Wow. For those who have yet to see Torchwood: Children of Earth, broadcast on BBC1 and BBC HD over the last five consecutive nights at prime-time, I won’t spoil it for you by revealing all the storylines and outcome but some mention of key happenings is, when discussing the show, somewhat unavoidable. Just get it watched, soon as you can, alright?

You still might want to skip this article before you join the ranks of six million plus people who were hooked from Day One.

Torchwood: Children of Earth was, simply put, the best British science-fiction/horror TV drama ever made. It has raised the bar considerably. Last night’s finale was so relentlessly exciting and tense, I had to pause it halfway through to take a break for fear of my heart bursting out of my chest.

The show has presented us with the most brilliant well-rounded gay relationship ever committed to camera, with one character being bisexual—or polysexual, as has been said before of Captain Jack–and the other, Ianto Jones, clearly defined as heterosexual until he met Jack and fell in love. The fluidity in both characters’ histories served to confound all those who see sexuality as either/or, and love their labels. And we’ve come a long way since the days of Larry Grayson and John Inman when it comes to presenting gays on TV. Oh, how I wish I’d had role models like Ianto and Jack when I was a kid!

But what have the writers done to Captain Jack? Without detailing the circumstances into which he was placed, or the decisions he made, it can be said that the character has been utterly devastated, his life comparable to that of Job’s in the Bible—plague after plague of personal horrors, with Jack cursed not by God, unlike Job, but by immortality, for which if anyone is to blame it is The Doctor. But Job’s faith was being tested; Jack had no faith, other than in humanity itself, and he only sought to do the right thing by as many people as possible. It was his constant seeing of the bigger picture that, it seems, in the end cost him his soul. Will he regain it? Well, series 4 is apparently written and awaiting the go-ahead from the BBC. So we’ll see. But after what Jack did, it’s hard to imagine ever seeing the character in quite the same light as we did before. For many, myself included, the resolution to Torchwood: Children of Earth was a step too far on the part of the writers, despite the fact that we know it was an act of perverse brilliance, perfectly undesirable from the viewer’s perspective. I was not the only one to cry out at more than one juncture during the final two episodes. You could almost hear the howls of anguish on Twitter, which has been alive with Torchwood buzz all week.

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The keen-eyed among you, especially anyone leaving comments here, will have noticed over the past fortnight that the site comments have switched from Disqus to IntenseDebate before today switching back to Disqus again. The standard default WordPress in-built comments have appeared whenever neither of the other commenting systems have been running. So. Why?

A number of other bloggers have in the past written on the merits or otherwise of installing external commenting systems, and the pluses and minuses of Disqus and IntenseDebate. I’ve concluded both have serious failings but are more or less equal these days in terms of functionality and aesthetics.  All you can do if interested is try one for a week, try the other for a week, see what feels right for your blog and makes most sense to you in how it’s set up.

Any comments people leave while you’re test-driving are synched back into your WordPress database (and your old comments are imported into both Disqus and IntenseDebate), so you shouldn’t lose or corrupt any data at all by hopping around like this. Both systems perform well in my experience when it comes to import and export and maintaining a central integrity to your core WordPress comments.

I first tried IntenseDebate a long time ago and then switched to Disqus, which I stuck with a very long time and only got annoyed with and removed when it took over a week of waiting for an answer to my support message in the forums (along with, it seems, many more people judging by all the unanswered questions I spotted) and my email to the help address. I got auto-notifications from the help email address but nobody human ever contacted me as a consequence. That’s a very poor show.

If I hadn’t been a Twitter user posting messages about my frustration that contained the hashtag #disqus, which were spotted by a Disqus employee and then the CEO, I’d have had no responses at all. Eventually the CEO told me that the 403 error people were getting when posting comments here was a fault on my server, not theirs. He was truly apologetic for nobody having said this long before, but I was still none the wiser as to how I might solve the problem and only Disqus was giving me 403 grief. So I got rid of it and reported the issue with my webhost. My webhost, helpful as ever (is poor technical support to be found from every Internet company?), eventually replied with an email the tone of which suggested I was dim, having checked things out and finding no reason for the 403 error. But now it’s gone. Trust me, the 403 error was no figment of mine or my readers’ imaginations.

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