An Hour of Who a Day: 03/13/15

March 13: "Exit Wounds" (TW)

Well. That was quite the finale. It's hard not to be entertained by an episode with as many big moments, and fortunately "Exit Wounds" delivers.

The basic idea (Captain John Hart comes back to Cardiff to wreak some vengeance against Captain Jack and the rest of Torchwood) has enough mileage to sustain the episode, and the way the other members of Torchwood handle things after a major terrorist attack that I'm willing to bet never gets mentioned in either Doctor Who or The Sarah Jane Adventures goes down in Cardiff is very engaging. Gwen shines as she gives the police force a motivational speech, and the part where Tosh and Ianto investigate "ghosts" at the Central IT Server Station and deal with them by shooting them dead when they advance menacingly on Ianto and Tosh ("There we are then," Ianto says. "Sorted," Tosh agrees) is really nice as well.

But what makes "Exit Wounds" even better is the twist regarding Hart: he's actually being coerced by Jack's brother Gray into destroying Jack's life, as punishment for Jack letting go of Gray's hand and allowing him to be captured by aliens when they were children. Hart rescued him, but it was too late; Gray had been driven mad by hatred, and he's now using Hart to get his revenge on Jack. Hart is as much a victim as Jack is, but he's willing to help Torchwood try and right Gray's wrongs. But it's really interesting to see how Jack reacts to Gray, how he's willing to endure his "penance" because of the guilt he feels at losing Gray. Of course, that doesn't excuse Gray's activities, and so Jack has to stop Gray after enduring the punishment. Still, it's really well done.

But before that, the rest of the team has to deal with Gray's attack -- primarily the one that's causing the nearby nuclear power station to go into meltdown. This leads to the saddest part of the episode, as Tosh (after having been shot by Gray) realizes that they can't stop the meltdown unless they flood the place with the river -- except Owen is trapped inside the control room, and thus is going to (very slowly) die, in a really rather horrible death when you think about it. So we lose both Owen and Tosh, who dies from her gunshot wound. It's a shocking ending, and it's very effective as a result. It demonstrates that there actually are consequences of what we see, that the team members aren't invulnerable.

It's definitely a "big" episode, but "Exit Wounds" delivers. They've managed to create an action-packed finale that is primarily about character relationships, and it's this anchoring of the episode that really makes it work. "Exit Wounds" is a story about change and about loss, about the consequences of the past catching up to you. It does its job, and it does it well.

And that's frequently been the case for this series of Torchwood. It's impressive just how much this show has turned around. Series 1 was, to be frank, something of a disaster, and while things started to get better by the end, all too often it felt like a waste of time. Series 2, on the other hand, looks like it's been making a conscious effort to see what went wrong with series 1 and fix those problems. At times it's difficult to imagine this is the same show -- that's how much things have improved. It's genuinely a pleasure to see Torchwood turn itself around the way it did, and I'm looking forward to seeing where the show goes next.