We open with a bunch of scenes from last week, which I love because it means I don’t have to recap as much this week. Blah blah blah explosive devices blah blah Snap! (in the sense of a beloved British children’s card game and not a gum-popping, trailer-trash epithet) blah blah Hey, it’s Spike! blah blah Graaaay??!!

Then the action continues, with the Hubbies realizing Spike’s made off with the Torchmobile and headed to the Hub. Tosh checks her scanner and sees rift flare-ups all over the city. Isn’t it nice how she’s the one holding the scanner and punching away at it with her broken arm while the rest of them stand around like self-involved doofuses bitching about a stolen car because God forbid they should have to walk?

Gwen gets a call from Andy, who tells her they need her at police headquarters right away. Proudly putting two and two together long after everyone else has already moved on to advanced calculus, Gwen announces that Spike is somehow behind this.

Jack instructs Rhys to drop off everybody at various crisis locales in his car, and Rhys balks, saying, “Will we all fit?” Heh. There’s a city-wide catastrophe and his biggest concern is his own comfort, which I totally get, because it’s just like when you’re at a party and the host asks if you’d mind driving home some so-and-so who lives like an hour out of the way and you have to smile and say, “Of course,” but inside you’re seething. Which is why I don’t own a car.

Jack asks to be dropped at the Hub, where he hopes to reason with Spike, saying the whole reason the Time Agency paired them up was because he was the only one who could ever control him. Rhys’ ears perk up and he’s all, “Did you say Time Agency? Is that based in Cardiff too?” And if he’s impressed by that, just wait til he hears Cardiff is also home to the Ministry of Magic, the Stargate to Atlantis, and the wardrobe entrance to the magical kingdom of Narnia.

TW3HQ. Jack comes in to find Spike’s transformed the Hub into his own private Club Babylon. He’s standing on the upper walkway swaying his hips and dancing with his hands in the air, blaring some clubby music that I had to go online to identify, and I guess that as gay as I thought I was, I’m still not quite gay enough, because I’d never heard “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper” before, even though it’s by Sarah Brightman.

Spike: It’s our song!
Jack: We don’t have a song. And if we did have a song, it wouldn’t be this song.

Totally agree with him on this one. Everybody knows their song would be the theme to Flash Gordon as sung by Queen. Either that or the theme to Cops. If only it had been sung by Queen.

Spike comes down the stairs toward Jack, and as welcome a sight as he is after an 11-episode absence, I can’t say the same for that ridiculous outfit. With all that time off, he couldn’t have traveled to the Dolce & Gabbana Galaxy for something a little more stylish and a little less Robert E. Fruitee?

Jack mocks Spike’s explosive-setting abilities, since his team survived the building blammo, and Spike counters that those devices were just prototypes. I can only guess Jack’s brain is addled from the grating tones of Dame Brightman, because mention of prototypes can only mean there’s more explosives to come, and it would certainly have been smart to warn the other Hubbies about that ASAP.

Instead, Jack asks Spike what he wants. Spike says he wants Jack to know he loves him, and Jack is like, “No, seriously.” But Spike is serious, saying, “You have to understand that I really do love you,” although he turns away from him, and Jack’s spidey senses should really be tingling, because it’s never a good thing when someone says they love you but can’t even look at you.

Spike continues — “Because this is going to get nasty” — and then turns around to face Jack bearing two Uzi-like weapons. Where those came from is anyone’s guess, because the only major weapon that outfit’s likely to conceal is the one between his legs, and even then, those pants leave little to the imagination.

He riddles Jack with bullets, and Jack collapses backward into a puddle of water. I can’t believe I’ve been recapping this show all this time and never noticed that a river runs through the Hub. It’s as if someone else was as appalled by Jack’s decorating style as me and decided to feng shui up the place (and from the glimpse we got of his art-lofty apartment, I’d say it was Owen). At least that’s what I’m hoping, because the only other option is a sewage overflow that no one’s bothered to clean up, which would explain why every so often in certain scenes the look on Barrowman’s face clearly reads as, “I can’t believe this crap.”