Torchwood: Adrift

(Originally written 28/11/13)

My opinion of this episode has always boiled down to “Too much Gwen, but it’s made up for by topless Janto.” Watching this time, however, my thoughts were very different.

For one thing, I actually enjoyed Gwen in this. Maybe it was because she was trying to recover her compassion, as opposed to having it ooze out of her with ease (finally someone acknowledges that Torchwood has changed her!). I certainly found it ironic that she’s going out of her way to help Nikki find Jonah, but is quite happy to treat Andy like shit in the process.

 Let’s talk about Andy. First of all, he seems to know a lot more about Torchwood than he did last season (to the extent that Gwen asks him to verify her story to Nikki). Is this just because of what he witnessed in End of Days? Because I can’t think of another example.

Secondly, we have the revelation that he used to have a thing for Gwen and he looks down on Rhys for his weight. Sorry, but where did this come from and why is it necessary? Is it purely because they needed to explain why Andy wasn’t at the wedding? Is it to make us feel less sorry for an otherwise-sweet character when Gwen keeps fobbing him off this episode? Is it to reinforce the idea that all men find Gwen irresistible?

The other man in Gwen’s life, Rhys, fared much better. I think the argument about having a baby is the best of the couple’s confrontations this season at least. I guess I like it because it’s not about the mystery of Gwen’s job, and there’s no added baggage with her having an affair – it’s just about how it will affect their future. It’s a bit annoying though that this is never followed up on – when Gwen gets pregnant in Children of Earth they figure that they’ll deal with it, and then Torchwood is conveniently abolished before she has the baby.

I can’t keep talking about motherhood without mentioning Ruth Jones – what a wonderful performance. I particularly liked the paralleled scenes of her getting rid of Jonah’s stuff with Gwen removing the photos – both forced to give up on what they believed in.

Of course I liked the Janto, but I also think it might have served a purpose. Jack was obviously comfortable telling Ianto about the island (since Ianto gave Gwen the GPS), so the episode needed to remind the viewer just how close Jack and Ianto are.

Meanwhile, Gwen and Tosh investigated the matter in secret, and I can’t help wondering if they had any other work they should have been doing at the time. Must have been a slow week, since Jack and Ianto had all that time for naked hide-and-seek.

Adding the lovely music and shots as Gwen approaches the island, and the fascinating idea of the rift taking people, this is surely one of Chris Chibnall’s best stories.

Torchwood: From Out of the Rain

(Originally written 18/11/13)

This is the big one – the Torchwood episode I have always considered my favourite (barring the amazing Children of Earth, obviously), and as 50 minutes of entertainment, I think it still works. The image of the Ghostmaker beckoning at the screen still freaks me out so much!

But when I try to think of the Night Travellers as anything other than one-dimensional, evil, magic villains, the story starts to fall apart. One could argue that their motivation is going to extreme lengths to get an audience for their show, but they were doing the same thing back in the old days when they had audiences.

Maybe they would have been more successful if the Ghostmaker hadn’t flat out told the young Christina what he planned to do with her last breath – that was a handy bit of exposition, wasn’t it? Ugh, and Jack’s random line in the hospital (“They came from out of the rain”), leading to the coincidental meeting with Christina, was pretty painfully contrived.

The exposition was also present in the description of the travellers – how they smelt of film, and how Pearl felt like plastic. The viewer can only take the characters’ words for it, which means we feel one step removed. I didn’t quite understand how, if the travellers have to stay close to the Electro, they plan to take over Cardiff/the world (unless I missed something here?). And when we’re told they could be trapped by coming “a film inside a film”, I can’t be the only one who was thinking “Filmception!”

These problems aren’t helped by the fact that PJ Hammond’s tropes are recognisable from Small Worlds. The story starts with a child being magicked away by our villains (though to be fair, they take all sorts). These villains are accompanied by a quite nice theme tune which gets repeated over and over again throughout the episode (though this wasn’t quite as annoying as last time). And Jack just happens to have had past dealings with them (though this time he’d only heard about them).

