An Hour of Who a Day: March 7: "Dead Man Walking" (TW)

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.)

Where the story is less interesting is when it tries to shoehorn a standard Torchwood plot into the proceedings. So Owen ends up being possessed by the Grim Reaper, complete with black eyes and some demonic language¹⁹³, and we get some stuff about Death wanting to claim 13 victims so that it can walk the Earth forever. (This, it seems, is what Suzie was worried about, and not Abbadon as it seemed at the time.) This part of the episode is less successful because it pulls us away from the drama with Owen and into a frankly uninteresting storyline. They try desperately hard to make us care about this part, with a number of hospital patients dying, a withered Martha Jones, and a young boy with leukemia, but they never really get the audience to connect emotionally with this part. Maybe if they'd followed through and had Owen sacrifice himself to stop the Reaper, to be actually gone at the end, this might have worked, but they pull that punch and so Owen merely drains Death's energy away. Full marks for making the Grim Reaper's cloak actually a billowing cloud of smoke though.

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.

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.