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.