Torchwood
That is So Welsh!
As ‘Doctor Who’ s first bona-fide spin-off series hits BBC3, Sean Alexander looks at how the 21st Century changes everything in Torchwood
During those almost-impossibly celebratory months following Who Version 2.0’s rebirth amidst the Zeitgeist, it soon became obvious that the BBC wanted to make the most of two if its newest and biggest hitters. So while Doctor Who spun-off into innumerable cross-media projects and tie-in events - with anything from mobile phone content to childrens’ TV taking a slice of the pie - the chief architect of its renaissance was given free reign to devise his own take on sci-fi for a modern audience. And what he proposed was something edgy, something rather less black-and-white than the good vs. evil shenanigans of the Doctor and co. and something that would open up the Whoniverse to an audience still put off by what was still nominally seen as a childrens’ show. In short, something more adult. The commissioning of Torchwood as a full series underlines more than anything else the changing fortunes of television franchises in the space of a quarter of a century so where once a mere pilot would be approved on the whim of a particular controller, now a whole series is commissioned on the strength of just one writer’s credentials. Almost everything has already been said about Russell T Davies’ Messiah-like resurrection of Doctor Who from the niche market that it occupied for fifteen years to the palpable mainstream hit which has seemingly achieved the impossible in reuniting families in front of the television set every Saturday nigh but it’s worth restating that none of this would have happened without the drive, enthusiasm and clout of one man.
Everything Changes, Russell T Davies’ pilot script does pretty much everything you’d expect of an opening episode - setting the scene, establishing the premise and, most importantly, leaving you keen to find out more. It also uses last year’s revival of Doctor Who as a template by introducing the show through the eyes of Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles): a feisty, inquisitive PC who witnesses Torchwood’s revival of a murder victim and becomes embroiled in a world of aliens, secret organisations and a mysterious, enigmatic man called Captain Jack Harkness. That it also contrasts this strange new world against Gwen’s work life and her domestic situation with a (predictably) bland, emasculated boyfriend only serves to underline the use of the extraordinary as a similar lure to Rose Tyler’s gradual conversion into the fantastical world of alien planets and time machines. And being a Russell T Davies script, it’s inevitably peppered with his trademark witticisms and socio-political concerns: throwaway lines about the lack of life beyond death and man’s pollution of its environment crop up regularly as do the name-checking of various real-life Cardiff place names, as Davies uses the pilot to establish Wales’ viable dramatic setting. This so-called ‘Welsh agenda’ which peppered the first two seasons of Doctor Who now extends to fetishising the city’s landmarks and skyline, much in the same way as London’s tourist image was exploited in episodes like ‘Aliens of London’.
In look and style though, it’s to another genre of show which Torchwood’s pilot owes its greatest debt. Given his self-confessed liking of the past decade’s most notorious and iconic of fantasy shows - principally Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its own spin-off Angel - it comes as little surprise to find the hereditary fingerprints of Joss Whedon all over this pilot. Whether it be the frequent aerial shots of Cardiff which act as segues between scenes, or in the brooding, melancholic central performance of John Barrowman in the lead role; with Captain Jack’s character now himself an Angel-like figure haunted by his past and apparently incapable of death by the conventional means the parallels are clear. Barrowman and Eve Myles as Gwen really are the glue that hold this show together in what is frequently a contrived and inconsequential episode. With his Tom Cruise grin, the former effortlessly reminds us of the breakthrough impact he had in just five episodes of Doctor Who; moving easily from charming and sexy leading man to intense and haunted loner in a heartbeat. Myles immediately captures the audience identification role of the outsider looking in, mixing the vulnerable appeal of her ‘Unquiet Dead’ role as Gwyneth from Season One Who with an empathic determination which should make for good drama as she butts heads with Captain Jack’s now more Doctorly lack of human compassion.
Only two aspects of this pilot disappoint to any great level. First is the rather embarrassingly gratuitous use of sex and violence in order to sell this series’ credentials as a post-watershed adult drama. No matter how many f-words fly about, Torchwood’s premise as a more adult version of Doctor Who will live and die on its ability to tell more mature stories in a successful way; and not by bandying about swear words like a bunch of adolescent pre-teens in a school playground. Secondly - and perhaps of greater concern - is the lack of any identifiable characterisation amongst Team Torchwood, bar Jack and Gwen. Admittedly pilots notoriously present their future regulars as little more than ciphers - the scientific expert, the sarcastic maverick, the cool and aloof second in command, etc. - but given that the major plot twist in this episode depends on us already having established some sort of rapport with the characters, then it’s surprising to find that (whilst shocking) the revelation of Suzi Costello’s double-life as a power-addicted murderess leaves you with a general feeling of whatever! As does the rather pointless attempt to ramp up dramatic tension by having Jack wipe Gwen’s memory only after having told her voluntarily every little last secret of his organisation!
At the end of the day, ‘Everything Changes’ is great fun, with a swagger and gloss that suggests only an injection of substance is required before it hits pay-dirt. For the Who fans (of which that record breaking minority channel audience must have contained many) there are some delightfully subtle kisses to the parent show: Jubilee Pizza, the TARDIS’ chameleon circuit and the (admittedly not named on-screen) severed hand that the Doctor lost fighting the Sycorax are all alluded to here. While the whole premise of Torchwood’s location on the time-rift - and the resultant ’flotsam and jetsam’ it finds coming through - develops a throwaway moment from a couple of Eccleston episodes. So, if they can only tone down the swearing - and at least make the more ‘adult’ elements intrinsic to the plot rather than dick-waving indulgences - then we might just have a show with an identity far beyond that most limiting of monikers ‘spin-off’.
Given all the inevitable hype that this first bona-fide spin-off to Who engendered, one thing which kept cropping up in the production team’s publicity machine was that Torchwood wasn’t simply going to be Doctor Who in a later timeslot. Rather its whole raison d’etre appeared to be a desire on Russell T Davies’ part to cut loose from the kind of story-telling that was restricted from Who’s more kiddie-centric format and produce something more akin to a fusion of This Life and The X Files: fantasy stories grounded within the real-life experiences of 21st Century life. And looking at Day One, you do wonder what kind of lives Davies and his writers lead…
If one of the major problems with ‘Everything Changes’ was its adolescent wearing of profanity as some badge of honour, then the biggest problem with ‘Day One’ is in the frankly ridiculous liberties it takes with post-watershed use of sexual imagery. Resulting in an episode which is less like an exploration of sexuality and the animal drives which often devour our everyday lives, and more like a thinly-veiled soft-porn movie; the likes of which you might find cluttering up Five’s late-night schedules, trying to sell itself as science fiction but in fact being little more than titillation. Given that the script comes from someone who is presumably going to have as influential a role on this series as Russell T Davies’ scripts have on Doctor Who, then Chris Chibnall’s inaugural entry cannot be seen as anything other than a badly-gauged misfire. What plot there is - gaseous alien comes to Cardiff in order to feed off as much orgasmic energy as it can - is little more than window-dressing for as many scenes of boy/girl, girl/girl, girl/alien intercourse as you’re likely to see outside of an episode of Footballers’ Wives. Again the problem seems to be an obsession with what can be shown given the timeslot, rather than the adult elements arising organically (rather than orgasmically) out of plot and character. Most preposterously so in the obviously dirty-mac-brigade pleasing scene in which the hitherto heterosexual Gwen is herself so consumed with the walking aphrodisiac creature inside Carys that she gets all lezzy; feeling little more than mild embarrassment afterwards. Had this character trait at least been alluded to, then it would have made some sense; that it comes so left-field only highlights the fact that it was evidently done purely for male-fantasy purposes and (again) to try to nail some controversial label to Torchwood’s adult premise.
