s out of her depth then taking orders from her former enemy.

There were dozens of similar tiny moments, something in a performance, the music, the direction easily missed by the viewer but collectively adding the kind of texture not often seen in action adventure series.  Imagine if in the 1980s JNT had decided to finally spin-off UNIT and after a couple of series of the Brig and pals getting into scrapes he then turned around and delivered something that had all the weight and waft of Edge of Darkness and brought Nigel Kneale in to write it giving him the freedom to inject his concerns.  It feels like that.  A few people on Twitter have wondered if its possible for a show to jump the shark in reverse – and on the basis of Torchwood it really is. 

The closest example I can think of for a show going from being one you love to hate to something you genuinely love is Star Trek: The Next Generation which was reviled for its first few seasons after producing some of the very worst episodes of television in that franchise (Home Soil! Up The Long Ladder! the clip show!) before pitching up at the beginning of the third season with Evolution, a complex, literate story about life's various stages that somehow even managed to turn Wesley Crusher into a likeable unit (though obviously that word has a very different resonance these days).

Regular readers will know that in the past I’ve tended to take great pleasure in yanking the wings off Torchwood even as I defend some of Doctor Who’s wildest excesses and up to about forty minutes into the episode I was sharpening my typing fingers.  Because there is no more hackneyed idea than the hero tape recording/videoing the most salacious behaviour of an otherwise publicly respected figure and threatening to make it public.  For all of its sophistication it was even the pay off at the close of the environmental legal drama Michael Clayton. 

Then as has been so often the case in this series, smug bastards like me (slapping my own back for using the phrase ‘protection racket’ last night) received a well-deserved punch in the nose as Torchwood grand plan didn’t work and in fact, made things worse.  There’s an interesting article somewhere about how The Caves of Androzani ruined Doctor Who because it showed that the timelord can lose.  I wonder what they made of the hash job Captain Jack made of this situation on the back of the revelation about his nefarious past – for that matter was the not-we audience prepared to meet the dark Jack?

A similar rug pulling exercise happened during the inevitable conversation about how best to select the children.  Last night I predicted a lottery and sure enough that’s how it seemed Cobra were headed and then Jackie Smith, Harriet Harmon or whatever the character’s name was proposed a cull of the working classes with the ultimate kiss off line “Well, the league tables have to be useful for something”.  At that moment, the show took on a political dimension as it implied how the ruling classes still view the proletariat – an expendable drain on national resources. 

Those scenes about the cabinet table, in which even the language used to describe the children was neutralised were all to reminiscent of the Wannsee Conference were Nazi middle men Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich hashed out the Final Solution phase of the Holocaust in which human beings were reduced to numbers to be negotiated on something akin to a commodity market.  When that meeting was clinically dramatised in the tv movie Conspiracy with Stanley Tucci and Ken Branagh, the topic of conversation only present in the form of servants (I think).  Here, writer John Fay immediately cut to those in question, the children in Ianto’s family’s house, explaining in fact why we’ve kept returning to them the comic relief turning to tragedy.

It’s a measure of how complex this series is that I haven’t yet mentioned such things as the other view of the Torchwood of the past, so cold and professional and morally ambiguous, Eve Myles’s ability to seamlessly slip between slapstick and horror, the death of the remnant so bloody confused and alone and bloody, drawing our attention away from the events in Thames House at a vital moment only doubling our attention instead, the reveal of the Lovecraftian alien perhaps the darkest creature yet seen in the tv version of the franchise (though that probably won't stop Character Editions from releasing ten different versions of it) and Lois (so Cush) finally getting her big moment which if it had been Martha might have seemed a tad derivative of the close of The Last of the Timelords but instead through the curious casting issues gained the resonance of speaking up for the common person and put our heroes in the room.