So that was my favourite episode. This review sounds harsh, but I honestly did enjoy watching it (one of my favourite parts being Owen getting rejected by the villain-of-the-week yet again). However, it has slipped down in my rankings. I think my top two favourite episodes now are Ghost Machine and Adam, though the former was helped by me completely forgetting its existence until this rewatch.

Torchwood: Something Borrowed

(Originally written 11/11/13, modified 19/1/14)

I am now much more aware of the Mystical Pregnancy Trope than I was when I first watched this episode, but I still think the story is quite well done and could have been a lot worse (though I did have a moment of realisation/cringing when I saw Gwen about to give birth in a stable). Gwen’s facial expressions during her initial reaction are especially wonderful in their outrageousness, and I thought Mervyn’s oral/death scene would have been a lot cruder if it was in Series 1.

Owen is quite sweet to Tosh in this episode, though we still get no indication of his former life in Fragments;  he says he doesn’t do weddings, and we’re really given no reason to doubt this. Are we really going to remember this single line three episodes later, especially after he's so easily persuaded to come by Tosh anyway? And although Tosh briefly laments her lack of a partner, she also gets some good moments as a Super Single Woman, knowing that she’s far too good for Banana Boat.

God that guy was annoying, as were Gwen’s friends. First of all, I wonder how she still has friends since she barely has time for Rhys anymore (have they not seen her a year yet they’re still taking her on her hen’s night?). Secondly, when the black one (if they had names, I didn’t hear them) started screaming at Mervyn’s dead body, I thought back to Blake’s 7, where in the two most obvious instances of women helplessly screaming, it turned out to be an act. Not so here in the 21st century.

Given how much emphasis Gwen places on her love of Rhys and her will to marry him, I found the Gwack really misplaced here. I was quite happy to believe that Gwen actually wanted to marry Rhys, but the impression I get later is that she needed to marry him, otherwise she’d always be tempted by Jack (and almost was). What’s worse is that intentionally or not, Jack tends to lead Gwen on during the episode, which is also unfair on Ianto. He jokes about Ianto being something to “do” while Gwen’s away, and then watches her after Ianto’s plucked up the courage to dance with him. It could be argued that he was just thinking about marriage in general, but the fact that it’s Gwen doesn’t help his case.

I end on a comment made by Jack at the beginning of the episode – that a Mystical Pregnancy has happened in Torchwood before. I can't help but wondering if Jack was the subject of this pregnancy, hence his line about never getting pregnant again in Everything Changes.

Torchwood: A Day in the Death

(Originally written 3/11/13)

As this episode begins, it appears we’ve finally found the secret of how to get fired from Torchwood: be the living dead. But wait, no, by episode’s end Owen’s back as Torchwood’s doctor. I can’t say I was saddened by Martha’s departure though, as Freema Agyeman’s acting style seems more at home in the kid-friendly Doctor Who. I also wish I could erase her kiss with Jack from my mind – it was just so messy, and Jack’s open eyes made it look quite uncomfortable, so why did it have to happen?

 
This episode certainly had a nice knack for showing how dull Owen’s life/death was; I particularly enjoyed the shots where he just stares into the distance, the music repeating in the background. Of course the finger-breaking scene is totally cringe-inducing, though I’m not sure I really believe in what prompted it. Tosh comes into Owen’s apartment and starts talking to him like they’re “an old married couple”, according to Maggie, but since when has Tosh ever spoken so much and in such a flippant way? Is this meant to be a hint that she was just stalling because she didn’t know what to do, or poor characterisation?

(While we’re on Tosh, this is now the second time she’s told Owen she loves him when she thinks he’s about to die. The first time she and Owen talked about it; this time there’s nothing. She’s really starting to annoy me now.)

I didn’t have much to take note of during the first half of this episode, but things started to get interesting once Owen got around to infiltrating Henry Parker’s house. His smile when he destroyed the generator was appropriately creepy, and his speech to Parker’s security guard was delivered with a confidence the Doctor would be proud of. He is very lucky that he was talking to a crap security guard though; seriously, who just stands there, lets a guy walk up to you and take your gun and knock you out?

