In following the life and death of nice guy Eugene Jones, we
have a rather nice episode – certainly with a lighter take on death than last
week’s. But I feel that in order to accommodate this niceness, a few changes
must be made to what we already know about the members of Torchwood. We
know Owen is a douche, but he’s also shagging Gwen, and given that she almost
died last week you’d think that he’d be looking out for her a bit more.
Instead, he’s making fun of her for caring so much (more on that later) and
asking that she do his job for him (i.e. the autopsy). It’s pretty obvious that
their affair was retconned so there could be room for Eugene to be Gwen’s love
interest for this episode, which brings its own problems.
Since we’re already retconning the lover, let’s go ahead and
retcon the boyfriend as well, shall we? Eugene spends the majority of this
episode following Gwen around yet he never seems to follow her home to Rhys,
who apparently has no qualms with Gwen going off to stay in a hotel by herself
for the weekend (does special ops take business trips?). Here Eugene declares
his love for her, which is kinda uncomfortable given that he’s only ever had
one-sided conversations with her. I did wonder if perhaps the reason Gwen can
sense him is not because she’s Super Special, but because Eugene is projecting
onto her or something because of his feelings for her. But why does he have
such feelings in the first place? Because Gwen is Super Special, surely. Eugh,
you just can’t get around it.
As for the rest of the plot, I kind of felt the same way as
I did in Countrycide, where I couldn’t get into the mystery (in this case, of
the bidder and why Eugene died), because I knew it already (although I’d
forgotten that the eye made Eugene a ghost, which I thought was pretty cool).
There is one mystery which I’m still yet to solve, and have wondered since I
first saw the episode: why the hell were Torchwood called in to what looked
like (and indeed was) an ordinary hit and run?? Surely they weren’t keeping an
eye on Eugene because they knew he knew about them?
My favourite thing about the episode would be the direction.
I like the feel of being inside Eugene’s imagination, with the whizzing through
space and the eye spinning like a planet – though I did think the Starman track
briefly drew even more parallels between Eugene and Love and Monsters' Elton. I definitely care
about Eugene as a character, which is more than I can say for Elton. I would
have liked him even more if he hadn’t fallen for Gwen.
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