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Small Worlds

12TH NOVEMBER 2006

(50-MINUTE EPISODE)

Creepy children are always far more frightening to me than Daleks, Sontarans

or Cybermen, particularly when they as well played as Jasmine is here. With Small Worlds, Peter J Hammond takes the sense of wrongness engendered by an ‘unearthly child’ and

combines it with the harsh realities of modern life.

We see a strange little girl, enchanted by ‘evil’ fairies, and we fear her. And then then meet a paedophile that these fairies are torturing – someone who comes out with sickening phrases like “they’re bright as buttons” - and are put in the bizarre position of wondering if the fairies really are evil, or if ‘evil’ really is just a matter of perspective? To Jasmine, the fairies appear to be beautiful creatures of light. To Jack, they are horrific wraiths from the dawn of time; a home grown variation of the Mara. To us viewers, on the other hand, they are a bloody good bit of CGI.

Without a doubt, the hook of the episode for me is the glimpse that we gain into Jack’s past. The flashback scenes are absolutely terrific, but the real meat of the story is in the present.

It is so strange to see Jack interact with his ex, Estelle – by 2007, an old woman – when he clearly loves her and always has. He tries to pass her off as somebody that ‘his father’ knew, but Gwen can see through him just as easily as the audience. Back in the war they made a vow to be with each other until they died. But Jack cannot die, and so in Small Worlds he has to cradle the old and broken body of his former lover in his arms.

I was also impressed with the unconventional ending; it shares an emotional resonance with Doctor Who stories like Warriors of the Deep and the recent Big Finish audio play Some-thing Inside. In the end, Torchwood loses. Jack submits to the fairies, and Jasmine is lost to her mother forever. Gwen and the others are appalled at Jack’s submission, but at the end

of the day, what more could he have done? It was Jasmine or the world.

On balance though, Small Worlds is my least favourite of the season to date. It isn’t a bad fifty minutes of television by any stretch of the imagination - quite the opposite - it’s just that I was not quite as captivated by it as I was by episodes one through four. Why? I’m really not sure. Maybe after the thrilling Cyberwoman, this episode was always going to fall a little flat. Or maybe I’m just not scared of monsters called ‘fairies’, no matter how questionable their intent.

Copyright © E.G. Wolverson 2006

E.G. Wolverson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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