Now Owen finally approaches Parker’s bed, and the music climaxes with Owen’s Theme (I pretty much bought the Torchwood soundtrack solely for this theme, so you can tell I’m a fan of it). To me, this really felt like the payoff of the episode. Parker was brilliantly performed by Richard Briers, but I have to admit, I wasn’t entirely sure what point it was making about death. One minute Parker’s desperately clinging to life (i.e. the Pulse), the next he’s pitying himself for lying in his own piss and being fed through a tube. Then he dies, without being able to make peace with himself. Owen later tells Maggie that she should choose life if there’s the slightest glimmer of hope, but did Parker have that hope? We’ll never know for sure.

(I’d also like to see Owen reflect on whether or not he had that hope after Diane left, particularly during his conversation with Maggie, but yet again this was not to be.)

Torchwood: Dead Man Walking

(Originally written 31/10/13, modified 15/1/14)

There's a lot that happens in this episode which goes unexplained.

To start with, Owen says he knows what the creature is (duroc/hunger), but we don’t know if it’s alien or magic or from another dimension or anything – it’s pretty much just accepted as Death incarnate (leading to this cringe-worthy line from Martha: "It must be Death... because it's stolen my life!"). Similarly, we get no background on Jack’s little psychic friend, though it might be implied that she’s the girl Faith who first brought Death to Earth 500 years beforehand (hence her powers and the reason she doesn’t age between Fragments and now).

 
And finally, the Weevils’ mystical powers come to a climax – not only can they feel each other’s pain and sensitive to disturbances in time, but they’re also apparently the guardians of Death. But wait... if they’re guarding the glove is that because they don’t want people to bring back Death? But they worship Owen because he has Death inside him... unless they’re scared of it... Ugh, I don’t know. My best theory is that it saves on making new monster costumes.

Some things just don’t make sense. Jack claims he needed the alien morgue code from Owen, but wouldn’t it be better if the guy who CANNOT DIE knew all the important things? Wasn’t it pretty much established that the thing in the darkness, coming for Jack, was Abaddon and not duroc? And why the hell was Martha performing an autopsy on Owen when literally everyone saw how he died?

Some things felt familiar. Jack’s story about knowing Proust made me chuckle about how his name-dropping is like the Doctor’s, but with more sex. This was fine, but then I felt that the glove’s attack on Martha was quite a rip-off of Rose. This didn’t really achieve anything plotwise, but was rather a very convenient way to get the team to the hospital for the final showdown. A showdown which featured a bad child actor (I couldn’t tell if his character was meant to be weak from the cancer or he just couldn’t be bothered trying), and where it was established that a little girl defeated the villain 500 years beforehand. What was everyone so worried about?

Luckily, the episode was saved by Burn Gorman’s acting. Especially in his farewell scene to Gwen, I really believed in what Owen was feeling (or not feeling). This was much more convincing than his grief for Diane in Combat. Pity they didn’t mention that episode though – the dude attempted suicide last season, and now he’s dead and you don’t want to mention it?

The most disappointing thing about the episode? The fact that it's written by Matt Jones, and I adored his Doctor Who story The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit.

Torchwood: Reset

 (Originally written 13/10/13)

This episode occupies a strange place in Series 2. Despite introducing Martha and killing Owen, there are a lot of elements which make it quite forgettable.

The editing was a bit odd, with short shots of medical images breaking up several scenes. This is quite unlike what Torchwood has done before, but it seems like something that’s been done in other shows. The presence the Gorillaz’ ‘Feel Good’ as Owen and Martha worked together seemed out of place – again, not something I’d expect. And then the “twist” ethical problem was that aliens are being held captive and exploited for the humans’ own means – so it’s basically Meat two episodes later.

