March 8: "A Day in the Death" (TW)

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.

Owen finds the dying Henry Parker. ("A Day in the Death")
©BBC

But one suspects that's the point -- to bring Owen to his lowest point, so that during the climactic break-in sequence we see him have a bleak purpose (he seems to enjoy taunting the security guards with his state of being dead), but still a committed one.  This leads to his conversation with Henry Parker (as played by Richard Briers), where Parker reflects on his life and wonders if it was all for nothing.  And then Parker dies and Owen can't perform CPR because he can't provide any breath (er, except he can talk just fine, which also involves exhaling air...), and Owen is ready to sacrifice himself by absorbing the energy from the alien artifact that it was his goal to retrieve in the first place.  And when he realizes what the artifact is -- a reply to one of the "hello" signals mankind has sent into deep space -- he suddenly finds that there's still wonder in the world he can experience.

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.