What does work in this episode is how Gwen is still a naïve interloper on Team Torchwood’s dynamic, despite her police training and integration into this fantastic world proper. That the whole alien possession plot starts off as a result of her carelessness and inability to rise above Owen’s teasing is a nice character point, showing her as a flawed and developing person. There is also a neat metaphor for the modern city singles scene and the emptiness of one-night stands, as the alien finds less-and-less satisfaction the more partners (victims?) it takes. The part in which a sex-obsessed Carys trawls the Cardiff high streets in search of fresh energy - surrounded by wall-to-wall images of sex, be it snogging couples or risqué advertising - suggests more subtext than a dozen shag-scenes. This is all but lost amidst the relentless mandate to make ‘Day One’ some tongue-in-cheek, tits ‘n’ arse version of serious science fiction. I mean, how many ‘adult’ shows feel the need to depict a masturbating bouncer in order to validate its mature remit? Or show a sperm-clinic of donors reduced to little piles of dust by their orgasmic activities? The humorous aspects of ‘Day One’ I fear will be as a result of the sheer outrageousness of it all, rather than because it’s actually funny. Oh well, now the writers have (hopefully) got that out of their system, we’re finally in for some post-coital maturity at last…
Or maybe not. After two episodes of varying quality in which the desire to differentiate Torchwood from its less liberated parent overpowered any cohesive story, episode three settles down into a more traditional narrative in which the team are required to act together to solve a specific mystery. But the main problem here is that the basis of Ghost Machine - crimes of the past coming back to haunt the present - has already been done far too many times in other shows; leaving Who script-editor Helen Raynor’s debut seem nothing more than a Xerox of better things. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the episode, it’s just that you spend the fifty minutes dotting ‘I’s and crossing ‘t’s without any need to engage the brain. There’s some nice characterisation - especially for Burn Gorman’s Owen, who finally seems to be becoming more than the jack-the-lad comic relief of the team - but very little surprises, as the story limps towards its morality tale ending of retribution without engaging the viewer in the manner which it clearly desires.
Utilising a device which allows the user to re-experience moments of extreme emotion from both the past and the future certainly gives proceedings promise but the lack of any resultant resonance from what each of the team witness during their trips through time lets down the premise. Gwen meets a lonely boy from 1940 - left to fend for himself when evacuated to Cardiff at the height of the blitz - but when she meets him all grown up in the present day (now played by John ‘Morgus’ Normington) there’s very little pay-off. Likewise Owen witnessing the years-old murder of local Cardiff girl Lizzy Lewis only leads to a rather perfunctory one-man crusade on his part to bring the perpetrator to justice. The killer Ed (played by ‘Blake’ himself, Gareth Thomas, in a well-judged performance of self-loathing and decades-old guilt) rather conveniently decides to use Team Torchwood’s exposure of his crime as a chance to redeem himself and seek martyrdom; something which he had hitherto managed to live without for the past forty years. Elsewhere, it’s clearly apparent now that Naoko Mori’s Tosh is by far the weakest of the regulars; her ‘scientific expert’ tag being little more than a weak cover for an underdeveloped part played by an actress who appears to show little aptitude for this type of role. In contrast, while Ianto Jones still does little more than lurk in the background, drink whisky and tidy up Torchwood’s messes for them, you do suspect that more of a long game is being played with this character.
It’s not a great episode for Jack or Gwen, either. While we learn that the former now no longer sleeps (to go with his ‘incapable-of-dying’ shtick) the latter is clearly becoming too limited by the bland domestic life of her boyfriend back home, who is now making frequent Mickey-style moans about how much time she’s spending at ‘the office’. Oh, and while we’re at it there’s a truly cringe-inducing scene in which - when introducing Gwen to the delights of his personal armoury - Jack gets rather too up-close and personal; lending the scene a pornographic spin on one of those male bonding sessions from any of a dozen mid-eighties ’guns as sex metaphor’ blockbusters. Yes despite this already common Torchwood predilection for ladling its sexual metaphor on thick, ’Ghost Machine’ is just bland without being bad; with an ultimate air of seen-it-all-before predictability that renders any lasting value almost null and void.
Having paid little more than lip service to its parent show so far, the show now takes the plunge into crossover territory with Cyberwoman, a sequel of sorts to the finale of Who’s second season ‘Doomsday’. But where it succeeds in making a more visceral spin on the body horror subtext of the Cybermen, it fails on just about every other level in what is by far the silliest episode yet. There’s nothing wrong with the premise per se - hitherto seen-but-not-heard Torchwood cleaner-upper Ianto Jones calls in a Japanese cybernetics expert to help save his half-cybernised girlfriend - but, as so often with Torchwood, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Not least the central performance of Gareth David-Lloyd, whose Ianto spends more time whining and blubbing than he does generating any genuine sympathy in the viewer. In a story which deliberately echoes new Who’s first season episode ‘Dalek’ - the last survivor of its kind escapes to terrorise a small band of protagonists in an enclosed environment - you would have hoped that it would also have gone some way to match the emotional resonance of that episode. But Lisa’s plight - not helped by just how implausible it is that her boyfriend has somehow managed to conceal both her and her extensive range of conversion equipment beneath a supposedly top-secret organisation - never even begins to elicit the kind of response that that lone Dalek did under the salt plains of Utah. The sub-Alien base-under-siege plot is hardly helped by the rather predictably juvenile approach that writer Chris Chibnall takes to his subject matter. Having already written an alien whose entire raison d’etre is to have sex, we now have a cyber-chick who looks as though she’s dressed as an Anne Summers model in a Meccano factory. Director James Strong also takes every opportunity to fetishise this new take on Metropolis by using every close-up of buttock, navel and cyber-thong that he can train his camera on. I mean, since when do converted Cybermen - male or female - have bosoms? Or go around in three-inch heels? Once again Torchwood seems to be plundering the late-night school of Sci-Fi Channel soft-porn for inspiration. And the juvenilia doesn’t stop there. In one particularly cringe-worthy moment, Owen and Gwen begin snogging when hiding out from Lisa in one of Torchwood’s mortuary draws; the latter even going so far as to comment on the former’s state of ‘arousal’. I mean, why? Is this really the only way that Torchwood can establish its adult credentials, rather than by telling more mature and complex stories as its remit suggested? There’s an interesting metaphor that Chibnall - as in his previous episode - tries to impart about Ianto’s status as outsider amidst Team Torchwood’s clique and its parallel with Lisa’s not human / not Cyberman status. But again it’s lost in favour of some kind of horny fourteen-year-old’s vision of what an adult drama is. Leaving us with characters that shout at one another in place of a script that builds tension and a hero whose whole inability to die reduces any dramatic potential as null and void. Laughably bad - just check out Lisa’s last-minute brain-swap with a hapless pizza-delivery girl for final proof - ‘Cyberwoman’ reeks of a production team who mistake 24-style shouting and soft-porn subtext as some kind of substitute for proper television.
When Torchwood’s commission was first announced in the Autumn of 2005, what raised most eyebrows along with the suggestion of more ‘adult’ and less kiddie-friendly stories than its parent could ever produce was the presence on the writing staff of one PJ Hammond. As creator and principal writer of the seminal seventies supernatural series Sapphire & Steel, Hammond had carved himself out a place in cult television history; and news of his contribution to this spin-off seemed to almost guarantee the stamp of quality on the whole production. Whilst Small Worlds is no unqualified success, it’s certainly a step in the right direction as far as Torchwood regaining much of the dramatic credibility it had lost since its promising pilot. Being a Hammond script, it’s no surprise to find the supernatural and weird goings-on in an otherwise everyday environment are very much to the fore. And whilst perhaps the resolution doesn’t quite capitalise on the premise, it’s fair to say that there’s enough here of interest to override any niggling plot-holes.
If this episode has one major fault it’s in the rather skewed sense of morality it takes towards its subject matter. By depicting a group of malevolent creatures who appear to be fairies - recalling the whole ‘photographing fairies’ phenomena that the likes of Conan-Doyle and Houdini lent credence to in the early 20th Century - the episode in turn argues that these things may or may not indeed by real. Also the methods of despatching their victims - not to mention those who qualify to be recipients of their wrath - are often at odds with one another. A local paedophile dies of asphyxiation as penance for some former (albeit accounted for) child abuse crimes; yet the central girl Jasmine’s prospective step-father also dies for the supposedly heinous crime of being a bit nasty to her and slapping her when she bites his arm. Justice for all, or just a case of rough justice for some? The denouement is similarly ambiguous; as Jasmine’ ascendance to fairy-land is seen as some balancing out of the natural order, yet is done only after the seemingly needless deaths of several people (including Jack’s former beau Estelle, who has done nothing worse than take photographs and risk self-ridicule for believing in them). It’s a good conundrum for Jack to sort out, and to be fair Barrowman rises to the occasion for this very Doctorly dilemma. Indeed, much of the character arc that Captain Jack’s receiving this year is to place him at the moral centre of Torchwood’s universe; making not always the popular choice, but certainly the right one.