I’m not sure if the characterisation of the regulars was quite up to scratch. For all of Jack’s flirting with Martha, he made a lot of references to past boyfriends (including Christopher Isherwood) and he even said of The Pharm’s security guard, “Grey is so not her colour”. Way to make him sound totally gay (though the plus side of this is that we also got Ianto’s gossip with Martha). I also thought Owen was way too nice to Tosh – especially after Adam ended with him back to bastard mode.

It was simply weird seeing Martha in Torchwood. I don’t know if she really got the technobabble, and when she exclaimed, “Oh I’m a camera!”, she seemed like she was trying and failing to be excited. I’m also wondering what the Doctor was thinking recommending her to UNIT – I know he generally enjoys working with them but he knows they are a military organisation, so why would he want one of his companions caught up in that?

 It wasn’t clear just how much The Pharm knew about Torchwood – Professor Copley noted that Jack does alien research, but how did he know this? Furthermore, when Copley’s assistant was asked by Gwen and Ianto about the Weevil, she didn’t even ask “Is that what you call it?”, despite the name having been made up by Torchwood.

 (Speaking of Copley’s assistant, I just realised that this episode does pretty poorly on the Bechdel test. The assistant was apparently called Plummer but I didn’t hear that, and when Gwen and Martha talk it’s about how neither of them has shagged Jack yet.)

My boyfriend often talks about how he finds Professor Copley to be “a plank of wood”, but I didn’t have a huge problem with this... until his final scene, where he’s ready to kill because his life’s work is destroyed, yet he conveys no emotion while doing this. Having just watch Milton Johns’ amazingly unsettling performance in The Enemy of the World, it was particularly obvious that there was potential for Copley to become an interesting villain, but Alan Dale did nothing with it.

And Owen's bullet makes three in the gunshot count of Series 2 so far. For an episode in which the characters kept going on about high security, you might have thought they'd secure themselves a bit more.

Torchwood: Adam

(Originally written 5/10/13)

WOW. That was by far the best episode in a while – definitely the best of Series 2 so far. Of course it helps that the concept of memory, and a creature that changes memories, is so fascinating – but the story wouldn’t be half as good if it weren’t for the performances.

Jack’s sadness as he remembered Gray was very moving. You could just see it slowly coming back to him, watching it affect him. And as if remembering wasn’t enough, then he had to lose his memories at the end after Adam infiltrated them. That was a real shock – just as I was starting to think that Adam was starting to regret his effect on the team, he basically holds Jack’s most precious memory hostage. That's a real villain.

Jack’s sad acting was certainly better than Ianto’s, though he at least seemed to have improved since Cyberwoman. And Evil!Ianto was amazing – the look in his eyes as he ‘confessed’ his murders made it such a tense scene. Speaking of confessions, Owen’s confession of love to Tosh was completely adorable. I know there are a couple more coming up though, so we’ll see if I get bored of their repetitious nature at any point.

I’m not sure about the treatment of Gwen this episode. When Rhys kisses her, it’s established that she still can’t quite remember him – but then it’s implied that she goes on to sleep with him anyway. And then at the end, she pretty much undoes it all by saying she loves Jack.

Apart from that though, the rediscovery scene was beautiful. It gave us a great insight into the characters’ lives in just a few lines, and it particularly felt like Jack was a true leader who cared about them. Notice how he responded to everyone – telling Owen he’ll save him, telling Tosh he knows she’s special, kissing Ianto... and telling Gwen, after she says she loves him, to just take her pill.

In an episode about changing memories, I’m bound to have a few questions. If Adam had only just decided that day to make Tosh love him, and it was only her memory he altered, why did the others think it was perfectly normal that they’d been together for a year? And why do none of the team care about Adam constantly invading their personal space?

