Torchwood: Combat

(Originally written 2/9/13, modified 11/11/13)

I’ve only seen this episode once before, and I recalled a lot more fighting than what I saw here. There was a lot more mystery and build-up than what I expected, all boiling down to about ten seconds of Owen in the cage. And then in a scene which I’d completely forgotten, he returns to the Hub and he’s apparently King of the Weevils? What? I thought this only happened in Series Two after he died! Or did that enhance his newfound Weevil powers or something? And since when are Weevils telepathic? Does that happen only to drive the plot of this episode?

I found that despite this episode focusing on Owen, the rest of the team all get a good amount of screentime, especially Tosh and Ianto. My only problem with this is that Ianto definitely seems a lot closer to Jack now (from the way he follows him around obediently), yet we’ve seen no development on this front since the Stopwatch Scene, so there’s no real reason for it.

As for Gwen, I was told by friends to look out for the famous "pizza scene", where after retconning Rhys she come to the Hub with pizza, only to find no one else there and she breaks down crying. It was definitely a good scene - I could very much believe her crying (as opposed to, say, Ianto’s in Cyberwoman) and it was a funny little moment when she tried to report to Jack but realised her headset wasn’t on. I can’t really praise her acting in the retcon scene though because Gwen’s actions just make me too angry. Forgiveness doesn’t work if the person doesn’t remember doing it (and retcon never works that fast, by the way). And earlier, I couldn’t quite believe her being so down about breaking the news about Dan Hodges to his family because she’s meant to be the one who actually thinks about that sort of stuff – she only just went through the whole process with Eugene! Unless she’s sick of it now?

There were other bits that seemed a bit off to me. A couple of Owen’s lines were pretty painfully clichéd – in the bar at the beginning he says “The bigger the crowd, the more alone I feel”, and when told to go undercover he admits “I could do with being someone else right now”. Jack’s lines had some problems too, but they were down to poor delivery by John Barrowman. And when Owen was telling Jack in the hospital that he didn’t want to be saved, it could have been a prime opportunity to mention how Jack let John die last week but Owen has more to live for. But there was nothing.

To end on a completely inappropriate note, Dan Hodges' ringtone was the Crazy Frog. That has not dated well.