Performances vary. Eve Pearce as Jack’s war-time love Estelle is very touching in her brief appearance, but the girl playing Jasmine comes straight from the school of bad child actors; a factor particularly regretful seeing as this is a character that you’re meant to feel sympathetic and fearful for. The rest are just there for window dressing, to be honest, highlighting once again the difficulties in satisfying all the players in an ensemble drama though Gwen does at least now have the quandary of whether she is able to separate her Torchwood and domestic lives to consider. An episode of nice moments rather than any satisfying whole - Alice Troughton’s direction and the striking image of the fairies’ victims choking to death on red petals being most memorable - ‘Small Worlds’ hints at the creative skill of someone who produced some of the most memorable and frightening TV images of a generation’s childhood; yet whose creative teeth have become a little blunted on churning out formulaic fodder for the likes of The Bill and Midsomer Murders. But given the last three episodes, this is a big improvement nonetheless.
Which is more than can be said for Chris Chibnall’s third entry, Countrycide. As principal writer for Torchwood, it seems that Chibnall’s scripts (like Russell T Davies on Who) will dictate much of the series’ tone. So it’s a shame that - following the progress made on ‘Small Worlds’ - Torchwood here reverts to furrowing its own patch of overt sexuality in the place of any proper adult drama. Again, it’s a decent enough premise (albeit one characteristically in debt to numerous cinematic and television antecedents) and by isolating Team Torchwood away from their hi-tech base the episode does at least feel fresher and less claustrophobic than some of its predecessors. Yet again the failings are in the frankly ridiculous attempts to instil the characters’ dynamics with an ‘adultness’ that would shame even the likes of Footballers’ Wives. The sexual tension - and indeed potential rivalry - between Gwen and Tosh for Owen’s affections is a curious touch; but one let down by the continuing still-born execution of Naoko Mori’s performance. Not to mention the overtly sexual (and indeed juvenile) discourse that passes for realistic dialogue in Torchwood. Like a spotty adolescent, this is still a show that thinks that by talking adult then it is acting adult.
Where the episode does score points is in the very effective direction from Andy Goddard (the Brecon Beacons will never look quite so idyllic again) and the neat twist of dangling the red herring of alien involvement only to discover this is just ordinary people doing terrible things. Even this revelation loses power, as the performances of the cannibalistic villagers is more League of Gentleman than it is Hills Have Eyes; a fact made all the more damning with Owen Teale’s thinly-veiled impression of the League’s infamous butcher Hillary Briss. Then there’s the whole issue of a programme made under the umbrella of BBC Wales depicting some of its eponymous inhabitants as a bunch of people-eating, inbreeding savages (hardly a good advert for the Welsh Tourist Board!). ‘Countrycide’ tries hard to reach the same aesthetic as any of the half-dozen recent horror entries that it wants to ape (Dog Soldiers, Cabin Fever, the recent Texas Chainsaw remake) but falls short for the usual reasons: too much shouting and profanity in the place of real tension and genuine chills.
And so the pendulum that is Torchwood’s quality control swings once again. Greeks Bearing Gifts is far from a perfect episode but is to be applauded for having at its centre a genuinely intriguing premise (would the concept of hearing other peoples’ thoughts be a good or a bad thing?) and a stand-out guest-star performance in the shape of Daniela Denby-Ashe as the alien Philoctetes; whose pendant and its inherent properties at last gives Toshiko some much-needed character, let alone character development. As the clear outsider of Torchwood’s clique - even Ianto’s ‘cleaner-upper’ seems to be more respected and needed - Tosh has had a pretty poor half-dozen episodes in which to establish either any character or sympathy in the viewer. Being the unpopular geek of this particular Scooby gang (Velma, anyone?) is hardly a good starting point, and this episode does at least flesh out the reasons behind Tosh’s self-imposed loneliness and some credence to the rather far-fetched idea that she holds a torch for Owen (though precisely why she does, given his rather unattractive habit of belittling her at every turn, still remains perplexing). Where the episode loses points - and, as always with Torchwood, by going for the lowest common denominator of some girl-on-girl action - is in having Tosh’s ‘rebound’ from Owen resulting in her falling into the first pair of arms that come her way. In this case the manipulative Mary and her pendant which allows the wearer to access people’s thoughts like they’re little more than radio waves. Now, had Tosh’s seemingly sexless existence been made more explicit then this we could believe; but again there’s a disturbing suggestion that sexual deviance is some kind of reaction to not being able to get a regular mate like everyone else. Tosh has seen her secret crush go off with another woman, so what does she go and do? Turn lesbian and become a seemingly willing victim to someone who manipulates her evidently vulnerable state with the temptation of seeing just how screwed up everyone else is too. By invading the thoughts of those around her, Mary’s innocent game of psychic intrusion takes on the mantle of mental rape if the metaphor is followed to its logical conclusion.
This aspect spoils what could have been an intelligent and insightful examination of the everyday neuroses of ordinary people. There’s a great scene where Tosh - wearing the pendant in the middle of a bustling Cardiff street - hears the thoughts of every passer-by; from the woman worrying about her looks, via the guy fantasising about being a James Bond villain to the very disturbing thoughts of a man who is evidently planning to kill both his family and himself. This last example also highlights the episode’s rather blatant steal from Buffy’s ‘Earshot’, in which the titular slayer also became an unwilling recipient of peoples’ thoughts; and like Tosh here, prevented mass homicide as a result. As for the framing device of the uncovered skeleton and its link to Mary’s true identity - an alien political refugee seeking entry into Torchwood’s inner sanctum - it’s all pretty flimsy stuff, as Torchwood once again goes the easy route of providing titillation above mental stimulation leaving the episode as little more than a clichéd examination of how all we ever think about is sex. Even the moral - that perhaps peoples’ innermost secrets and desire should stay just that - is lost amidst a predictable onslaught of sub-soft-porn sex-scenes and Owen thinking about how to conceal one of his hard-ons. I mean, seven episodes in and this show’s still thinking that a few expletives and some adult discourse is all it takes to make proper drama. Yet there’s still hope. If nothing else ‘Greeks Bearing Gifts’ is a great Jack episode (did I mention, he’s got a direct line to the PM these days) and has one or two enticing hints as to how the whole Harkness arc is gonna play out for the second half of the series.
I think the start of They Keep Killing Suzie pretty much sums up one of the major problems Torchwood as a series has: they’re not very likeable. As the team arrive on a police tip-off regards the latest in a series of brutal murders, the reaction of the investigating officer (played by Yasmin Bannerman) says it all: Torchwood walk all over both the police and the city as though they are a higher power; their cockiness matched only by their lack of regard for the consequences of their actions. It was there all the way back in ‘Everything Changes’ when their involvement in the murders which first brought them to Gwen’s attention were just an excuse to test out the resurrection glove and it’s appropriate that it’s here - in this thinly-veiled sequel to the pilot episode - that Jack and co. have a rather uncomfortable time when a certain chicken comes home to roost.
Typically of Torchwood the episode presents an intriguing premise, only to shoot it all down in flames with a plot so convoluted it would give you a migraine to keep up. While Torchwood think that they’re investigating a mystery which seems to bear their name, in fact they’re being lured into a complex chain of events that former operative Suzie Costello has somehow meticulously planned from beyond the grave. And that’s not the end of it; to achieve her goal Suzie has not only installed a Trojan horse-style patsy to kill people in Torchwood’s name, but she’s also hypnotised the same person into locking down all of the Hub’s systems once he’s imprisoned inside (by reciting pages from the complete works of Emily Dickinson, no less). As far as over-egging the mix goes, this gives even the likes of The Usual Suspects a run for its money. To their credit newcomer writers Paul Tomalin and Daniel McCulloch do have some interesting concepts at work here. The whole notion of being able to bring someone back to life with the memories of their demise intact - an aspect only briefly touched on in ‘Everything Changes’ - is very disturbing. And the scenes in which first Jack - whose lack of ‘empathy’ makes him unsuitable for the task - and then Gwen resurrect each of the victims is as ‘adult’ in the way it should be as Torchwood has got. Once Suzie is resurrected - bizarrely, by shoving the knife with which she killed her victims into her chest - then all the common sense and tension which has been carefully built up is swiftly disposed of in favour of more of the cod science that this series has already used too often. Ending in a predictable race-against-time for the team to rescue the rather gullible Gwen from Suzie’s clutches; as it seems that while bringing people back from the dead, the ‘risen mitten’ (as Ianto calls it!) also sucks the life out of the person doing the resurrecting.
