I'm not even sure what to make of this episode. It's incredibly dumb, but there doesn't even seem to have been any sort of point to it. The best guess I have is that someone said, "Hey, let's bring Indira Varma back! We don't need a good reason!"
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Gwen and Jack bring Suzie back to life. ("They Keep Killing
Suzie") ©BBC |
I mean, it's sort of nice to see her back, but they've bent over backwards to do so in such a way that it's very hard to believe this is how these characters normally act. Why else is Gwen suddenly advocating using that resurrection glove that drove Suzie mad? And why is Jack okay with this? This leads to a plot entirely driven by technobabble, where the authors, Paul Tomalin & Daniel McCulloch (and incidentally, where did these writers come from? This is one of only four author credits for Tomalin, and the only one for McCulloch. Apparently they were a "gift" from Davies' friend Paul Abbott...), simply invent a new bit of technobabble to get from moment to moment. Suzie won't come back to life with the glove? That's okay, stab her with the knife she was killing people with because it's made of the same material -- that'll work! (You know, just like how you can use a kitchen magnet as a speaker.) Need the rest of the Torchwood crew out of the way for a bit? Just have some sort of lockdown! Need them out of it? Have Tosh suddenly start babbling about ISBN numbers. Oh wait, we cut all the power (except for all the lights and things, but never mind) -- so just say that the membrane on the keyboard might recognize the code (!) and we'll be good to go! Oh, and we need to have some sort of connection between Suzie and Gwen, so let's make one up, such that Suzie is slowly leeching life energy from Gwen (and, for some reason, transferring her wounds) -- but make it so that it instantly snaps back when Tosh destroys the glove.
The net effect of all this is to try to suggest that all of these events are part of some elaborate plan Suzie put into action back when she was still (properly) alive, but even when you set aside the huge number of unlikely decisions that would have to coincide for this plan to work, the ultimate point appears to be...what? A way to kill her father? The whole thing is built up like some sort of master plan, complete with locking down Torchwood and drugging some guy for two years just so he'll go mad and put this plan into action, but it's never clear what the payoff is supposed to be. It doesn't look like she wants to achieve anything she couldn't have done while she was alive. (They could have gotten around this by suggesting that she wanted to see what there was after death, but they don't.)
But all of the gaping logical problems might have been acceptable if there'd been a point to it all, some statement Tomalin & McCulloch were trying to make, or some idea they wanted to explore. But there isn't -- at least not in the episode as broadcast; it's possible there was a point to it all that was edited out at some stage, but that's not what we get. Instead we get a series of increasingly unlikely coincidences, and for what? To show that Suzie was dangerous all along? To show that Gwen is easily manipulated? Or is the entire episode just to set up the idea that there's "something moving in the dark" that's coming for Jack? It's hard to tell what they were going for, and thus even harder to tell why they bothered.
(Oh, and apparently Ianto and Jack are shagging now? Ianto recovered pretty quickly from "There isn't an inch of me that doesn't hurt" last episode, didn't he?)