So while they're doing this shit, the Progenitor has been working hard to create shiny new beautiful Daleks, candy-colored as only a laptop right off the presses could be. They roll out one by one: A shining White Dalek named Tommy. A shining Blue Dalek named Billy! (My favorite Mighty Morphin' Power Dalek!) A shining Yellow, Orange and Red Dalek! Trini, Kat and Rocky! That sound you just heard is two billion previous Dalek toys going in the trash, even Black Dalek Sec, as the NEW PARADIGM crashes down around us all.

Because the world ending all around them isn't annoying enough, Bracewell has decided to kill himself. Luckily, Churchill and Amy come running down there into his lab, thanks to her out-of-the-blue decision-making a second ago. "My life is a lie, and I choose to end it," he says, with the free-floating gravitas you've got to employ when your character is a cardboard cutout of a human being who hasn't even vomited up his precious, wet backstory for us yet.

Amy tells him to cut it the fuck out and help them, so he whines at length about how A) He made the Daleks, B) His life is, aforementioned, a lie, and C) He has all these memories about this and that, how he was in the war and loved a lassie and gas gas quick boys an ecstasy of fumbling and a bunch of the usual substandard Wilfred Owen shit we toss around when we need backstory in a hurry. Have you seen "Human Nature/Family Of Blood"? Hope so, because you have to do this one yourself and it might give you some pointers, just like "Empty Child/Doctor Dances" gives you the necessary information -- the proper Spirit of the Blitz emotional state, Nancy and her brother/son, the Mouse that Roared, the things that make us great, the healing of Albion, all that bullshit we don't apparently need to experience this time round -- for the episode itself.

(And I'm barely being facetious, because honestly this episode, like the last, relies so much more on previous connections you've made in your brain -- movies you've seen, episodes of this show, trite scenarios they scarcely have to built to at all for you to assume the connection for yourself -- that frankly it would be better if you had that stuff available to call on. Be Pound's Ideal Reader, and take the references -- which is all these two episodes are, just fragments of better ideas and half-remembered tales by better writers, shored up against the ruins of story -- that they're practically literary in their own right. Almost poetry. To the point that maybe I should treat them that way, like sketchy semiotic moments in a web of universal poetics, referencing lyrically instead of earning in their own right. What do you think?)