As so often with Torchwood you’re left bemoaning the waste of a good idea with some poor execution and several factors which just don’t make any sense such as Suzie’s whole plan to ensnare Torchwood into a series of actions which would force them to bring her back from the dead (despite the obvious shortcomings of this, since when did the glove resurrect more than only the recently dead?). Or how the solution to the Hub’s shutdown would be the ISBN from a book left arbitrarily lying around amongst Suzie’s belongings. Then there’s the whole issue of why Suzie wanted to be resurrected in the first place: does she really believe that her colleagues will welcome her back, having not only killed three people but also having drained the life-force of a fourth in order to finish her grand plan? And what’s the deal with the visit to her ailing father, where she goes from doting daughter to committer of patricide in a heartbeat (an underdeveloped subplot about her ‘abusive’ childhood, no doubt?) Too many questions and not enough coherent answers is becoming Torchwood’s dramatic signature it pains me once again to say.
Jacquetta May’s Random Shoes is as indebted to other sources as any other episode this season - principally the film Ghost, with its similarly limbo-stuck central character - but what it is clearly trying to ape is Who’s ‘Love & Monsters‘; depicting another socially-inept loner whose obsession with his passion leads to tragedy. The first problem with this episode is the lack of any credibility that Torchwood would be called in to investigate the hit-and-run death of someone who just happened to turn up at many of the crime scenes they investigated. Last week saw the police bring them in to solve a case of multiple murders; this week an RTA?!? Then there’s the whole resolution - I can take the idea that Eugene’s lingering presence following his death is as a result of swallowing the alien eye; but having been cremated and any last part of his mortal remains separated from it, how then does his non-corporeal form manage to save Gwen? In fact, shouldn’t he just pop off once his funeral is over? Or even more pertinent, how does the eye manage to keep his spirit (if that’s what it is) hovering about anyway?
Quibbling about logic is becoming a pointless exercise when it comes to reviewing Torchwood, so let’s try and look at the positives instead. Um, well the guy playing Eugene is okay; and at least Gwen is given the chance to prove that she’s still about the only likeable character amidst Torchwood’s rag-tag of misanthropes and social screw-ups. Which sadly raises the question of why precisely Eugene is so enamoured - not to mention aware - of this supposedly secret organisation; and why should we as an audience have sympathy for someone who is deluded enough to think that Torchwood are cool in the first place?
Sorry, that logic thing again. But it says a lot for this series that we keep coming back to the plot inconsistencies. And why? Because there’s rarely anything else on offer to distract us. Likeable people? Nope. Genuine human drama? Did you see ‘Cyberwoman’? ‘Random Shoes’ tries very, very hard to make us care for this feckless everyman who just stumbles - like ‘L&M’s Elton Pope - into this fantastical world of aliens and mysteries, but the aesthetic so richly mined by Season Two’s episode just seems like over-egged schmaltz here. All the ingredients are there - lost parents and lost souls; endearing dreamers who hope for a world beyond the mundane; a final truth that life is brief so make of it what you can - but by attempting to be poignant when we just don’t care about either Eugene or the focus of his dreams, then the lack of resonance kills the episode stone dead. In an episode which tries to instil Torchwood with some much needed heart, what is most regrettable is how it all just boils down to two blokes ripping off a supposed mate. ‘Love & Monsters’ message of there being so much more to life than the one thing that so consumes it is here turned into a rather depressing diatribe on the selfishness of everyday people; and is bereft even of any reassuring coda that something ‘bigger and better’ (to quote Elton Pope) is out there. Because Eugene - unlike Elton - doesn’t even get to find out whether aliens really exist or not…
Now this is more like it. Torchwood finally hits pay-dirt with Out of Time, a lyrical tale of love, loss and the inescapable finiteness of existence. Newcomer Catherine Tregenna’s script sparkles with memorable characterisation, some poignant moments of insight and a dose of controversy that for once warrants the ‘adult’ label that Torchwood has been striving so hard for, but has all too often fallen short of. In a story almost devoid of any sci-fi trappings - indeed, the three refugees left stranded some fifty-plus years from their own time aside, you’d almost forget you’re even watching a genre programme - the episode finally capitalises on Torchwood’s potential for more morally complex storytelling, whilst providing a sense of characterisation largely lacking up to this point. The romance between Owen and aviation-adventuress Diane Holmes is charming and on the whole beautifully-executed but what is particularly striking about ‘Out of Time’ is in how it neatly balances its tragic and comedic moments equally. While Gwen is having some sitcom-style culture-clashing comedy moments as she brings the naïve Emma Cowell up to speed on how the dating game has changed in half a century, Jack is left to carry the emotional burden of John Ellis, shorn of both his long-dead wife and his Alzheimer’s-riddled son - who he meets again in a particularly moving scene - and ultimately left so bereft of hope in a world that has (quite literally) passed him by that he decides that taking his life is the only option. This latter element highlights in particular how Torchwood’s remit to produce more adult stories can pay off in spades when the material is as poignant and as shocking as this. No doubt many viewers will be appalled by the fact that Jack quite willingly lets a man die by his own hand rather than fight to convince him of the worthiness of existence but it’s a theme very much consistent both with the episode’s message - that each of us has our time to live as well as our time to die - and with the continuing unpeeling of the Captain’s character. Ironically Jack regains much of the humanity he has apparently lost since his resurrection by his very inaction when it comes to saving John Ellis’ life because only he can understand the spiritual emptiness that comes as a result of also being a man out of his time…
For a series that came with a much-vaunted premise of high-tech, high-concept sex ‘n’ thrills, Torchwood produces its best episode to date by telling a very simple, human tale in which the only threat is the passage of time itself. As Jack at one point says, there’s ‘no puzzle to solve, no enemy to fight’; and what you’re left with instead is an episode packed with so many memorable moments that you don’t even notice the fact that for once Team Torchwood aren’t racing against time to save the day. Moments like Owen telling Diane he loves her without actually saying the words; or Gwen and Emma’s discussion of sexual morality actually seeing the two swap tutor/pupil places; or John Ellis’s joy at seeing a glint of his young son in the dementia-afflicted old man in the nursing him; or how Jack holds his hand as the car-fumes provide John with an escape from the life of missed opportunities and dead loved-ones he now finds himself in. If only Torchwood had been half as engaging and provocative as this in its previous nine episodes, then we’d be talking about something really special…
Of course, writer Noel Clarke will need no introduction to anyone who’s been following the Doctor’s adventures these past two years and the author of indie-hit Kidulthood makes his Who-niverse writing debut with Torchwood’s eleventh episode Combat, a spin on Angel’s Season One episode ‘The Ring’ and cult David Fincher film Fight Club. For anyone with long enough memories to recalls the Weevils from the debut episode - and how their presence there suggested more than the spit ‘n’ cough cameos in a couple of episodes since - there is some sort of payoff here; with the creatures cast as somewhat more sympathetic victims of a group of directionless yuppies who have decided to use them as the basis for some bizarre kind of underground illegal boxing ring. Once again, Burn Gorman’s Owen takes centre stage; his heart-break of last week’s episode very much providing the catalyst for events here. There’s even an attempt to parallel Torchwood’s medical doctor with the exploitation of the Weevils: both are in a kind of existential pain and both attract the attentions of the Tyler Durden-modelled leader of the ‘fight club with aliens’ organisation, Mark Lynch. Not that the inspiration particularly needs highlighting, but Lynch (whose surname almost screams out an embarrassed homage from Clarke to his source material) even paraphrases several of Brad Pitt’s speeches about directionless youth needing some kind of outlet for their pent-up anger. Meanwhile, Gwen finally finds her two lives come crashing together as boyfriend Rhys’ growing dissatisfaction with the direction which their lives have taken force her to confess to the affair she has been having with Owen. However, having only decided to come clean once she has drugged her boyfriend with the amnesia pill she herself was a victim of in episode one not only highlights how morally compromised Gwen’s position has become, but also perpetuates one of Torchwood’s underlying themes: that the secretive and seemingly ‘above the law’ existence of the organisation is a corrupting influence on its members.
‘Combat’ has an energy and conviction that has all too often been lacking in more cerebral episodes; but where it falls down is in the rather blatant way it wears its influences on its sleeve. To be fair, Fincher’s film did this whole existential angst thing so well that anything else which tries to plough a similar furrow is almost doomed to failure but to have characters almost reciting chucks of the Fight Club script like karaoke singers is perhaps a homage too far. As with Kidulthood, writer Clarke seems to have a firm grasp on both street culture and the disaffection of modern youth and hopefully his next script - be it on Torchwood or perhaps even its parent show - needs to show a greater degree of originality for these worthy ideas to bear fruit.
