Army of Ghosts: Torchwood Finally Steps Into the Light

“This is the story of how I died.” That’s how Rose opens Army of Ghosts, in voiceover, and it’s a hell of a way to start a season finale. I’ll be honest, it had me from that first line. Everything after it pulls together threads the show has been quietly laying since the Tenth Doctor showed up at Christmas, the ghosts, the name Torchwood, the people in charge who are far too sure of themselves, and then the last ten minutes set fire to the lot and I was physically off the sofa. Really loved this one, it’s Doctor Who firing on every cylinder it’s got, and the first half of a two-parter already feels enormous. I’m going to keep this to the first half only, because I’m nowhere near ready to talk about what comes after that ending.

A World Full of Ghosts

The Doctor and Rose come home to present-day London for a cup of tea with Jackie and find the whole planet has quietly gone a bit mad. Ghosts have been turning up all over the world for two months now, grey humanoid figures that fade in and out of streets and living rooms, and humanity, being human, has decided to love them. Everybody’s convinced these are the dead coming back, somebody’s husband, somebody’s gran, and nobody seems especially keen to ask what they actually are. There’s something properly chilling in that, a whole species picking comfort over the truth because the truth would mean losing them all over again. The Doctor isn’t buying it for a second, and his first guess is something psychic feeding on all that belief.

Jackie’s the human face of it. She can’t wait to see her own dad, and there’s a hushed, hopeful excitement to her that’s hard to watch when you can see exactly where it’s going, and sure enough one of the ghosts does turn up in her kitchen. What I love is how straight it’s all played, ordinary people on an ordinary estate just getting on with it, because the ghosts have been around long enough to become part of everyday life. It’s a wickedly clever bit of world-building, an alien invasion dressed up as the one thing everyone most wants to be true.

But the Doctor knows what he’s looking at, and it isn’t the beloved dead. These things are a symptom, the visible sign of something forcing its way through from a place it shouldn’t be able to reach, and the source of it, it turns out, has a name we’ve been hearing all year. Army of Ghosts spends its first act just letting that sit, the wrongness building on the streets while the Doctor and Rose work out where to go looking, and I think it’s better for not rushing to explain. It’s patient, the show trusting you to sit in the unease instead of dumping the answer on you in the first five minutes.

Torchwood, At Last

There it is. The name’s been hanging around the edges of the frame all season, first when Harriet Jones has Torchwood shoot the Sycorax ship out of the sky in The Christmas Invasion, then when Queen Victoria founds an institute to keep the Doctor out of Britain in Tooth and Claw, and here we finally walk in through the front door. Torchwood Tower sits at Canary Wharf, all glass and polish, hoarding alien technology and answering to nobody, and it’s run by Yvonne Hartman, who’s a superb creation. Corporate smile, steel underneath, completely convinced that everything she does is for the good of the country. Their philosophy might as well be “if it’s alien, it’s ours”, and they scavenge the wreckage of every incursion and reverse-engineer whatever they can’t hope to understand.

Yvonne even greets the Doctor like a prize catch, the best piece of alien technology they’ve ever got their hands on, and before he knows it he’s effectively their prisoner and the TARDIS has been confiscated. It’s the logical end of what Victoria started all those years ago, Britain arming itself against the entire universe and no longer entirely sure which side of the line it’s standing on. And it’s Torchwood that’s been making the ghosts, deliberately tearing a hole in reality to harvest the energy of what they call a ghost shift, treating a catastrophic rip between worlds as a handy source of free power. Worse, they’ve dragged something through it, a smooth, silent sphere sitting in their lab, a Void Ship, a vessel built to travel through the empty space between universes.

The Doctor is properly frightened of it and says so, warning that its arrival has put cracks in the world that could end the whole planet, and Yvonne treats all of that as an eccentric’s inconvenience. We can see the catastrophe coming from a mile off and the people in charge are too pleased with themselves to look up. It’s what makes the tower such a good place to spend the episode, that mix of gleaming confidence and a sphere that just sits there being wrong. I was properly on edge by the time anyone paid it any attention, which is exactly where the episode wants you.

Two Armies for the Price of One

Jackie’s along for the ride and completely out of her depth, and then Mickey turns up. He’s come across from the parallel Earth chasing Cybermen, having stayed behind at the end of The Age of Steel to finish the job, and he’s exactly where he’s needed. This whole season’s been so good at seeding people that their convergence on Torchwood Tower feels earned rather than convenient. Then the trap springs, and it springs twice. Yvonne, drunk on her own cleverness, pushes the ghost shift past the point of no return, and across the entire planet the ghosts finally solidify into what they always were.

Cybermen. Millions of them, marching out of every street and shopping centre and front room on Earth, the steel horror of the Cybus world pouring through the breach into ours. It’s a staggering reveal, an invasion on a scale the show has never tried, and it would be a finale-worthy cliffhanger all by itself. Except it isn’t the cliffhanger, because the Cybermen didn’t come in the sphere, they only followed it through. So what’s inside the Void Ship? The thing rolls open and out come four Daleks, battle-scarred survivors calling themselves the Cult of Skaro, meant to have been lost in the Time War the Doctor still carries around like a wound.

They’re the same enemy whose fleet was undone back in The Parting of the Ways, and now here they are in the same building on the same afternoon as an army of Cybermen, the two monsters every fan has always wanted to see collide, with the Doctor caught in the middle and the people he loves standing right beside him. Plenty of people saw the Daleks coming and it’s still a fun cliffhanger. I didn’t see it coming, for what it’s worth, and I don’t think the revived show has landed one this big. And then it just cuts out on the lot of it.

Yvonne Hartman Thinks She’s the Hero

The best villains are the ones who never think they’re villains, and Yvonne’s a perfect example. She isn’t cruel, she isn’t twirling anything, she’s just certain, and it’s that certainty that opens the door. Every warning the Doctor gives her bounces off, because she’s spent her whole career being the person in the room who knows better, and the moment she gets to prove it is the moment the planet pays for it. Torchwood’s the same as the rest of the world in that respect, refusing to look at what it’s doing because it likes what it’s getting out of it, the ghosts as comfort for everyone else and power for the Institute.

If I’ve got a gripe, and it’s a small one, it’s that a fair chunk of the episode is setup and I noticed myself waiting for the payoff. The pieces take the time they take to move into place, and the sphere in particular sits there for a good while being ominous before anything happens with it. I don’t mind that much. It’s just the reason this doesn’t quite hit a five for me, and it’s a very small reason next to everything the episode gets right.

Rating: 4.5/5. Tense, clever and properly emotional, with a cliffhanger so cheeky it almost dares the second half to top it, and I’m not sure I’m ready to find out.