March 1: "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang"
But it does, both literally (Jack announces his return from Doctor Who by shooting an alien in the head) and figuratively, as this is an episode that's surprisingly energetic and fun, without all the baggage that series 1 had accumulated. It's as if Chris Chibnall and the other showrunners looked at all the feedback and made changes accordingly. It's a welcome move.
One does wonder a bit what people who watched Torchwood and not Doctor Who made of the Captain Jack stuff (admittedly likely to be a very small percentage of the viewing public; that said, I know at least two people who have done just that), as "End of Days" left on something of a cliffhanger, and then this picks up after Jack returns, and the episode refuses to do more than just hint at where he's been (references about how Jack "found my Doctor", and that he'd seen the end of the world, and that's about it -- so hope you saw "Utopia" / "The Sound of Drums" / "Last of the Time Lords").
But what's great about "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" is that, by moving events along in Jack's absence, they've been able to get rid of some of the unwanted problems they had. So Gwen is engaged to Rhys, Owen doesn't seem like a tosser anymore, and Tosh seems more like a proper member of the team than she had been. Even Ianto gets some personality, avoiding Jack's advances (sort of) and rescuing the rest of the team. This means that when Jack's old partner Captain John Hart192 shows up, the Torchwood Three team seems to be a much more coherent unit than they had been.
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| Captain John Hart returns Jack's Vortex Manipulator. ("Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang") ©BBC |
It's energetic, it's fun, and it's even got sex and violence that doesn't feel tawdry. It also manages not to be breathtakingly stupid; the worst offender in this category is probably the "mixed blood injected into Hart will confuse the DNA bomb", which is all right in theory but not with the small dose Hart gets -- and that's nowhere near "Evolution of the Daleks" levels of DNA stupidity. And, happily, Hart is still alive at the end and able to return for a sequel; he's easily the best character Torchwood has come up with yet, and he deserves a repeat engagement or two. If the rest of series 2 is like this episode, Torchwood is in surprisingly good shape.
March 2: "Sleeper"
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.
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| The mind probe reveals Beth's true identity. ("Sleeper") ©BBC |
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?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."
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.
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.
March 3: "To the Last Man"
Like "Sleeper", this is an episode that attempts to put a human face on the more abstract, SF-ish issues Torchwood wants to deal with. But because there's not an action break in the middle, "To the Last Man" is more successful in its aims than the previous episode was.
And so while the SF part deals with two time zones colliding and intermingling (er, just like "End of Days", albeit without the giant demon), "To the Last Man" chooses to focus on the human element, in the form of Private Tommy Brockless, a shellshocked soldier taken away by Torchwood and frozen, to be awoken once a year, until the hour that he's needed to go back to 1918 through the Rift and seal it up behind him. We get some interesting exploration of the nature of warfare -- such as Tommy seeing tanks driving through Iraq and commenting, "First year they woke me up, 1919, they told me it was all over. We won. The war to end all wars, they said. And then three weeks later, you had the Second World War. After all that. Do you never wonder if we're worth saving?" -- and some bitter recriminations of the way soldiers used to be treated. Tommy's outburst when he learns he has to go back is rather pointed -- "I know what'll happen. They'll send me back to the Front. I'll be back in the trenches. ... You're no better than the generals. Sitting safely behind the lines, sending us over the top. Any one of you lot could go, but you're not, are you? You're sending me. ... I've been shoved from pillar to post all my life by the Army, by Torchwood. All this time I've had, it means nothing" -- and the discovery that he's going to be executed for "cowardice" (aka PTSD, essentially) three weeks after he returns is distressing. (Incidentally, this is where the episode title comes from: Field Marshal Haig announced in response to the German Spring Offensive of 1918 that "Every position must be held to the last man", which meant that shell shocked soldiers would be sent back to the front.)
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| Toshiko convinces Tommy to use the Rift key. ("To the Last Man") ©BBC |
And so maybe that's why "To the Last Man" ultimately feels somewhat underwhelming. There's a really lovely human element at the heart of it, and some intriguing anti-war commentary, but the best ideas are relegated to the background, while the episode moves on to its safer (albeit depressing) conclusion. There's a lot that you can admire about "To the Last Man", but there's not quite enough there to make it truly compelling.
March 4: "Meat"
Look how responsible a driver Rhys is, pulling over to the side of the road before answering his phone...
So, like the last two episodes, "Meat" is interested in examining the human cost of these strange alien occurrences. It just happens to be the case that the person affected this time around is Rhys, who stumbles across Torchwood's activities when one of his lorries overturns and he spies Gwen at the scene investigating. And frankly, it's about time that Rhys found something out about Torchwood's activities -- he's been kept in the dark so long that it's nice to finally see him learn something. It also gives Kai Owen a chance to shine -- he's been one of the best things about Torchwood, and it's nice to finally see him take center stage in an episode. He's particularly good in this, tailing Gwen and then getting involved in the alien goings-on, which leads to him acting undercover and even taking a bullet for Gwen. It's also wonderful to see him so enthused about the thought of alien life out there in the universe. It's little wonder Gwen refuses to retcon him.
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| The alien creature, tied down in a warehouse. ("Meat") ©BBC |
What's nice about this plotline is that, for once, Torchwood wants to help the alien lifeform rather than kill it or lock it up. "We see enough death," Jack comments. Of course it doesn't work out, and Owen is forced to euthanize the creature instead of being able to save it, but it's nice that they tried. It's also worrying that the creature was seemingly sentient, which makes the criminals' actions even more heinous, despite their protestations that the creature is just "meat". Jack and Owen both seem particularly affected by this.
If there's a downside to "Meat", it's that the main storyline doesn't have a larger point behind it, other than the now-standard one of "people are the real monsters". But that doesn't really matter -- by focusing sufficiently on Rhys (but not to the point of exclusion), this is the best character-driven episode series 2 has provided yet.
March 5: "Adam"
Oh, come on! It's not bad enough you have to name your failed companion Adam, now we're naming alien monsters Adam too?
Of course, if you're going to share a first name with a parasite, you could do worse than the one we get in this episode. "Adam" the episode is an entertaining, intriguing tale. I like the way shots of Adam are inserted into the opening "this is Torchwood" montage (although they missed a trick by not putting him into the closing slow-motion walking shot -- but maybe it was too difficult to do for such a quick moment). And it's clear that there's something vaguely creepy about Adam, even before it's clear he's manipulating people's memories -- so kudos to Bryan Dick for an engaging performance.
It's a really well-constructed episode -- Catherine Tregenna does a great job of inserting Adam into Torchwood's day-to-day operations and only making it apparent that something's wrong later, as Gwen fails to remember Rhys and Ianto can't find any trace of Adam in his diary, even though he's supposedly been around for three years. The scenes between Gwen and Rhys are surprisingly powerful -- Eve Myles does a great job of acting frightened by this stranger in her apartment, who's gone around putting up pictures of himself, while Kai Owen is lovely as the confused and hurt Rhys. The scenes where Jack tapes Rhys remembering some of their experiences together is sweet and moving.
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| Adam implants unpleasant false memories in Ianto's mind. ("Adam") ©BBC |
This is a clever, solid episode, with some nice elements that keep it from being similar to a lot we've gotten before. The relationships are well-balanced, and the drama is definitely present. It's a way to get "alternate universe" performances without having to construct an alternate universe, and the episode is stronger for that. So I guess if you're going to share a name with an amoral alien, you certainly could do far worse than "Adam".
March 6: "Reset"
The successes keep on coming for Torchwood, as "Reset" provides another strong episode for series 2. It's got a strong plot and strong characterizations, which make for a great combination.
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| Martha is readied to become the next subject in the Mayfly clinical trial. ("Reset") ©BBC |
But as I said, it helps that they've provided her with a strong plot to work with. I really like how the plot develops, from a deadly conspiracy to a pharmaceutical company that's using alien things to try and cure diseases, only the alien stuff is going wrong. So not only does their conspiracy plotline logically expand out to cover alien issues, but it also provides a convenient way to get Martha in on the main action, as well as flirting with the issue of medical ethics. If you could cure any disease and "reset" someone back to their "factory settings", so to speak, but you ended up killing patients because your "cure" is actually an alien parasite that will kill its host, would it be worth continuing the trials in the hope of isolating the "reset" part? The people at the Pharm think so -- in fact, they have a number of aliens chained up and isolated so that useful chemicals can be extracted, regardless of how the aliens feel about it. It's nice to see Jack on the side of the aliens ("Combating hostile aliens is one thing," Jack tells Dr Copley, "but this is slavery, exploitation, a war crime") -- series 2 seems to be making an effort to pull Torchwood back from the rabid xenophobic position it held in series 1 -- and it makes it a lot easier to root for them when they shut the Pharm down and essentially euthanize all the aliens inside.
This is a smart, fast-paced, strong episode -- Martha fits in well from the very start, and the assassination of clinical trial subjects leading Torchwood to enslaved aliens is very well handled. And then, just when you think it's all done, Copley shoots Owen dead. Not just wounded, or on the verge of dying, but actually dead. That's a hell of a lead-in to the next episode (and the trailer is all about his autopsy and things like that, so it doesn't seem like there's any sort of fast one being pulled here). The quality of series 2 just keeps going up.