So, with just two episodes to go Captain Jack’s story comes full circle in an episode which evokes the Time Agent’s Who debut in ‘The Empty Child’ whilst peeling off another couple of layers from his enigmatic background (not to mention adding another few). Investigating reports of ‘ghostly’ music from a soon-to-be demolished music hall, Jack and Toshiko are transported back to 1941 and one particular night when a certain Captain Jack Harkness bade farewell to his sweetheart before dying in battle the next day. Leaving his name free for any passing con-man to adopt…
Catherine Tregenna’s second script for Torchwood - like her first, ‘Out of Time’ - contains as much heart and warm human emotion as pretty much the rest of this first series put together. In what has frequently been a cold and emotionless show, it comes as something of a shock (not to mention, pleasant surprise) to find you once more sympathising for this most socially and sexually maladjusted bunch of misfits. Principally with Jack, whose rather amoral and clinical view of things post-resurrection has perhaps been one of Torchwood’s biggest failures (especially when you consider his almost universally acclaimed impact in just five episodes of new Who). And no matter how much you argue this stance as part of some overriding character arc, it’s been difficult to regard Jack as a leader when his team are largely so unlikeable and he himself has become so inured to life that the very joie de vivre he previously showed was almost totally absent. Fortunately, ‘Captain Jack Harkness’ (its title being almost a mission statement for reminding viewers what the principal appeal of this show was) goes some way to redressing that. Not least of which being how the episode’s setting of war-torn Britain in 1941 was arguably the perfect setting for Jack’s character. Now, any period drama is almost by nature rich in atmosphere, but seeing Jack wax nostalgic for the sounds, sights and senses of the blitz only adds to the effect; whilst reminding viewers of just how much this man has lost since he was taken out of ‘his’ time. The forties setting also allows for some nice social commentary about Toshiko - a Japanese woman at a time shortly before the events of Pearl Harbour - and how this live fast/die young society where the prospect of sudden death was never far away led to some intense and impassioned liaisons.
Which brings us to the emotional crux of the episode: Jack’s brief and ultimately doomed dalliance with the ‘real’ Jack Harkness. Admittedly, in a series which has already flirted on several occasions with same-sex relationships this could be construed as perhaps one trip too many to the titillation well. But in Tregenna’s hands - a writer who almost managed to make Owen Harper sympathetic for one episode, remember - the result is a warm and touching examination of not just the taboo subject of homosexuality in the 1940s, but also the dare-not-mention-it reality of men-loving-men in the armed forces. What particularly impresses is how Tregenna layers in the suspicion of the real Captain Jack Harkness’ torn feelings between the sweetheart he is leaving behind and the secret yearnings that are making their relationship a lie; no doubt other writers in other episodes would have been far less subtle.
But don’t dig too deep into the rest of the episode, because it’s as redolent with Torchwood’s characteristic faults of ill-thought plotting and tedious bitching as pretty much any of the rest. Owen and Ianto get to bitch-fight over whether to open the rift or not - with the customary Mexican stand-off resolution, of course - while Gwen’s investigations into her friends’ disappearance is a less than subtle steal from the ‘Triangle’ episode of The X File in which Mulder and Scully pass through the same location, but in different time-zones. Torchwood may be pretty trashy TV, but at least in Tregenna’s hands you get some sense of how much better this show could be.
End of series finales - thanks principally to the cliff-hanger nature laid down by American dramas like Dallas - have become more about spectacle than substance and the climax to Torchwood’s inaugural season is no exception. Big bangs, lots of shouting and things making about as much sense as the proverbial script written by a bunch of monkeys. Torchwood in a nutshell then.
On first viewing, the sheer kinetic pace of End of Days may be enough to paper over the gaping holes in the script which ape the cracks in time that Owen’s opening of the rift have now created. But look as the plot inconsistencies with more than a passing glance and you’ll see yet again the disappointing impact that chief writer Chris Chibnall has made in cementing Torchwood’s credentials as serious drama. The disappointment here stems more from the fact that the final episode of any series should provide some kind of closure to events and themes that have been developed across the previous weeks; and not suddenly throw in some half-arsed McGuffin simply because special effects company The Mill have a few hours spare.
Let’s see what saving graces this episode has. Well, first and foremost is Eve Myles’ performance as Gwen. While she’s perhaps not been best served by the somewhat inconsistent characterization inherent of Torchwood’s principals, ‘End of Days’ does at least give her a chance to shine and show some of the heart and grit promised much earlier on in the series. Whether it be sharing a tender moment at last with boyfriend Rhys - who you just know is doomed as soon as he finally gets to visit his other half’s place of work - or in the downright heart-wrenching scene where she discover him dead in a pool of his own blood, Myles is about as good as anyone gets in this series: touching, sympathetic and - yes - believable. And sure, the moment when Torchwood’s already fractious team relations reach something of a nadir even by their standards - with Owen despatching Jack in the process - has a sort of visceral thrill that you’re not likely to want to admit to enjoying. Like I say, this is an end of season finale writ large; and all the tension and drama is ramped up to eleven regardless of whether it makes any sense.
Okay, those plot holes. Time is seeping through the cracks as a result of Owen opening the rift when rescuing Jack and Tosh from 1941; resulting in Roman soldiers and Black Death victims appearing out of nowhere. Eh? Then there’s the time-old device of having the principals’ loved ones appear, warning them of what will happen if they don’t do the one thing that everyone agrees would be A BAD IDEA. So, whadda they do? Open the rift against the advice of the only person who can see through this thinly-concealed attempt by the bad guys to get the good guys to do their dirty work for them.
And that bad guy being…who, exactly? Well it’s not Bilis Manger; despite the fact he pops up again to act all enigmatic like some latter-day evil prophet of doom; and despatching Gwen‘s boyfriend Rhys in the process. No, it seems he’s acting on behalf of some ancient demon who’s just been hanging around these past few millennia for the opportunity to stomp his cloven hooves (very politely so as not to knock over any buildings – ed) all over downtown Cardiff. Like I say, if Abbadon had at least been referred to once or twice before his climactic showdown with Jack then this would have all made some kind of sense but in the event his last-minute rising has all the signs of a production team realising too late that they needed an apocalyptic demon to give their season climax the epic scale it otherwise lacked.
So, with Jack apparently fulfilling his implied prophecy as world-saver and achieving the release from life he has so desired, that would appear to be that. Except it isn’t; for we’re then treated to one of the longest bedside vigils in the history of televised drama. What are we to make of Jack’s unlikely resurrection? That the life-force that first brought him back to life in ‘The Parting of the Ways’ has now been expelled and that he is a mortal man again? Or, that there is apparently no force on Earth - from a bullet in the head to a demon beyond imagining - that can put him down for good now? Either way, it doesn’t bode well for Season Two avoiding the perils of the deus-ex-machina get-out clause any more than Season One did, does it..?
And of course, we have that climax. Just when you thought you’d leave Torchwood behind with a shake of the head, the sound of the TARDIS’ engines whisks Jack away to Who Season Three and the prospect of finally getting to meet the right kind of Doctor (though wouldn’t it be much neater if that wasn’t actually the Doctor’s TARDIS after all…). Yes, you probably sat at home with a shiver down the spine at this point; but I bet it came with a sense of guilty pleasure as well.
Torchwood got commissioned on the back of one writer’s credentials and the unprecedented way in which he resurrected one of the BBC’s crown jewels to the status of mainstream success. But with a second season already announced - and with its BBC Two slot now robbing it of the comfort of being on a minority channel - things will have to pick up for this show. And fast. Else what could have been a truly original, innovative and thought-provoking spin on adult sci-fi is gonna go the way of so many American shows before it.
AMNESIA PILLS
After a mixed reaction to its first season, could Torchwood impress second time around? Chris Orton investigates.
It’s probably fair to say that the first series of Torchwood was not exactly a roaring success with fans of Doctor Who, but it was obviously enough of a triumph with the general audience to make the transition from the digital backwaters to BBC2 which feels like the most natural home for the show, rather than being tucked away on BBC Three. During the promotional round of interviews for this run there was much talk from members of the production team and cast about how rushed they all felt first time and how they have had much more time to ‘get things right’ for the new series. A longer production period should have helped to tighten up the series and hone the scripts to perfection (despite this, John Barrowman has hinted in at least one interview that the behind the scenes organisation of the second series was chaotic at times). The overwhelming impression however, after viewing the first few installments is that the series remains as unfocussed and childish as ever. In the first episode, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, there was a seemingly constant stream of silly sexual innuendos and references that felt shoehorned into the story for no good reason. Yes, we get the idea that Torchwood is for grown-ups (despite there now being a child-friendly pre-watershed repeat the next day), but please tone down the pointless, repetitive sex talk. It gets in the way of the storytelling, and the team behind the series should be concentrating on strengthening the plots rather than inserting (oo-er, inserting, that’s gone and done it now) silly bits of rudeness. This sort of line sticks out (whoops, done it again, you just can’t help yourself after watching Torchwood) a mile and feel completely forced. It’s a shame that the increased production period didn’t result in these tired aspects of the series being ironed out because they do nothing for it. The writers will probably consider it to be humour.
