Like a chronic drunk stumbling through the streets after kicking-out time, Torchwood: Miracle Day has tripped over its own feet and staggered under its own weight so many times that its final collapse into a heap seemed inevitable.
Yet the horrendously hammered frequently find their way home safely; and although this penultimate episode is more of a rejuvenation than a resurrection, it lifts what was a Category One patient – dead yet still twitching and breathing – out of its slump with enough verve and energy to carry us all through to next week’s final conclusion.
‘What is the plan?’ Gwen asks. ‘What’s it all for?’ Funnily enough, the long-suffering viewers have been asking the same thing for the past couple of months – and with just one episode left to go, we’re still none the wiser as to why the Miracle happened, what it has to do with Captain Jack Harkness, or what the Blessing is.
We do now know, however, what the latter looks like: it’s a giant intestine stretching from Shanghai to Buenos Aries, filled with swirling dandruff and protected by Kate Winslet’s mum from Titanic. We also know that it attracts Jack’s blood like iron filings to a magnet and that it has hired Jilly Kitzinger as its publicist. ‘Your hair is a work of art,’ another of its minions – a geeky textaholic – gushes when she arrives in China; and she isn’t the only one to have left the United States behind.
Esther and Jack are coyly flirting in a remote Scottish farmhouse that looks distinctly Welsh – Jack’s shirt comes off yet again – while Gwen is back in the Land of her Fathers, selling pharmaceuticals from pizza boxes to her neighbours and trying to hide her actual father from officious, iPhone-wielding, council busybastard Mr. Finch (Ian Hughes) in a Buffalo Bill-styled basement hideaway. The Emergency Powers Act, which has granted Finch his freedom to dispense bald-headed, menacing invective, sounds like something straight out of 1970s Doctor Who (Russell T Davies even gets to do a voiceover cameo as a newsreader, like Jon Pertwee did in ‘Inferno’) and the scenes on the streets of suburban Swansea have a similarly nostalgic glow about them.
Conversely, the scenes at the CIA headquarters in Langley between Rex, Shapiro – who gets to dispense more of his laconic, world-weary homilies: ‘Recession became depression; we’re all being rationed, even the CIA’ – and openly lesbian, secretly Families-agent Charlotte Willis are ultra-modern and 24-ish. It’s a pleasant contrast in styles after the uniform dreariness of the Torchwood team’s wild goose chase across America and the 1920s retro yawn-dom of Jack’s memories of Angelo Colasanto.
But some things are still not working. Oswald Danes’s arrival at the Cooper household is as anti-climatic as it is unexpected, while Gwen and Rhys’s paedo-rage at the child killer’s nonchalant entrance into their home (the scene where he picks up baby Anwen and coos, ‘Isn’t she pretty?’ is pretty disturbing, to be fair) descends into cartoon violence and silly, shouted cliché. ‘WATCH IT PAL!’ Rhys roars at Oswald, following it up shortly afterwards with a ‘SHUT IT!’ for good measure. It must be catching, because when Jack arrives, he starts yelling too.
It’s a relief when everyone leaves Wales on jaunts to either end of the Blessing, Jack, Gwen and Oswald heading for Shanghai while Esther goes to join Rex in Buenos Aries. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other in two months, but when she gives the über-macho CIA man a cuddle, he snorts, ‘Oh man, don’t start with that hugging shit.’ Nice to see you, too.
The series finale will ultimately decide whether Miracle Day has been a success or not – a curse or a blessing, you might say – but ‘The Gathering’ has gone some way to repairing the damage of the last few weeks which seem, looking back, like a hazy drunken blur. The show might have a hangover, but it’s definitely sobering up.
Aired at 9pm on Thursday 8th September 2011 on BBC One (UK) and at 10pm on Friday 2nd September 2011 on Starz (US).