And talking of rooms, lets finally look at that elephant shall we?  Was the death of Ianto and viral infestation of Thames House gratuitous?  To cover the second issue first, as way of creating instant panic and to show the 456 mean business it’s as good an idea as any and has the irony of the microbe taking down the human race in a reverse of The War of the Worlds; as the swine flu and sars epidemics have demonstrate, us bags of mostly water (Home Soil!) (stop that) have an innate fear of a danger that we can’t see.  As for Ianto …

On the one hand, the death of a lead character shouldn’t be that shocking and so soon (in temporal terms) after the snuffing of Owen and Tosh and Suzie before that at the shocking conclusion of Everything Changes.  24 or Spooks has done this often enough that it's begun to lose its dramatic power (unless the method of mortality is particularly horrific).  The reason this worked is because it was the last thing we expected because we assumed we’d seen the last of the deaths within the main cast and the pre-publicity had led us to believe that this was the new stripped down version of Torchwood going forward; Gareth’s all over the publicity and gave interviews which generally gave no indication of something amiss

From an in-universe perspective it’s dramatically brilliant.  One of the few solid elements running through the first two series was that you might well join Torchwood but you’ll never leave – you’ll die first – it’s the last job you’ll ever have. That was mentioned again during the radio plays and eluded to on earlier days and the Ianto's death simply confirms it.  Now the story focuses on Gwen who like Jack during his Fragments flashback has watched almost all of her colleagues die, but unlike her boss she can die too.  What are the implications of that?  Frankly, about the only thing that could have made this more tragic would have been if the credits had rolled silently over a shot of some coffee beans …

Tomorrow: The claw!  The claw! and the death threats start flooding into Cardiff from Jack/Ianto ‘shippers

Children of Earth: Day Three

I do genuinely worry for some Doctor Who/Torchwood fans. After two series of what could, at the very least, be termed abuse and at the worst a flagrant disregard for all standards of decency and humanity, Torchwood is finally delivering the goods. And how. Yet, there are people out there in Webshire who long for Cyberwoman, who are gently rocking themselves to sleep, crying into the coat of their Captain John action figure and attempting to eek viewing 4,985 out of their terminally damaged Meat DVD. These people worry me. What on earth do they want? Would they like the gas to clear in the tank and for The 456 to be revealed as nothing more than Gray standing there naked apart from a prosthetic aardvark head and a bout of the norovirus?

Pray silence for Mr and Mrs Fiscal Tightening and their budgie, Cuts.

I suppose now that the hub's been blown apart series 4's main threat will come from keeping the tramps from pissing in the doorway of their new base - so normal service might be resumed after all. Of course there were moments of silliness, aside from the Primark version of Hustle. Jack's skewed priorities and Ianto's ability to pinpoint the nearest Army Surplus store - even if you've got to ask yourself which army, in this day and age - generates these sorts of surpluses? Is there a big stock of World War II great coats out there? Perhaps that's all the MoD have left to send the troops to Afghanistan with.

The offspring of John Le Mesurier and Richard Briers.

And the 24 hour rolling news woman's back again. This poor dear remains the sole US news anchor on duty, now entering her 5th consecutive year without so much as a minute's rest. At least the UK seems to have a fairly deep roster of anchors to chew their way through, Louise Minchin being the latest in the long line. What I would give to have Peter Allen be the next one. In fact, when the inevitable happens and we get subjugated by an alien overlord, I'd like to request that it is Peter Allen's grumpy tones that impart the bitter news to a shattered nation as we're taken, one by one, to a fantastical meat processing plant and filleted. Even if Minchin's big scene is basically a re-run of the Aliens of London/World War III (I can't be bothered to work out which one) scene where Andy Marr's running commentary covered the political arrivals at the Number 10 Ball. Pray silence for Mr and Mrs Fiscal Tightening and their budgie, Cuts.

The highlights of the series so far has been Frobisher, who I thought was almost about to give The 456 chapter and verse on diplomatic protocol right down to the correct temperature to serve Ferrero Rocher and Dexter who looks like the offspring of John Le Mesurier and Richard Briers. Perhaps The 456's slight dicky stomach is down to one too many Ferrero Rochers from their last diplomatic encounter. Who knows... perhaps it is Gray after all and the last two days will be spent petulantly sulking at the Universe?

