Torchwood continues strong with this second episode of
Miracle Day. "Rendition" (or "Renditions", if you're going by the iTunes intro) is primarily about two things: Jack and Gwen's flight across the Atlantic (Rhys gets left behind with Anwen), and Rex's CIA colleague Esther Drummond being pulled into this Torchwood conspiracy and set up as a patsy. Sure, there are some other things going on involving the consequences of the Miracle (such as Vera working out that they were treating patients in the wrong order, now that no one can die), and we're introduced to the character of Jilly Kitzinger, a public relations representative who's so perky and calculatedly scatter-brained that it kind of rubs you the wrong way, but those often feel like background details while we focus on other things.
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| Jack is poisoned. ("Rendition") ©BBC Worldwide, Limited |
One of those things is a conspiracy within the CIA against Rex and Esther, purely because of their investigation of Torchwood -- somebody out there
really doesn't want people to learn about the connection between Torchwood and the Miracle. Not that Torchwood understands it yet either. But as Rex says, "I don't think you actually know anything. ... What you are is connected. And someone has made a link between that old Institute of yours and the Miracle. And now they want to kill you for it. So we work out what the connection is, and then we start to solve it." Jack has a theory, involving morphic fields
233 being reversed (which is why he can be injured and not heal -- as Rhys puts it, "Everything mortal becomes immortal, so everything immortal becomes mortal"), but as of right now it's little more than a theory. It's enough to worry the conspiracy, though (whose face is currently that of CIA agent Brian Friedkin, as played by Wayne Knight -- perhaps still best known as Newman from the sitcom
Seinfeld), so they try to poison Jack, which leads to an exciting sequence on the airplane as they try to save the only mortal man left alive on the planet. I like the way they're tearing up the plating on the plane to get what they need to save Jack, and how Gwen punches out the awful smug Lyn Peterfield with one right hook (sorry, Dichen Lachman was recently on
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and I have some issues with her character (not her acting -- she was good) that I'm still working through). It's a good sequence.
And this conspiracy definitely don't want Torchwood finding out what's going on, so not only do they try to kill Jack but they also start taking care of anyone working on the Torchwood case. So not only is Rex set up, but Esther makes the mistake of telling Friedkin that she'd been working closely with Rex on the Torchwood case, which makes her a target as well. That's also a tense scene, as she steals a fellow agent's badge to get out of the building before the conspiracy's men grab her -- but Esther is smart (for now), so she makes her way out of there unscathed. It's a nice way of showing her thrown into this fugitive role that she was completely unprepared for but still able to think intelligently about her situation and thus get away. (Sadly, this won't last.)
Those are the main parts of the episode, and they're easily entertaining enough to keep this story going. As Gwen says at the end, "Welcome to Torchwood", and it's hard to think of a better introduction than what we've gotten these past two episodes. Keep it up, guys.
233 Morphic resonance is a "theory" from Rupert Sheldrake that suggests that all members of a species are linked together and influenced by special morphic fields, which means that if someone does something somewhere then it's more likely that someone somewhere else will do/learn the same thing. It's supposed to provide an explanation for how you can sense that someone is looking at you behind your back, among other things. It's not accepted by the scientific community because it can't actually be tested experimentally and seems to be unfalsifiable. About Time 5, while acknowledging that it's generally nonsense, advance it as a possibility for how evolution works in the Doctor Who universe, so they were probably pleased by this confirmation.
