S3E07: 42

Today I suffered the final episodes of the worst series of 24 ever. Let's see what Doctor Who can do with the real time format: a spaceship is falling into a sun and He only has forty-two minutes to save everybody...

There's our digital clock, counting down. There'll be one in every room on this boat.

Why tell the captain what's going on in the med room when you can say something suspenseful instead? So 24.

Glasses! The return of the super-phone! I'd drink except there isn't a quiet moment to pour.

"Any number that reduces to one when you take the sum of the square of its digits and continually treat it until it yields one is a happy number. Any number that doesn't, isn't. A happy prime is a number that's both happy and prime. Now type it in! I don't know... talk about dumbing down. Don't they teach recreational mathematics any more?"

Corwin puts a helmet on so he can do better stunts later.

Martha's phone number is 07711 911905. (It goes straight to voicemail and the mailbox is full. I tried.)

Nobody on this ship is on first name terms - not even the husband and wife!

Remind me to put the controls on the inside of the spaceship next time.

The last ten minutes of countdown was almost precisely ten minutes of screen time, thus robbing me of an easy nit-pick. We're so conditioned to expect a countdown timer to stop with a second or two spare that my brain had to play catch-up when this one reached zero. The crisis was averted but there wasn't time to turn the clock off too.

She's snogging her way around the galaxy like Captain Kirk. Go, girl!

That was better than I expected from the chief writer on Torchwood, which was light on character development and heavy on running around. Flaws like that become virtues under the real time format: things happen without perfect causality under pressure, especially when working out why what's happening is happening is part of the puzzle. You don't have to know the bit-part characters inside out to not want people to die, etc.

Can we have more Sinister Woman from Hollyoaks, please?