A deliberately far more emotional episode than "Captain Jack Harkness", "End of Days" felt like you expect end-of-season epics to feel.

"I wonder if they'll do a low-key end of season episode one day?" opinioned my fellow viewer. It's hard to see this happening - "Torchwood"'s closer felt like it KNEW it had to crank up the drama for its final stand.

Ideally, I suppose, tension should build towards the end of a series of episodes, culminating in the dramatic resolution of the ongoing narrative in the final part. However, nothing before "Captain Jack Harkness" (bar the whole notion of the rift, which has been a series staple anyway) suggested the nature of the denouement that suddenly arose within it. The rift manipulator, we're conveniently told here, is one of things the team are told they shouldn't touch on joining Torchwood... yet we've never been told about it before. "End of Days" was a confusing coda to its predecessor, which had featured the rift opening and closing. Now, we're told, the rift has to open once more for Abbadon to come through, with no explanation given for why he didn't nip through the first time. It's not clear how Bilis communicated with him, how he could flit through time, how he knew that the rift opening would release the beast, or in fact why everything went back to how it was at the end. Even Jack apparently using up his 'life force' to defeat the beast was never stated, instead being left to the viewer to suppose from the wavy CGI lines briefly joining the two.

Le'ts get this straight - this was amazing, amazing visual TV. Bilis Mainger made a superbly enigmatic villain, and Abbadon was quite the best monster the show has ever turned in, especially as he killed people merely by allowing his shadow to fall over them. But in truth, nothing here was sufficiently explained, however lovely it looked and sounded. And there was also a touch too much melodrama - as if, in order to rise to the occasion of the end of the series, everyone simply had to shout "fuck" and shoot each other.

In many ways, it's a shame there weren't more explanations - the idea of Jack having sacrificed his immortality to kill the beast appeals, and in fact this still might be the case, although it's yet to be stated. Instead, this episode finished with a rather familiar sound - no police box, but of course this surely dovetails into something to come in Doctor Who this year.

I doubt whether we WILL ever get a low-key end of series episode of either "Doctor Who" or "Torchwood". Somehow it's ingrained into the success of the series that the whole Universe must now fall into dramatic and dangerous peril at the end of every three months. So perhaps this last episode of "Torchwood" did exactly as it needed to.

John Barrowman Sit-On-My-Face-O-Meter:

A snog for Ianto and a beastly moment where we feared Jack was dead make this a top episode for Harkness fans.

Torchwood Tally: ***

An episode to make you roar with excitement! Though you'll wish you could wind time back and fix some of the flaws. God that was really lame wasn't it?