N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

Jack really, I mean REALLY, ought to know better, almost than anyone on Earth (let alone the Torchwood team), than to mess around with death.

“You brought me back for an alarm code!”

Owen, Dead Man Walking

And yet here he is, off looking for the other Resurrection Gauntlet rather than letting Owen have his heroic, if totally unnecessary, death at the end of Reset.

And would Owen really have been the only one to know the alarm code? Surely when they fired him, albeit briefly, back at the end of Series One, they would have changed that protocol.

The tone of unintended hilarity is set straight away with Jack’s creeping around a church full of weevils being more amusing than frightening. Indeed, therein lies the problem with Dead Man Walking: it’s not remotely scary. It’s almost like an episode of Scooby Doo, Where Are You! It wouldn’t have surprised me if it wasn’t Death who was responsible, but Old Man Withers, or the hospital janitor.

It’s probably best not to mention the glove in the autopsy room, except to say the disembodied hand acting was much funnier back in Rose.

As usual, Jack gets the bulk of the overwrought dialogue and Burn Gorman gives his all, but neither he, nor the continued presence of Martha Jones can save this one.