March 7: "Dead Man Walking"
Ah well. I guess the good fortune had to end sometime.
But the thing of it is, "Dead Man Walking" isn't even that bad. It's just a sign of how good series 2 has been that this feels like a come down. There's nothing terribly wrong with this episode; it just has an unfocused feel. The best bits involve Owen and his return from the dead, sort of. Jack retrieves the other Resurrection Glove, the mate of the one that caused so much trouble with Suzie Costello (in "Everything Changes" and "They Keep Killing Suzie", if you've forgotten), in order to bring Owen back -- except instead of for two minutes it brings him back indefinitely, albeit in more of a half state. He can think and move and talk (and breathe, it seems, although that one probably can't be helped), but he can't eat, sleep, or use the bathroom. (One of the more memorable moments involves Owen standing on his head to drain the beer he's drunk out of his body, while Jack looks on in horror.)
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| Owen fights Death. ("Dead Man Walking") ©BBC |
So when "Dead Man Walking" is trying to present us with another potential "end of everything" scenario, it's a rather pedestrian affair. Where this episode succeeds is when it deals with the effects of Owen's death and his sort-of resurrection: things there are a lot more interesting.
Huh. Owen is one of the best things about this episode. We really have come a long way since the beginning.
March 8: "A Day in the Death"
It's funny; when this episode began I was not at all on board with it. It seemed like a rather generic script -- admittedly about an unusual subject, but still. But by the end I was completely engrossed by Joseph Lidster's script, and the ending was quite lovely and charming.
The framing story -- Owen talking to a girl who's preparing to commit suicide by jumping off a building -- is done reasonably well, and Lidster does a good job of changing the audience's perceptions of why Owen is up there as the story progresses. It's the internal storyline -- the part that Owen is ostensibly narrating -- that starts off problematically. Jack seems to be treating Owen a lot more harshly than he was at the end of the last episode, and it's understandable that Owen ends up feeling like a useless spare part. (And we should probably assume that there's some narrative bias at play, as this is intended to be Owen's version of events.) The problem is that it's hard to sympathize with Owen. Yes, he's suffered a bizarre tragedy, and he has to deal with the consequences of that, but he still acts like a brat -- being a real dick to Ianto and Tosh, and generally morose around everyone else.
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| Owen finds the dying Henry Parker. ("A Day in the Death") ©BBC |
It sounds somewhat clichéd, but it works for two reasons -- the first is that framing sequence, where Owen uses his experiences to help convince Maggie that things do in fact get better, even if it might not seem like it. The second is Andy Goddard's direction, which really pulls you into the story, and the performance of Burn Gorman, who knows exactly what Goddard is going for and is able to match it in every scene. It's really a fabulous job.
It's not the most flashy of episodes, but that's a strength for "A Day in the Death". Rather than try to shoehorn an "end of the world" plot into a character-driven episode (like, say, "Sleeper"), they've provided an organic story that ties in nicely with the themes being grappled with. In its own quiet way, "A Day in the Death" may be one of the best episodes Torchwood has turned out.
March 9: "Something Borrowed"
The main issue with this episode is that it seems to be trying to be two things at once: it wants to be a funny, rather lightweight story, but it also wants to be a standard Torchwood story, with horrific aliens and macabre events. (It also wants to be the "event" episode, showing the marriage (finally) of Gwen and Rhys.) The end result falls between the two camps, not really succeeding at either.
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| Gwen is escorted up the aisle by her father. ("Something Borrowed") ©BBC |
This is also a problem because the other storyline (shapeshifting alien implants an alien baby in Gwen, then the mom comes to collect the offspring) just isn't distinct enough to maintain interest. There are some interesting moments (the way the mother kills the DJ and wraps up Tosh and "Banana Boat", the general shapeshifting idea), but there's no real impetus behind them, no way to distinguish this from any other monster episode. There's not even much danger involved -- once the female shapeshifter is discovered, there's little in the way of complications until Jack shoots it dead.
And that's really the problem with "Something Borrowed" -- it clearly wants to be the "fun" episode of the series, but it pulls most of its punches, as if it's never quite sure if the comedic moments are acceptable. This means that the whole thing falls flat. It's not actually a bad episode, but it could have been so much better; instead, we get a rather unmemorable "event" episode.
March 10: "From Out of the Rain"
This must have looked good on paper; a somewhat mysterious circus that steals people's "last breaths", which drains them of all the moisture in their bodies. Throw in some inexplicable stuff about surviving on old nitrate film stock and it seems like this should have come out OK.