These are only little niggles though in an otherwise brilliant episode. Yet another favourite written by a woman :)

Torchwood: Meat

(Originally written 25/9/13, modified 3/1/14)

After basically no mention of Gwen and Rhys’ issues since the end of last season, it’s good to have an episode focus on them. I enjoyed the rawness of their argument and Rhys’ anger, especially since I couldn’t really back Gwen’s side at all. Thinking about it though, I’m confused – Gwen told Rhys she was now working in special ops within the police. Those who are familiar with the name of Torchwood think it’s special ops. So why couldn’t Gwen just tell Rhys in the first place that she was working for Torchwood? He wouldn’t have been surprised when she showed up to the crash site then.

It was really great watching Rhys in unfamiliar situations, out of his depth while bluffing to the crooks and trying so hard to be tough. And he’s so happy at the end! I do wonder what happened after the credits; how he would have explained to people at work about his injury (that's Torchwood's second gunshot wound for the season), or how Gwen would have explained it to him if he’d been retconned!

So for an episode all about Gwen and Rhys’ relationship, it’s pretty annoying to have a couple of doses of Gwack (Jack pushing Gwen up against a wall and staring at her). (And when Jack told Rhys that Gwen could take care of herself, I had to laugh a bit, given her tendency to be taken hostage.) And then it was just inappropriate when Jack flat out said his encounter with Rhys was “homoerotic”, in front of everyone. People say that Torchwood’s Jack isn’t as flirtatious as the old one, but maybe that’s because he’s the boss. When he’s just a loveable sidekick he can do whatever he wants, but a boss needs to have a certain level of respect from his employees.

 Let’s turn to those employees for a moment. Owen is inexplicably nice (if ignorant of Tosh’s advances), and feels a lot of pity for the creature. As I recall, he didn’t even seem to care that much about Beth a couple of episodes ago. His relationship with Tosh also appears to have gone backwards, as back in Ghost Machine they were quite happily out a bar together.

Ianto’s stun-gunning is possibly his best non-Janto moment. That is all.

 A final question: Jack wants to send the creature back through the Rift, but it was well established last season that the team don’t know how the Rift works and objects could end up anywhere. Have they discovered more of its secrets during the break? Or was this just desperation on Jack’s part; a bluff to himself and the team that he could perhaps save the creature?

Torchwood: To The Last Man

(Originally written 22/9/13, modified 2/1/14)

In which Tosh falls in love with what appears to be a young Steve Coogan.

This episode certainly has parallels with Out of Time – what with talk of people ‘belonging’ in one time or another, and this situation sparking a few words about Jack’s time in the past (and future). It’s also quite obvious when Owen tells Tosh that he doesn’t want her to get hurt when she has to say goodbye. I did feel that a small mention of Owen's lost love Diane wouldn’t have gone astray here, as it would have been about a year since viewers saw that episode, so they might not realise why Owen’s actually acting like a decent human being for once.

The episode works fine as a love story (definitely a better love story than Tosh’s previous outing), but not so much as a horror story. Cliched scary movie noises don’t really work if they’re revealing such horrifying figures as... nurses and patients in a 1918 hospital.

There’s some nice foreshadowing about Torchwood employees dying young, setting up later episodes this season. But there was a missed foreshadowing (or backshadowing) opportunity when Tommy asks for Tosh’s confirmation that she wasn’t “conscripted” to join Torchwood, and once again she says it was her own choice. I don’t care that Fragments happened in the past – I want it acknowledged, dammit!

Speaking of people’s pasts, I thought the Jack/Ianto conversation could have been a good opportunity to mention the events of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang; just a little reminder that there’s a mystery about Gray. But on the plus side, that conversation leads to kissing, which makes it all okay.

 I always got the impression in Series 1 that Ianto hadn’t been working at Torchwood for much longer than Gwen, yet he apparently knows about Tommy. The last time he was opened must have been not long before Gwen joined, so that means Gwen must have been made temporary leader after less than a year in the job. Once again, I think her credentials need to be called into question.

I'd also like to call into question the fact that Torchwood just happens to have technology which can send psychic projections into people’s dreams, and this is just casually mentioned towards the end of the episode - it seems pretty significant! One mention I don't mind towards the end, however, is Tommy's reference to saving the world in his pyjamas (see Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion).