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End of Days

1ST JANUARY 2007

(50-MINUTE EPISODE, PART 2 OF 2)

And so it’s the apocalypse; the proverbial End of Days. And despite Jack’s assur-ances that it is not the end of the world, the Torchwood team have never been under such pressure. UFOs hover above the Taj Mahal. Historical characters run amok in London. And Cardiff A & E has been infected with the Black Death. Even Gwen’s old partner, PC Andy Davidson, has a Roman Soldier in the lockup.

And it’s all Owen Harper’s fault.

“People are dropping through time and they’re going to be bringing every disease

in history through your doors. You scared yet? ‘Cos fuck knows I am.”

On top of all this, the Torchwood team are seeing ghosts. Tosh sees her dead Mother. Owen sees Diane. Ianto sees Lisa. The sinister Mr Bilis Manger prophesises Rhys’ death, only to carry out the murder himself. Each and every member of the Torchwood team has lost some-body, and not content merely to ‘stick plaster on gaping wounds’, Owen leads a full-on mutiny against Jack who is adamant that “there is no solution” to this problem.

Chibnall’s script is remarkable for its scope and imagination, but more so for how he pushes every character to breaking point. They are all so very close to cracking, and so when Rhys

dies it is such a horrific moment that it pushes them over the edge. Eve Myles is absolutely astonishing in what she manages to convey in her performance - grief, anger, sorrow; and

all at once. And most powerful of all, Myles conveys that illogical desire to undo a personal tragedy. There must be a way. There is always a way.

End of Days is written very cleverly in that it initially paints Jack as the bad guy. He tears in-to all the Torchwood team verbally and he is so, so cruel in his indictment of them. But he’s

also right. Because they all want to get their loved ones back so badly, they aren’t thinking straight. He is the only one that can see that this is all one big trap orchestrated by Bilis. He is the only one that can see this because there is nothing – apart from maybe the “right kind of Doctor” – that could tempt him to do something as reckless as opening the rift. Bilis wants them to open it; not to undo all the damage caused by it being opened, but to unleash that ‘something’ which has been referred to throughout the series.

And when Jack tries to stop them, Gwen punches him in the jaw.

And then Owen shoots him between the eyes.

Ianto said that one day he would have the chance to save Jack, but instead he would watch him “…suffer and die”.  And in spite of their apparent relationship since, he does just that.

Opening the rift unleashes Abbadon, a monstrous creature undoubtedly spawned from the ‘Satan’ beast in the Doctor Who episode The Satan Pit. A very clunky piece of exposition from Bilis Manger marks the first appearance of this monster on screen, and it has to be said that the Mill have outdone themselves once again. As impressive as the Satan beast was in Doctor Who, that particular piece of CGI showed the beast chained up underground in the dark. End of Days shows Abaddon roaming through daytime Cardiff, his gargantuan shadow absorbing the life force of all that it comes into contact with. It’s short, but completely spectacular. I’d imagine a good proportion of the season’s budget went on this set piece.

At the end of the day it is down to Jack, risen from the dead once again, to stop the beast.

As he so eloquently puts it, if Abaddon feeds on life, he’s an “…all you can eat buffet.” After

a David and Goliath battle, Abaddon is apparently destroyed, and Jack dies once more.

“From out of the darkness he is come. Son of the Great Beast…

All hail Abbadon, the great devourer, come to feast on life.”

Rather disappointingly, Abaddon’s destruction seems to prompt the use of that ever-popular science-fiction device: the reset button. Rhys lives. The apocalypse never came. UFOs over Taj Mahal? What are you talking about? Humanity lives to see another day and once again it didn’t even realise that it was in danger. Now I can understand the writers not wanting to face the problem of a world completely au fait with aliens and monsters and thus utterly divorced from our own, but the cop-out ending really grates here. We could’ve had an old fashioned D-Notice, UNIT style. The dead could have at least stayed dead – all that wonderful acting that Myles did grieving for Rhys, and then he just pops up at the end, alive and well.

As does Jack.

“I believe in him.”

In the writer’s defence, Chibnall does leave Jack dead a fair old while this time. Gwen sits with him for days before he wakes up with that trademark cheeky grin. Ianto and Tosh are both ecstatic when he appears (particularly the former), and even Owen cries with relief when he realises that his sin has been undone and that his victim forgives him. And then the Doctor’s hand begins to glow. We hear the grinding of the TARDIS engines. Cue Utopia.

On balance, End of Days is a thrilling climax to Torchwood’s first season. Chibnall writes

the episode like a series finalé, not just a season finalé. Just when you think that the stakes

can’t get any higher, they do. Just when you think that these characters’ relationships can’t be pushed any further, they are. Each and every member of the Torchwood cast gives their all here, particularly Barrowman, Myles and Gorman. Even the deus ex machina ending is forgivable bearing in mind that this is just a fifty-minute episode. If Torchwood can maintain this kind of quality into its second season, it could well run for as long as the series that spawned it.

Copyright © E.G. Wolverson 2007

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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