I found myself wondering whether the episode had actually started life as a Torchwood script at all. Lots of it was two-handed scenes with Jack and Gwen which could easily have been the Doctor and Rose; quite a few of Jack's lines were quite Doctor-ish, in fact. The rest of the team had very little to do; most of their lines could have come from the Doctor. It wasn't about aliens or alien tech at all, and it played on childhood fears. Was it perhaps a Doctor Who script that got rewritten to make it less family-friendly?

As there was no reference made at all to the cataclysmic events of Cyberwoman (c'mon, if that had happened, they'd barely be able to look each other in the eye and they'd all be tiptoeing around Jack and Ianto like they were walking on broken glass), I've now decided that the whole episode was a dream. Ianto actually is a coldly-efficient gay assissin with a crush on Jack, and the whole thing was him dreaming about what it would be like if his straight tea-boy cover persona were true. CyberLisa? Vagina dentata, more like.

Torchwood has yet to recover from the Lack of Jack, if you ask me. When he first appeared in DW, the character description was something like 'Jack Harkness is a charming con-man, cheerfully bisexual, and able to travel in time.' None of that has carried over into Touchwood.

I thought the kiddie-fiddler's plight touched on the suitably grotesque for part of the time. Though I find it mysterious that a team with a medical genius on board has its forensics handled by a WPC and computer technician.

BTW might be my browser but I couldn't read the Carusometer text that starts the piece: my text begins with "but also an improvement from last week's Cyberwoman."

Still, it was good enough for me to give the show one more chance. But if next week's episode is rubbish, I don't think I can put myself through another five or so hours of this.

For one thing the hype certainly hasn't helped. Whenever I see RTD smugly talking about how "dark" and "sexy" and "adult" it is, or that clip Barrowman telling us it would be like nothing we'd seen on British TV, it just amazes me that they could possibly think any of these things were true.

They also can't seem to decide what the show should be or where it's going. There's been far too much of the "Jack and Gwen show", a poor imitation of the Doctor/Companion relationship that's been pushed at the expense of the rest of the team, and the suff with Gwen's home life comes and goes with a confusing lack of focus.

I mean we're five episodes in an we've had nothing about the organisation itself other than a few throwaway lines. If there are multiple Torchwoods and they're outside the government etc then who is in overall charge, who funds them, do they have international counterparts, etc?

I'm afraid it's all just a poorly planned, unfocused mess. If it was a US series I'd probably have dropped it by now but I can't let go of the hope that it might just eventually get better.

There's so much hubris floating about, I'm almost inclined to hope Torchwood flops, simply to give RTD and co a much-deserved wake-up slap. When you're that lauded, you need a manually administered dose of reality occasionally.

Having said that, though, compare the podcasts for Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica. RTD and co are always gassing on about how fantastic the show is and how brilliant it is, even though they made it themselves. RDM is always pulling his stuff apart, confessing when he doesn't like the way things turned out, blaming himself for mistakes, and so on. Clearly, plaudits don't always go to the heads of exec producers, and look which show's the better for it...