At least it'll keep certain sections of fandom happy for a few scant moments.

That. Was. Scary.

Scary Torchwood.

I wonder if this is how we'll have to conduct diplomatic relations with the North Koreans when they decide to hold us to ransom by nuking the entire planet? I've not been as chilled to the bone by an hour of television as much as that in a very long time. Day Three's rendition of an archetypical science fiction genre trope - 'first contact' (except in this case, it was more like...er...second contact) - was magnificently done. More of that later.

We do, unfortunately, have to deal with the rest of the episode first. Round of applause please for Lachele Carl as the ever reliable Trinity Wells. The first half of the script's pincer movement from James Moran and Russell T Davies to try and convince us that, yeah, this a global event. Look out for the French newsreader and American general plus various extras of ethnic diversity to complete the manoeuvre. However, we did get interminable, grating scenes of newreaders with various close ups of their mouths and eyes scattered throughout the hour. Enough! I know the world's hanging by a thread but judging by this we'll all probably suffocate under swathes of rolling 24 hour news bulletins first before the slimy, boomy voiced aliens get us.

The script strikes an ironic note with Ianto's 'All together. The old team' because of course it's not the old team. Torchwood's reputation for early retirement has seen to that and instead we've got Jack fretting about his track suit bottoms fashion faux pas, Rhys throwing a strop with Gwen about sharing her good news and Ianto getting the horn. Erm...excuse me? The Prime Minister's on the telly doing a 'swine flu pandemic' closing the schools type announcement thing. Focus. Despite this fluff, there's a sweet and funny scene where Ianto passes a message on to Rhiannon and we find out that her husband Jonny has reacted with entrepreneurial zeal ('ten quid a kid!') and is getting her to mind the neighbours' kids. I really like the efforts to fill in Ianto's background and with Davies trademark ability to write naturalistic dialogue and characters it's been easy to warm to Rhiannon and Jonny. We also check back in with Jack's daughter, Alice and there's a gently percolating build up to giving her more involvement in Day Three.

I say you can never go wrong having a spare Lemsip so sod recovering the Hub software and put the kettle on. Oh, well. Time for our rag-tag team to remember what they learned from The Real Hustle and use various cons to snaffle themselves enough equipment and money to set themselves up a temporary Hub and get Gwen some clean knickers and Jack a new army surplus coat. Again, this has that comic book feel to it where our heroes simply can't just go out and deal with the problem until they've sorted out their sartorial arrangements. What baffles me is how on earth they cracked the chip and pin on those cards they ran off with? More delaying tactics really and enough to get Ocean's 3 and a half set up so that they can snoop in on the diplomatic talks of the century. And Rhys gets to cook a nice pan of beans, Ianto's got the coffee on and there's loo paper in the shitter. Back in business.

Fortunately, Moran and Davies centre a good portion of the episode on Lois Habiba as our point of view at the meeting with the 456. This is thanks to that ubiquitous Bond gadget, tried and tested by one Martha Jones in Reset, the ACME Contact Lens Camera™. There is perhaps a suggestion here that Lois was pretty much created as a replacement for the rumoured idea of Martha joining Torchwood. In the end, Cush Jumbo has by now already made the role her very own and she communicates great vulnerability and fear when Gwen pleads with her to use the camera to spy on their behalf. We also start to get details of Jack's connection to the incident in 1965 and his relationship to one of Torchwood's former employees. It's at this point that the episode drops all the fluffy caper nonsense and really starts getting hard nosed. Agent Johnson's found Alice and is ordered to bring her in, Gwen gets help from PC Andy to release the recently arrested Clem in a very emotional reunion with some superb playing from Paul Copley, whilst Frobisher prepares for the arrival of the 456.

