March 2: "Sleeper" (TW)

This episode is an odd beast.  At the basic level, it's about the discovery of an alien sleeper cell, and what happens when the cell activates.  This is the level that the direction is operating on -- Colin Teague chooses to shoot a lot of this in a faux-documentary style, with lots of handheld shots and close zooms for reaction shots from our main cast.

The mind probe reveals Beth's true identity. ("Sleeper") ©BBC

But what James Moran wants to do with his script is focus on the human cost.  To that end, "Sleeper" spends a lot of its story concentrating on Beth Halloran, one of the sleeper agents whose cover is so good that she's not remotely aware she's not human, until her alien part defends itself by killing two burglars.  This leads to the revelation of Beth's real nature and the discovery of the existence of the sleeper cell.  We also get discussions on what it means to be human -- is it enough that Beth feels human and thinks she's human, if her biology makes her alien?  Can she live a normal life now, knowing that she might be activated at any time, erasing her personality as Beth?  It's something of an intriguing discussion, and the episode doesn't provide any strong answers, which is on the whole a good thing.

Incidentally, this episode is where the Ianto Jones we all know and love really starts to snap into focus: he's full of dark humor (the part where he describes what happened to the last person they used the mind probe on), he's wonderfully sarcastic ("And I thought the end of the world couldn't get any worse," he says after Owen suggests they all have sex while the world goes up in a nuclear holocaust), and he's just generally entertaining:

GWEN: Why would anyone want to kill him?
IANTO: He's also the city coordinator.  Takes charge of the city during major emergencies.  Has all the security protocols.
OWEN: How do you know that?
IANTO: I know everything.  And it says so on the screen.

(from The Torchwood Transcripts - Sleeper)

But because "Sleeper" tries to have it both ways, to be both an examination of the human condition and how these events affect Beth, and a taut suspense-filled episode about an alien terrorist attack as the prelude to an invasion (well, sort of; the implication is that the aliens will let the humans destroy themselves and then come in and take over what's left), we get wide variations in tone.  While they're partially successful -- certainly enough that we can easily see what they're getting at -- it is sometimes jarring to have both approaches in the same episode.  This is perhaps most apparent when the action/suspense portion first starts; up to this point it's been a character drama about Beth, but then the cell activates (presumably because Beth went offline) and suddenly we have murders and terrorist attacks in Cardiff.  This is fine, except when that part's over they try to go back to the character drama, where Beth decides she doesn't want to live as a sleeper and commits suicide by threatening Gwen and forcing the rest of the team to shoot her.  "She wanted you to shoot her," Gwen says.  "She used her last shred of humanity to do this."  "We couldn't take that chance," Owen replies.  "She must have known that."  "She did," Jack says.  "She just wanted to make it easier for us."

So as I said, it's an odd episode -- it tries to be both a character drama and an action story, and while it does a decent job at both, the juxtaposition of the two (matched with Teague's direction, which occasionally feels inappropriate for the quiet moments) makes "Sleeper" a difficult episode to really like.  But you can't blame them for trying, and we're still far ahead of where we were for much of series 1.