So, after all the build-up over several episodes, things are reaching a climax.  The music matches the mood, and the camera closes in to catch a critical moment.  Something small and moist and alien sits on a plate, and Celebrity Masterchef host Greg Wallace raises it to his mouth.  Whatever happens next is a rarified experience, something transcendent that turns his face into an expression of bliss, language barely able to contain this sublime moment.  But words there are, and I will record them here: ‘Those boozy prunes’.

Out of context, the words have no more meaning than the Zen master who in his pointing urges his students to look at the moon and not his finger.  It’s clear that something powerful has happened here, and that’s what has glued millions to their seats to see who has won the competition.  How many of them stayed, as I did, for the conclusion of Torchwood?  It’s been building up all week, up to yesterday’s appalling revelation that icky aliens want 10% of the world’s children — and that Captain Jack failed in his first attempt to do something about that, and wasn’t looking in any state for round two.

Part of the power of the story has been its willingness to go to extremes, to think your actual unthinkable.  The business of politicians presented with the reality of dealing with the world’s junior population being tithed to extraterrestrials was chillingly plausible: the scenes in which strategies were discussed reminded me of the tv dramatisation of the notes made by Nazis on the logistics of the Jewish question.  What followed was perfectly credible, as the army were mobilised to round up kids from schools at the bottom of their league tables and ship them to holding areas for the delectation of aliens known as the 456.  (I still feel that the 456 looked less like beings from another world than guests on a Saturday morning kids’ show, kept in a tank full of noxious gases and splashed with unpleasant fluids.)

If Greg Wallace has an orgasm when contemplating those boozy prunes, then what would he have made of Captain Jack’s dilemma?  Just when it looked like things couldn’t get any worse, a germ of a solution appeared, involving feeding back a noise to the aliens that they’d used to off the aging mentalist who’d given them the slip back in 1965.  Said noise would be channeled through all the kids in the world, as per alien practice, but at the epicentre would be one particular kid: Captain Jack’s grandson.  And that kid would be sure to die.  And he did.

This was a version in miniature of the problem the government were presented with, and when push came to shove Captain Jack made the same choice as them.  He offed his grandson, whether because the death of one really is justified by saving millions — a reasonable enough stance — or, more chillingly, because as a military man and one for whom death doesn’t have the finality it does for the rest of us, it was the obvious thing to do.  And this is the tragedy of Captain Jack Harkness, doomed to live and die again and again and be faced with impossible choices and then live with the knowledge of what he’s done.

No wonder then, at programme’s end, that Jack chose to go hitching to the stars, travelling with spacefaring types to see if he could forget the death of his lover Ianto, and of his grandson, and all the other deaths that he’d seen and sometimes been involved in.  I’m hoping he’ll be back: Torchwood this time round was a head and shoulders above any previous iteration, and I’d love to see the gang assemble again to tackle whatever is lurking in Cardiff, or even further afield, in the future.