Lois bluffs her way into persuading Bridget to allow her into the meeting with the 456 by intimating that her relationship with Frobisher is based on more than taking a letter. It's another superb little character moment where Susan Brown, who has been brilliant as the dour Bridget, succinctly reveals all of Bridget's personal history with Frobisher with her tart remark to Lois of 'You're not the first, you know. Don't go thinking you're the first'. Meanwhile, Alice goes all Captain Jack on us, and she even has a matching coat, in an attempt to escape Johnson's clutches ('certainly your father's daughter') but suddenly all the kids go weird and do lots of pointing to the sky. The 456 are here. Lois gets ready to pop her contacts in as, in scenes reminiscent of Euston Films 1979 Quatermass, a column of fire descends to earth and we are treated to probably the finest, and scariest minutes of British telefantasy in a long while.

The encounters with the 456 work because they follow the simplest and most effective premise for generating genuine terror. Don't show the creature. Merely suggest it. The build up to the scene where they arrive and Frobisher converses with them completely rested on how Moran, Davies and director Lyn were going to scare the pants off you. It's really a tour de force of writing, directing and acting as well as the use of impressive and highly suggestive sound effects which again takes us right back to Kneale's early Quatermass serials where alien visitors are only briefly glimpsed but given fantastic presence by good reactions from actors and, more importantly, from the work of the fledgling Radiophonic Workshop. Here, all is required is the combination of brilliant sound effects, Ben Foster's very sensitive scoring, the subtlest of movements broken by violent thrashing and the spilling of lots of very unpleasant looking body fluids in the gas filled chamber to provide fuel for over active imaginations and sleepless nights. And then you get that dead pan, slightly synthesised voice as a bonus. Close Encounters this ain't. Stunning.

Add Peter Capaldi in, quite frankly, what should be an award winning performance as Frobisher, his stress summed up by that exhausted slump against the corridor wall after the first encounter, and this is very definitely must see television. I also loved the contrast between this and the then tit for tat squabble between General Pierce, Colonel Oduya of UNIT and Prime Minister Green in a sort of G8 for alien encounters where, similarly, much hot air fills the vaulted ceilings of rooms bearing witness to the cut and thrust of international relations. Green decides to leave it to the 'middle men' like Frobisher, claiming he's 'expendable' and suggesting that he's possibly unlikely to survive beyond Day Five. As Gwen cuts through traffic to get Clem a cup of tea and a hotdog ('I bloody love 'em'), there's that lovely, rather humanising, moment between Bridget and Lois as she suggests that perhaps her eagerness to 'trot after John Frobisher' didn't forsee meetings with slimy beasties from outer space. Likewise, Frobisher's admission that Jack is the better man because he won't take Frobisher's wife and children as hostage tells us that he's very determined for Jack not to reacquaint himself with the 456.

As we watch, director Lyn covers the formal diplomatic negotiations all through Frobisher's reactions, Lois's eyes, through the laptop screens and translations via shorthand in the makeshift Hub, beautifully building the tension of the scene and also using that lovely bit of tension breaking humour with Gwen's typo of 'Need his moth' and Rhys' comment about smileys. The pieces start to come together and, shockingly, it is clear that Jack and Torchwood originally did a deal with the 456 back in 1965, as recalled by Clem, and now they're back and they want their further 10%. In the end, the story positions both Jack and Frobisher not as opposites but very much as men on the same side in their dealings with the 456.

Let's hope we get more scary Torchwood with Day Four because Day Three was, quite simply, excellent.

 Incredible. The best so far.

The confrontation between Frobisher and the 456 halfway through the episode? Sweet Jesus that's intense! Oldest trick in the book, not showing the monster, but it's the way to go. We have no idea what the hell is in that tank aside from the fact that it leaves a lovely residue and is prone to violent outbursts seemingly at random. Some of the sound effects came out a bit Raxacoricofallapatorian, but I really didn't care. That's no Slitheen. That's a threat. The foggy visuals and the deep voice are important, but the timing really sells it. The suddenness of the physical outbursts. The occasional delay or refusal to respond. It's clear who's in charge of this conversation and it's not the one who's doing the all the talking.

Which is why Capaldi's performance at Frobisher is so important to selling the scene. Luckily he's superb. At the end of the exchange, when he shudders and slumps (you and me both, friend), that's magic. Frobisher has been the surprise standout of this show and the real lynchpin of the story. His conversation with Jack, his reception of the news that he's the scapegoat: there's such humanity to the character, and it's a pleasure when he's on screen.