The big news surrounding `Kiss Kiss Bang Bang` was that it featured James Marsters, once of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He appears here as Captain John, another rogue Time Agent who has a penchant for dressing up as Adam Ant and claims to be looking for Captain Jack to help him deactivate some cluster bombs that have been placed by person or persons unknown in a number of locations throughout the city. In the end of course he turns out of course to be a bit of a villain and is well versed in the art of the confidence trick. Captain John is virtually the same as Jack in nearly every respect – he can be crude, he dresses in a similarly anachronistic way, seems to be pansexual (whatever that is) and is also a bit of a crook. As an opening episode `Kiss Kiss Bang Bang` does a decent enough job, and it has the big name guest star, but at times Chris Chibnall’s story feels a bit runaround. Perhaps this is understandable though as in an introductory episode of a new series, on a new channel, plot perhaps has to take a back seat to reintroducing the characters and the set up.
The second episode, Sleeper, was an improvement on the opener story-wise but the pace of it felt incredibly leaden at times. James Moran’s script explores the nature of what it is to be human and we are shown a number of people around Cardiff living apparently normal human lives, blissfully ignorant as to their true self. Suddenly they learn that they aren’t really who they think that they are and are in fact, alien sleeper agents with nasty great blades for arms. Up until the point at which they are activated they have remained dormant but when they are ‘switched on’ (by whom we do not discover) they begin a campaign of suicide bombings, blowing up various places across the city. One of the agents heads to a military facility that apparently contains nuclear weapons, but the budget for the episode must not have been able to stretch to a decent-sized military base, as the one presented here unfortunately looks more like an abandoned factory outbuilding on a derelict industrial estate. One particular agent, Beth, appears to be affected more than the other. After she accidentally slays some burglars who had broken into her home she is found and held by Torchwood. We quickly discover that she is completely torn between her human and alien sides and had no idea that she was anything other than a normal person. In the end she goads the team into shooting her, thus releasing her from the mental torture that she has been under. Judging from this episode Ianto seems to have become the office joker this year with many a quip and humorous comment, but points should be deducted for the just dreadful ‘let’s all have sex’ line.
Episode Three, Helen Raynor’s To The Last Man, was Tosh-centric, featuring her falling for a shell-shocked WWI soldier who Torchwood have had stored in one of their freezers ever since the end of the conflict. Said solider (called Tommy, quite incredibly for a British solder from the first world war) is awoken once a year to undergo a series of medical tests to ensure that he is still functioning okay. Predictably Tosh falls in love with him. Tommy, it is revealed, is going to prove important to the future of the planet at some point, but the team doesn’t know exactly why. The romance is a little far-fetched really, considering that they have only really known each other for Tommy’s equivalent of a week, but it ties well with Tosh’s desperation to find somebody for herself. She and Tommy get on very together, but it is immediately apparent from the moment that they fall in love that the relationship is doomed: Tommy won’t survive in the 21st century. The story was going quite well until the final few minutes when a ridiculous ‘psychic projection’ macguffin was employed to miraculously solve the story. It was interesting to see the 1918 version of Torchwood in action though, with operatives Gerald and Harriet visiting Tommy in the hospital ward with their quaint detection equipment.
Cath Tregenna’s episode Meat came next and despite some quite ropey CGI (the whale from the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy seemingly making a guest appearance), the story isn’t so bad. Tregenna wrote some of the more impressive episodes in the first series but Meat seems somehow more workmanlike. Gwen’s boyfriend Rhys finds himself drawn into the Torchwood world after accidentally stumbling on one of their investigations and finally discovers what his missus-to-be does for a living. After witnessing Gwen at the scene of a road accident Rhys takes it upon himself to follow her and see exactly she has been getting up to, fed up with being kept in the dark by his fiancée about her job. He takes things quite well after the initial shock and volunteers to work alongside the team in an effort to find out where the dodgy meat that is flooding Cardiff is coming from. As it turns out, Rhys seems like a natural at this sort of thing. It turns out that an unfortunate sentient alien creature is secretly tied up in a warehouse having lumps hacked off it to sell to kebab shops and the like. The whale is like the magic porridge pot that never empties as the flesh of the beast keeps on growing back, no matter how much they cut away at it. People all across the city have been unwittingly ingesting the meat from the creature (which must indicate that alien whale meat tastes quite like meat from animals on Earth anyway!) Rhys is proving to be one of the most likeable characters in the show, and it is to be hoped that they make more use of him in future episodes as he somehow seems much more interesting than any of the regulars.
Things start to pick up with episode five, Adam, the second of Tregenna’s episodes, in which Brian Dick appears as the titular character, an infiltrator into the Torchwood team with the ability to manipulate and plant false memories in the minds of people. Prior to the adventure starting he somehow got himself in with the team, and made them all think that he had been a member for years. He does this with all of the Torchwood team, and we get to see each of them undergo a radical personality change: Owen becomes what would probably be regarded as a geek for example, while Tosh becomes more confident (and is apparently Adam’s girlfriend) while Ianto is cruelly made to believe that he is a serial killer. We also get to see a glimpse Jack’s childhood home in the 51st century in this episode and his family scenes that provide an interesting glimpse into the back-story of Jack. Unfortunately John Barrowman just doesn’t seem quite able to carry off the emotional acting that the scenes require and when it matters, he somehow fails to convince. Adam is of course defeated, but questions remain about why he needed to be there in the first place. We don’t find out how he came to be drawn to Torchwood, why exactly he picked out Torchwood to infiltrate or where he went after he was destroyed (presumably back through the Void from whence he came). It would have been better too, to have had an infiltrator have a bit of a better motivation for what they were doing as it all felt a little sketchily covered here. Having said that, Brian Dick is suitably sinister in his role.
Episode six is the best episode of the series so far. Written by JC Wilsher, Reset is a more interesting, tighter paced story than anything so far this series and sees the return of Martha Jones, a companion who was somewhat wasted in Doctor Who, never really being allowed to step out of the shadow of her predecessor, Rose. Here though, Martha is given a little more to do and a lot more responsibility than she was while travelling with the Doctor. Now working as a medical officer for U.N.I.T. Martha seems more strident and rounded as a person. She chose to leave the Doctor for the sake of her family and has managed to forge a successful career for herself. Here she goes undercover to investigate The Pharm, a research facility run by Jim off Neighbours who plays a misguided scientist, and as such is up to no good, meddling and experimenting on aliens. This is what most scientists tend to do in this kind of series. The intention of The Pharm is to perfect a drug that they have developed (called Reset), which is something of a medical panacea, curing just about every disease known to man. The unfortunate side effect of this wonder drug is the fact that alien parasites are released after ingesting it which results in the cured person being devoured from inside by the alien larvae. Its unlikely that the National Institute of Clinical Excellence would give Reset a licence really based on this fundamental flaw. The revelation that Owen is apparently killed at the end of the episode comes as something of a shock, but it’s fairly apparent that this won’t be the last that we see him. John Wilsher is an established television writer, having contributed to some numerous crime series, as well as creating the excellent Between the Lines, and his experience shows in the writing of this episode. It is to be hoped that he returns for the next series, and has not been put off by the experience of apparently having to write multiple drafts of his story.
