This episode has a bit of a contrived way of getting the team to the warehouse (they think they’re tracking life signs but they’re actually bombs? What sort of technology’s in that?). And now that I’ve seen Firefly’s Out of Gas, I agree that the two episodes are uncomfortably similar. But it’s all worth it to get some insights into our characters (does it count as character development if it happened in the past?).
Victorian Jack appears to be his old cheeky self, and I like to think he was deliberately written as a less world-weary version of his 100+ year old self. The lesbians were a lot more understated than I recall (probably a result of my exposure to Jenny and Vastra), though I’m not quite sure where they were going when they said “You know how we deal with threats”. Yes, you kill them. And you’ve just demonstrated that Jack can’t die. So... what are you going to do? I am also slightly disappointed that they didn’t use New Year’s Eve to make a TV Movie reference.
Unless I’m mistaken, this is the first episode since Greeks Bearing Gifts where Tosh isn’t defined by someone she’s in (or wanting to have) a relationship with (and obviously the pendant came packaged with Mary). It’s a real shame they didn’t do with her character; in fact, the supposed amateur we see in Fragments appears to show a lot more brilliance than Tosh in the present day, who pretty much just sits on computers all day doing clever things. Why couldn’t we see more of the Tosh who improvises her way through building sonic resonators? Why couldn’t we see more of her relationship with her mother? For that matter, why does Jack say she can only have limited contact with her (postcards), when Gwen got to have the whole family round (unless that was an exception for her wedding)?
It seems appropriate that I move straight from Tosh to Owen, aka the only character who is completely out of character in their backstory. And all I can think about is how these revelations affect Tosh’s crush on him. She was already employed by Torchwood when Owen arrived, presumably still grieving for his wife, so at what point did she fall in love with a(n almost) widow? How did this environment turn Owen into (effectively) a misogynist? Maybe it was Suzie’s doing – we know they were shagging, after all!
And the story that made me feel like an 18-year-old Janto shipper again? Nothing to say on the actual relationship apart from ‘awwwww!’, but just a technical question. Jack says in Everything Changes that they don’t know the real names of Weevils – they just call them that. But Ianto calls them that too, so does that mean all the branches of Torchwood call them this made-up name? Also, Jack’s Weevil scratch heals almost instantly in this fragment, but after being beaten up in Owen’s fragment he stays bruised throughout their conversation.
Season finale next week, after which point the Torchwood experiment will become a lot less fun and a lot more teary.
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