Lois is winning me over. Although Jumbo is occasionally overshadowed by Capaldi, her performance is itself a marvelous part of the episode, with her bluff being a defining moment both for her character and the suitably nasty Bridget Spears. It's the secondary characters who really shine. I'm even willing to forgive the unfortunately small role of PC Andy for the sake of the daring escape attempt by Alice.

This episode has everything I've come to like about the new Torchwood and then some. It develops the mysteries in an interesting way, contains some fantastic character acting by a cast broad enough that I couldn't praise them all without making this review seem like a shopping list, and a monster whose creepiness sells the alien threat hard enough to justify all the fuss. In short, I loved it.

But I'm still troubled by it. There's a lot of optimism for the future of Torchwood buzzing around the net over the past couple of days, but is that optimism really justified if the only way Torchwood's managed to make a hit is by sidelining its own main characters? Frobisher is the star of this story, and the plot is the government's handling of 456's arrival. Torchwood itself has been demoted to subplot status, at least so far. A confrontation between Torchwood and the 456 seems inevitable, once the team manages to get their act together. The destruction, scattering, reunion, and re-establishment of the Torchwood team over the past two hours is a transparent ploy on behalf of the writers: it serves the dual function of padding for length and stalling for time, keeping the team busy for two episodes while the groundwork is laid for Day Four and Day Five. I think. It will be hard to say until we've seen the story in its entirety

This type of storytelling is normal and forgivable, even occasionally appropriate, and here it's working well. to reiterate: I love Children of Earth thus far and Day Three has some of its best moments yet. What I'm troubled by is not the story but an external consideration: if The Powers That Be have decided that the proper way to write Torchwood is to keep the stars in secondary roles while the plot is happening elsewhere, that may make for a good story but isn't it problematic in the long run?

Maybe it's a moot point, because the revelations about Jack's involvement with the events of 1965 have put him dramatically front and center. Which solves that problem but opens up an entirely different can of worms. It's a return to Torchwood's old formula, with the same old "Jack's-mysterious-past-catches-up-with-him" storytelling that's been a hallmark of this program since the beginning. The Doctor-ifying of Jack is one of the most annoying things in the contemporary Whoniverse, with the companion-ifying of the rest of the Torchwood team being a natural consequence of that. Jack is not the Doctor. Trying to make him the Doctor cheapens Jack, the Doctor, and the rest of the Torchwood team. And  it looks like we may be going down that road again.

All of that is troubling. But Children of Earth has been awesome so far and there's just so much to love about this most recent installment. Maybe that's why I find myself feeling like it's too good to be true, and that a sudden, sharp drop in quality is inevitable. I hope I'm wrong.

And by the way, where's Nick Briggs? Isn't he meant to be in this? I hope he jumps out of nowhere to provide a deus ex machina in the last ten minutes of Day Five. Wouldn't that be lovely?

Oh, God. I've jinxed it, haven't I?

"Day Three in Thames House.  Mr Frobisher is talking to the 456 about nominations."

Riveting.  It takes some very good writers (in this case Russell T Davies and James Moran) and excellent performances to make a scenario we genre fans have seen played out dozens of times before, human to alien contact, this suspenseful.  This showdown had all of the ingredients.  Our heroes out of the room having to witness the action via relay leaving the inexperienced middle manager to do the talking, an inability to see the alien properly, our only clues to its true nature that its behaviour and vocabulary closely mirrored that of a delinquent teenager lashed to the gills on white cider ringed by a halo of marijuana smoke and the slow burn of incomprehension as our very British bureaucracy clashed with a culture that didn’t give a stuff about such things.