Dead Man Walking is the middle part of the Martha trilogy in which the team deal with the fall-out of the events that happened at The Pharm. Owen does indeed get brought back to life (of sorts) through the convenient discovery of the other resurrection glove – the first of which we saw way back in `They Keep Killing Suzie`. Jack discovers the gauntlet in an abandoned church where a bunch of Weevils are sleeping rough. Burn Gorman is very good in the episode, and it is clear that from what he goes through Owen will be a very different person in future. Somehow, the gauntlet being used on him results in Death entering this world and Owen finds that Weevils are scared of him (speaking of Weevils, why is it that they all have the same regulation boiler suit? Surely they should be wearing all manner of tatty rags? Or are Weevils issued with their uniforms by a Weevil workers co-operative?) Unfortunately Martha doesn’t appear to do a great deal in this episode really, apart from have the life temporarily sucked out of her by the glove and end up old and wrinkly for a few minutes. Of the rest of the cast, Naoko Mori shows that she is by far one of the best actors on the show, even if her character appears a little one-note at times. They really should give her something more interesting to do than just pine after Owen. The appearance of Death was quite well realised, with a skeleton being enshrined in black smoke, although the smoke aspect does seem to have been inspired by the smoke creature from Lost. Owen’s dance with Death is a bit of a weak way for Death to be defeated really (and it just looks a little corny). Luckily though, Owen drains the energy from Death, and Martha is restored to her natural state. The ending of the episode feels perhaps a little rushed too, although it is hard to see how they could have written an alternate get-out given that there was just Owen and Death locked in an empty hospital together.
A Day in the Death comes from the pen of well-regarded Big Finish writer Joseph Lidster. This is his first script for television and he does rather a good job with it. The story takes a step back from the all-out action of earlier episodes and deals with the ramifications of Owen being dead. Sort of. Owen is too all intents and purposes still alive - he can still move around and talk, but he is also trapped in his own nightmare. He can’t heal, recover, eat, drink, age or breathe (despite this last fact, he can still speak – how does that work do you think?). Burn Gorman does a terrific job at portraying a man in turmoil, and again shows how much better than he is than the rest of the cast (Naoki Mori aside). Particularly good is the scene where Owen breaks his own finger (knowing that it won’t mend) to show what kind of state his body is in. It’s hard to see how much longer they can continue with the ‘Dead Owen’ storyline though, as surely he will not be able to carry on in this manner for ever. At some point they are going to have get rid of him or find a cure (unless they plan on showing his gradual deterioration until he reaches a point at which he can’t function at all) Killing a character off, only to bring them back negates any kind of emotional investment that the viewer has made into their character. Are they trying to make the characters in Torchwood more like The Doctor? Is there any point in showing death if it doesn’t really mean anything? It’s the same with Captain Jack – he can’t die, so we know that he isn’t really in trouble. In Doctor Who, the Doctor doesn’t die either, but the difference is that he can regenerate – in Torchwood, we are just seeing the same character back again. Good to see Richard Briers again too, appearing here as Henry Parker an elderly collector of alien artifacts (there seem to be quite a few of these collectors around, what with Henry Parker and Henry van Statten from Doctor Who – is Torchwood doing its job properly if so many members of the public can get their hands on this sort of stuff? Or is it that Henrys are just particularly determined collectors?)
This is the last of the Martha episodes, and it’s difficult to shake the feeling that she has been as wasted here almost as much as she was in Doctor Who. She leaves Cardiff at the end of the story, but for all that she has had to do, she might as well not have been there. Bonus points for this episode come for a cameo appearance by Richard Briers, who acts brilliantly in a remarkable little scene as the dying recluse, Parker. Briers puts in a performance way above and beyond the one that he gave the last time that he visited the Doctor Who universe.
Something Borrowed is the Gwen wedding episode that had been hinted at prior to the commencement of the series, and it of course brings the welcome return of Rhys – as well as his mother, Brenda, played by British television favourite Nerys Hughes. Former Coronation Street scribe Phil Ford makes the transition from The Sarah Jane Adventures and produces a belter of a story. The concept of an overnight pregnancy has been done before of course elsewhere, as have shape shifters but the aspects seem to come together well here. Gwen finds herself pregnant after being bitten by an alien shape shifter and faces the daunting task of how to explain it to her fiancée and family mere hours before the wedding ceremony. It’s a pity that Colette Brown didn’t get a meatier role in the episode though. She appears here quite briefly as the shape shifter, but isn’t really given as much to do as her abilities deserve. Nerys Hughes appears albeit only quite briefly but her performance is great – particularly when Jack calls her “an ugly bitch”. Yet again we see more of the innuendo that blighted the early episodes of the series, with more silliness between Jack and Ianto. Given that Ianto was so utterly bereft and distraught when his Cyberwoman girlfriend was killed in the first series, it’s difficult to accept his shenanigans with Jack. And why does the Torchwood team keep having to rely on these amnesia pills (ret conning as its called here)? It’s a lazy bit of scripting to have to keep on using them at the end of each adventure and is becoming just a bit too convenient (with them having already having appeared in the first series, as well as earlier in this one in `Adam`). `Something Borrowed` is a quite silly episode at times and a bit runaround, but one of the best seen so far. Oh, and wasn’t the get-up worn by the male members of the wedding party awful? You just wouldn’t wear that to get married in would you?
From Out of the Rain is the second Torchwood script from P.J. Hammond and is the story that many people have been waiting for. They really should let Hammond write more of the stories in a season (and get him writing on Doctor Who!) because this, like the one that he wrote for series one, is a top episode. Certain reviews of this episode have compared the episode to Sapphire and Steel (logically, given the writer) and said that it feels quite old-fashioned. But being compared to Sapphire and Steel isn’t exactly a bad thing, and old-fashioned scripting isn’t too shoddy either. There can be a place for the more modern style of storytelling and the type seen in the past. The trailer for `From Out of the Rain` at the end of `Something Borrowed` immediately made the episode stand out as something a bit special – it’s all sinister, creepy and circussy. Lots of people find circuses creepy, and the one presented here was even slightly reminiscent of Papa Lazarou’s from The League of Gentlemen. Right from the beginning of the episode this one feels just better than what we have had so far. When an old picture house reopens people who appear in the films that are being shown are somehow brought to life and they roam the city searching for people from whom they can steal their last breath. The Night Travellers, as they are known, are something of an enigma as we don’t really discover where they came from originally but they are great villains. Julian Bleach gives an excellent performance as the creepy and eerie Ghost Maker, bringing to the role both an odd physical presence and a good acting performance too, with a very distinctive voice. Also worthy of a note of praise is Eileen Essell who gives a touching and moving, albeit brief, performance as Christina, an old lady who has lived almost her entire life in a psychiatric hospital after her youthful encounter with the Night Travellers. Pearl is a bit flakey however. She is apparently some kind of mer-person and wants to be near water all of the time, but we learn very little else about her. Camilla Power gives an interesting enough performance, but the character feels a little underdeveloped. The Night Travellers are defeated through Jack realising that trapping them on film once more, and then overexposing it is the way to go. There is a coda to the tale that shows the audience that as long as there are cans of old film around then there is always the possibility of the Night Travellers making a return appearance (perhaps they are even hiding away in one of the missing episodes of Doctor Who?) One of the more startling things about the episode was that almost everybody who the Night Travellers stole breath from died at the end, with only one small boy surviving. It would have been all too easy (and a bit of a cop-out) if there had been a miraculous revelation that resulted in them all being saved, so all credit to PJ Hammond for not going down that route. The Torchwood team isn’t really the main focus of this episode, although Jack gets a little more to do here than of late, as Hammond is seems more interested in exploring the Night Travellers. It’s a shame that Tosh was sidelined for virtually the whole story though – the character has been underserved by the scripts this series and deserves better. Perhaps the story is a little sketchy in places, but the episode looks good, has a number of good settings, feels very atmospheric and is well acted. More like this please. (And there was no need to resort to amnesia pills, either!)
Adrift kicks of the last three episodes of the series and the first of a Chibnall trilogy. A Chibrilogy, if you like. It tells the tale of some of the things that Torchwood (or more specifically, Jack) gets up to without other members of the team knowing. As a result the episode contains a great deal of conflict between Gwen and Jack. Gwen doesn’t like Jack keeping things from her and the rest of the team, which is rich coming from her, given that her own husband knew nothing about her job until recently. This episode contains a terrific performance by Robert Pugh as the unfortunate Jonah Bevan, who was sucked into the Rift as a young man. Pugh doesn’t get a great deal of screen time, but with what he does get he produces an excellent piece of acting. After Jonah was taken into the rift, we discover that he had looked into the heart of a Dark Star, driving him insane as a result (something similar apparently happened to the Master in his youth you’ll remember from the end of Series Three of Doctor Who), before being spat out and returned to Earth. When Jonah came back he had aged forty years or so and has horrific scarring. Ruth ‘Myfanwy” Jones plays Jonah’s mother Nikki and does a good job of portraying a desperate mother, in search of her missing son. Quite how many people would go to the lengths of recording crowd scenes from the television in the hope of seeing their loved one is debatable however. (I mean doing this in the hope of seeing a loved one and then finding them a result of seeing them in a crowd is akin to trying to catch fog in a fishing net really isn’t it?) One good aspect of this episode is the choice of location used for the secret facility where the people who have been in the rift are being looked after. The hospital is on the small island of Flat Holm in the Bristol Channel (once the site of a real sanatorium), so we get to see a bit of variety in the shooting scenery for a change, including Gwen getting to go to the island on a boat. PC Andy makes a return appearance here too, and we learn that he was once Gwen’s partner both in the work and personal sense. He and Gwen seem to have a very abrasive relationship. Given their frequent appearances in the series so far, why didn’t they use the amnesia pills? Surely Gwen could have slipped Jonah’s mother a pill so that she didn’t have to live with the knowledge that her son had become an elderly, scarred man or was it more humane for Nikki to know the truth, however terrible it is?
