It's been two months since the last episode, and the world has gone to hell since then. Which begs a larger question for
Doctor Who -- how is it that we never hear about these events outside of
Miracle Day itself? Even allowing that there seems to be about a year's gap between "The Big Bang" and "The Impossible Astronaut", the Miracle lasts for something like three months starting in March 2011 (Rex's bank transfer text in "Rendition" is dated 22-MAR-11), with the Western world collapsing and China closing its borders and things generally going to hell -- and yet in the midst of this, on 22 April 2011, Amy and Rory meet the Doctor at Lake Silencio in Utah. And not once do we see them mention this to the Doctor, or wonder how he could be dead in the midst of the Miracle, or anything like this. At least in the past, there were token efforts to keep all the spin-offs more or less lined up (even allowing for things like no one mentioning to the Doctor that a giant devil materialized over Cardiff for an hour or so) -- but now that
Torchwood and
Doctor Who don't really share a production office (even if much of the UK crew still overlaps), it seems the same efforts aren't being made.
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Rex asks Shapiro permission to head to Argentina. ("The
Gathering") ©BBC Worldwide, Limited |
And while it's sort of interesting to see how society has begun its slow collapse into a depression, as the Miracle carries on and the overflow camps are reopened ("It's funny, isn't it?" Gwen remarks. "When they first opened the camps, we all protested. Second time we're all too busy looking after ourselves"), it doesn't make for the most thrilling television ever. We see that Rex and Shapiro have spent two months chasing down the Families, only to come up with nothing, while Gwen is trying to keep her father hidden from the authorities -- and Esther and Jack are hiding out in Scotland, doing little better. I suppose we should be thankful they skipped over those two months, but really, other than showing that things have gotten really bad little has changed since last time. Jilly Kitzinger's storyline hasn't even advanced yet.
But the nice thing about "The Gathering" is that we do finally start to get some answers. Torchwood works out where the Blessing is, thanks to a tip-off from Oswald Danes of all people (nice that he's finally being integrated into the story; despite Jack's claims that Oswald needed watching, he hadn't really been relevant to the conspiracy storyline), and we're starting to see people moved into position to deal with it. Plus we finally get to actually see the Blessing, although it's not very clear what it is: some sort of fissure that sucks in stuff and runs all the way through the Earth that makes people feel weird when they look at it, but that's it. We still don't know exactly how it was used to make everyone immortal, or what the hell Phicorp or the Families' endgame actually is, but we're getting closer. Of course there's still Charlotte Wills in the CIA to deal with, along with the fact that it looks like she'll be able to warn the Families that Torchwood has discovered them, in Buenos Aires at least, so we're not out of the woods yet.
I probably could have done without the jump forward in time, but at least "The Gathering" starts to finally bring everything together in a satisfying way. The final episode next time has a lot of questions to answer satisfactorily, but some of those answers start to appear here, rather than simply leaving us hanging until the very end. That said, they still have a long way to go and not much time left...