Turns out the 456 are running an intergalactic “protection” racket.  Give us x number of children each time we visit or we’ll burn the rest of the planet, our massive rocket shaped baseball bat ready to smash up the windows of the world if you don’t have enough takings to cover the debt each time (or whatever it was that happened in that 80s episode of Eastenders with Ali’s Café).  The Doctor would taken one look at that scenario and laughed, got his game face on, done something wizzy with his sonic screwdriver, perhaps pressed a big red button, jumped in the TARDIS and visited the mothership and had a speedy shout through there as well before returning to Earth to give everyone a hug before buggering off again.

Because at its heart, as I’ve suspected but tonight’s episode confirmed, Children of Earth is really about what happens during an alien invasion when the Doctor isn’t there (just as I suppose both of these spin-offs are).  It can’t help it.  It’s Turn Left but with events yet to be seen, known unknowns.  That could be inadvertent, though Jack’s brief mention of the timelord must surely be part of a subliminal strategy to keep him in our thoughts.  The general expression seems to be – even with Torchwood (and perhaps because of) we’d be pants, jurisdictional infighting or geographical cock measuring getting in the way of dealing with something more important.  In the next episode the world’s clearly going to appease the alien’s demands and hold a lottery closely followed by some all purpose civil unrest.

We could have a discussion here about how Martha hasn’t phoned her Gallifrayan friend at the first sign of global trouble just as she did in The Sontaran Stratagem (I means she’s only on her honeymoon and not callous) but like the Sarah Jane question that’s just something we’ll have to suspend our disbelief over – this is one big universe, everything is connected, but for narrative purposes we’re just going to have to assume they’re otherwise indisposed.  My assumption is that because of what happened in 1965 the last thing they want is the Doctor showing up to give them a right telling off and that if Captain Jack himself was considering it he’s too embarrassed.  Or something.

In Jack himself we see the timelord’s influence.  The man who sent those kids to their probable doom is the broken version we greeted in the first season, soiled by the influence of the darker version of Torchwood.  We know this because he did much the same thing at the end of PJ Hammonds’s Small Worlds (which much surely warrant a mention in the next episode).  The Jack we greet these days is the one who spent a year being tortured on the Valiant for a year, the presumably more heroic version, the one who wouldn’t nab Frobisher’s kids, who jokes around and isn’t really comfortable unless he’s wearing army surplice.  Perhaps tomorrow such issues will finally be nailed to the ground.

Elsewhere in those jokier ends of the episode we watched Torchwood regrouping or rather re-enacting an episode of Hustle so that they could empty PC World and spend much of the episode in that warehouse.  I used to get a bit annoyed when some newsreader would signal impending doom Torchwood Cardiff’s first reaction would to joke about and find the quietest place for a shag but the writing seemed to make clear that it’s a defence mechanism, a way of dealing with the unbelievable.  It helps that the cast have developed their comic timing somewhat; the old watch humour always used to seem a bit forced but the baked bean curtailing pre-charver negotiation was nicely played with Kai Owen’s blistering unawareness a joy.

The guest cast also continue to impress.  The surprise in this episode was the burst of action from Alice who has clearly been trained by her father to defend herself; did anyone else think when she was asked by Johnson whether she too was invulnerable that Lucy Cohu was going for the ambiguous beat, that it’s something she herself has pondered despite the fact that she’s growing old?  Never mind Lois Habiba, Alice is surely the natural new Torchwood member if Cohu’s free and willing, forever digging into her dad about never having been there for him, assuming there is a new series (and given that Day Two was the most watch programme on Tuesday that’s highly likely – people love this show).

So let’s ask the question again.  Who are these aliens?  Certain editors of this website on their twitter feeds have made genius suggestions, but I won’t steal their thunder. I’m still convinced they have something to with the children taken in the 60s, the current smoky box presence a more sophisticated version of the Balok puppet the Enterprise tackled in Star Trek’s The Corbomite Maneuver, the face behind the face.  Or the Borad.  Or the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal.  A triffid.  Gonzo the Great.  A disembodied tendril from the version of the Sarlacc Pit that appeared in the special editions of the Star Wars films.  At this point, I have no real idea.  And isn’t that the greatest?

Tomorrow:  Before the show, Gary in Stockport selected Arthur and set of balls number three...