But somewhere along the line something went askew, and the final result is missing something. To their credit, the main cast try to make this as believable as possible -- Ianto in particular seems extremely affected by all the events -- but it's just not enough. Not even Jack showing up in the old films really makes it work.
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| The Ghostmaker and Pearl regard their silver flask. ("From Out of the Rain") ©BBC |
I don't know; this could have worked if they'd played up the mysterious angle more and given the Travelers some sort of fig leaf explanation as to why they were around. But as is, where we just learn bits and pieces from Jack with little context, it's hard to be invested in it. "From Out of the Rain" is thus unfortunately something of a disappointment.
March 11: "Adrift"
Boy, talk about a tearjerker of an episode, huh?
In some ways this is portrayed as something of a conspiracy thriller -- Gwen and Tosh discover that not only are things deposited in Cardiff from the Rift (as we've already known), but sometimes people are taken from Cardiff by the Rift and sent somewhere else. Except Jack seems oddly reluctant to do anything about it. Thus "Adrift" spends its time from Gwen's point of view, as her investigation into a missing boy leads her to this discovery.
This storyline is presented in a really nice way, as Gwen (after being confronted by her old police partner Andy about becoming too hard and uncaring) starts investigating what seems to be a slightly odd disappearance that snowballs to become bigger and bigger. This part is handled very well, as Gwen delves deeper and deeper into the mystery, only to find it gets larger and larger -- the scene where more and more people come to Nikki's "missing persons" support group being a particularly effective moment. Chris Chibnall also does a good job of casting doubt and suspicion on Jack; Gwen is repeatedly told by him to drop this investigation, which makes us wonder about his motives. After all, there's still an awful lot we don't know about Jack, and frequently we're not sure why he does things. Did he therefore know about the Rift taking people and is choosing to cover it up? It's really well handled, and we can't help but be drawn in. And balanced against this is Gwen's relationship with Rhys, where he lays into her about forgetting why she's in Torchwood in the first place -- to fight so people can have a normal life. This is also a highlight of the episode, and Eve Myles and Kai Owen both do a great job in this scene.
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| The adult Jonah. ("Adrift") ©BBC |
This is an adept, well-constructed episode. Once again, by focusing on the characters and the people affected by the weird events, Torchwood comes out ahead. Clearly they've figured out what works best on this show, and "Adrift" is a prime example of this.
March 12: "Fragments"
This is something of a hard episode to get a grip on. At its heart, it's simply recounting how each member of Torchwood bar Gwen (who we already know about) joined Torchwood Three in Cardiff. As such there's not really any sort of storyline or a thread to follow all the way through the episode -- instead, "Fragments" relies on the audience being interested in the main characters and wanting to learn more about their back stories.
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| Jack is interrogated by Torchwood Cardiff. ("Fragments") ©BBC |
The other stories aren't quite as intriguing, just because they don't tie into the history of Torchwood (and Doctor Who) quite as much, but they're still neat to see. Tosh was stuck in a UNIT prison without hope of appeal or release because she built a sonic modulator for some villains so that they would release her mother when Jack got her out in exchange for working for him (and boy, UNIT sure became a lot more intimidating and brutal since Jon Pertwee's time -- it's clearly meant to parallel the War on Terror and prisons like Guantanamo Bay, but still); Ianto begged his way into the organization after the Battle of Canary Wharf and the destruction of Torchwood London; and Owen was a doctor whose fiancée had a brain tumor that turned out to be an alien lifeform -- his efforts to find out what happened, and what happened afterwards despite the Torchwood cover-up, sufficiently impressed Jack to recruit him as Torchwood's medic. They're all decent stories, and they work better because we've come to care for these characters -- but one does wonder what someone whose first episode was "Fragments" would make of this.
Still, it's nice to get some of the team's past details filled in before the series 2 finale, and even if there isn't a thread linking all these together (beyond "everyone's (Torchwood) life flashes before their eyes"), what we get gives us some nice insights into the characters. That's enough to sustain the episode, and it seems we actually get a cliffhanger -- Captain John Hart is back to cause trouble for Jack, and he's brought Jack's brother Gray along with him...
March 13: "Exit Wounds"
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.
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| Captain John Hart handcuffs Jack while Gray prepares to make him suffer. ("Exit Wounds") ©BBC |
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.
Footnotes
192 Remember that "Captain Jack Harkness" is the name of someone who died and then had their identity taken by "our" Captain Jack. Then note the name of the officer in charge of the HMS Seaspite naval base in The Sea Devils, and start to worry about his fate...
193 This isn't an invented speech, but actually comes from Stephen R Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant -- although in that it's a good thing.