Fragments reveals more about the history of the current Torchwood team and how they got to be where they are today. Up until this point details about them have been quite sketchy, but here each member of the team gets ten minutes or so screen time detailing how Jack recruited them. First up, is Jack himself. We see him in Victorian times and two stern (for stern, read lesbian) women, who it turns out work for Torchwood, soon capture him. To show how ruthless they are, one of the women callously murders a blowfish that they have in custody. Jack is given very little option other than to work for the institute after he learns from the tarot card-reading girl that he won’t meet the Doctor for another hundred years. He assumes the mantle of leadership on 31st December 1999, after the previous chap in charge of the Cardiff branch kills all of his team, then commits suicide himself, despairing at the kind of things that they have had to do. Of course, if he had remembered to he could have just given them all amnesia pills… Tosh is recruited after Jack rescues her from U.N.I.T. custody, where she has been held after she was found to have constructed a sonic device. Now, this version of U.N.I.T. is quite different to the one that Doctor Who fans will be used to seeing. They keep Tosh locked up in a cell on her own, and denied any form of communication with the outside world. It seems that U.N.I.T.s remit has changed somewhat since the days of the Doctor’s exile on Earth. We later see Tosh working undercover for Torchwood of course, in the Doctor Who episode `Aliens of London` when she encounters the pig in the spacesuit, although she seems to be an expert in pathology by then. Quite why she needed to be undercover when Jack proves in this episode that Torchwood operatives can gain access to U.N.I.T. facilities is another matter entirely. And its odd that Torchwood’s London branch didn’t do the investigating, given that they were still around at this time. In Ianto’s flashback we learn that he worked for Torchwood London and see that he rescued Jack from a Weevil. He wants to join Jack’s team but Jack doesn’t want him to - later they go a bit gay with each other and Jack finally allows Ianto to join his gang. Owen’s is probably the best tale. Working as a doctor in a hospital, Owen is seeking a cure for what he thinks is dementia in his fiancée Katie. It turns out though, that her brain has been inhabited by an alien entity that is slowly killing her. Needless to say, all of this is quite a shock to Owen but Jack convinces him to join Torchwood as team medic. One thing though, following the explosion at the start of the episode that traps Jack’s team how exactly did they manage to lift almost an entire building from on top of Tosh with their bare hands? Does the Torchwood Institute possess a special alien brick-levitating machine that they carry around in the back of the Range Rover just in case of such an event? At the end of the episode Jack receives a holographic message from his old nemesis/colleague/partner Captain John, who reveals that he has captured Jack’s brother Gray. John was the one behind the bombs that exploded at the start of the episode and tells Jack that he is going to destroy him. And yes, you’ve guessed it – Jack uses amnesia pills!
The series finale is Exit Wounds and brings with it the return of Captain John, providing a neat bookend to the series. John’s entire raison d’etre seems to be some kind of jealousy about Jack not wanting to be with him, and the fact that he discovered that Jack is more or less immortal. He alluded to this at the conclusion of the previous episode and is back here to take his revenge. But Captain John actually turned out okay in the end, and James Marsters gives a very good performance here. It is revealed that he wasn't really a baddie, but had been being controlled by Gray through the use of a bomb, bonded to his arm. The CGI explosions triggered by Captain John across Cardiff look quite lame really, with no evidence shown of the devastation that would have been caused. Not letting the viewer see the results of the explosions was probably a way of saving money (another economy was made here was with the reuse of the Hoix from Doctor Who episode `Love and Monsters`, although it is good to see underused creatures getting another chance to shine), but surely some kind of disaster zone could have been mocked up to give us a bit more of an impression of the scale of the disaster? It also seems a bit crazy for a city (that has a nuclear power station nearby) to have all of its major computer servers located in one building. Any fool knows that you shouldn’t put all of your eggs in one basket like that. The actor playing Gray - Lachlan Nieboer (ever heard of him before?) - was pretty ropey and bland. There just wasn't the sense of urgency there that the performance required, and he came across as incredibly one-note and dull. He just didn't come across as any kind of real threat - his motivation was weak: it seems hard to believe that Gray became quite so bitter and resentful towards Jack purely because of a mistake. Jack tried to explain that he kept looking for his brother, but Gray still doesn't pause to reflect on this. There was lots of talk about absolving here. It might have been nice to have been given at least a glimpse of the creatures that had tortured Gray for all of those years, but we don't find out anything about them at all. Ideally, to sympathise a little more with Gray's predicament we needed to see at least something of what had happened to him after Jack lost him. We later learn that Jack apparently survived for thousands of years while buried beneath Cardiff by endlessly dieing and then coming back to life, but this doesn't explain how when he is revived by the Torchwood of 1901 why there are no ill effects present whatsoever.
It’s a real shame though that they have apparently got rid of their two best actors. Burn Gorman and Naoki Mori were by far the best things in Torchwood this year, and now we seem to be left with the three least interesting characters, not to mention weaker actors compared to the aforementioned pair. Mori was superb in her death scenes, and the line where she told Owen that he was breaking her heart was delivered excellently. Given that we saw her shot, and that we saw her final message to the team it is hard to see how she should be brought back, and if she did come back the emotional impact of her passing would be lost. We didn’t actually see Owen perish, but given his physical state through the latter part of the series it is unlikely that he will be back. Owen has come a long, long way this time around as a character from the man who was prepared to use a date-rape drug on an unsuspecting woman in the first series. To be honest, these two actors have been the stars of the series and have probably both outgrown Torchwood and deserve to go on to greater fame. The Weevils make another appearance, with huge numbers of them all roaming the streets in their identical boiler suits (perhaps they got a job lot from Cardiff’s Matalan?). Owen once again shows that he can escape them due his King of the Weevils status. No amnesia pills.
Overall, the series has been something of a mixed bag, although it has certainly been an improvement on the first series. Some scripts have been very good while some have been distinctly average. At times the show feels distinctly underwhelming however, almost as if the production team don’t really know which direction to take Torchwood or the characters in. Some of the direction has been quite good however (Jonathan Fox Bassett’s work on `From Out of the Rain` being worthy of note), although some of the acting has been terrible at times (sometimes more so from certain members of the regular cast, than the guest cast). The music on the whole has felt quite intrusive and overblown, with music layered over speaking scenes where there should have been none (witness the confrontation scenes between Jack and Gray in the Torchwood Hub, where the music all but drowns the speech). On the positive side there have been moments that have shown that given a bit more of a polish, Torchwood could be a very good programme. Better use needs to be made of the characters next time around, and the childish, forced, intrusive and simply tiresome sexual references need to be dropped: they aren’t funny and they don’t make the series more grown-up. It’ll be good too if Rhys is used more next time around, as his appearances in this series were amongst the highlights of the run. Perhaps he might be recruited as a member of the team? We need more characters that we feel sympathy towards. It might also be nice if the effects of the time rift are occasionally felt further a field from Cardiff too. The episodes this time around haven’t ventured very far from the city centre (although on the plus side, we have had much less of people standing around on the roofs of buildings for no good reason, and it seems like just a few less sweeping shots of Cardiff Bay and Roald Dahl Plass at night). The episode `Countrycide` from the first series and parts of `Adrift` from this one gave the show a nice bit of variation in terms of location. Hopefully next year there won’t be any of the messing around with the scheduling of the series that has gone on this time, with certain episodes debuting on certain channels, and certain episodes debuting on certain days. Can we just have a consistent run of all thirteen episodes without the day, time and channel shifting please? If Torchwood fans find that they are losing track with the broadcast of episodes, then what chance does the general viewing public have?
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