March 11: "Adrift" (TW)

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.

The adult Jonah. ("Adrift") ©BBC

But it's when Gwen finally discovers the truth of everything that's going on that things get really good.  We learn why Jack has been so secretive, and what's really been happening to many of those missing people: they have indeed been disappearing into the Rift -- but some of them come back.  Except those that return seem significantly worse than when they left; they're being cared for in a secret facility, and they all seem damaged in some way, both physically and mentally.  They're also displaced in time -- for instance, the fifteen-year-old boy that Gwen is searching for, Jonah Bevan, is now in his fifties and very badly scarred from events he witnessed while on another planet.  These are people that can't be integrated back into society, and so Jack has been keeping them comfortable away from everyone.  But Gwen still wants to try, so she brings Jonah's mother to see him -- and while she eventually is willing to handle his being forty years older and scarred, she can't cope with his constant primal screaming, the result of being driven insane while out in space.  And worse, Gwen has taken Nikki's hope away -- now she knows what happened to Jonah, and that for all intents and purposes she'll never see her son again.  That, for Nikki, is the worst thing.  "Promise me you won't do this to anyone else," she tells Gwen.  "Before, I had the memory.  Whenever I thought of him, I'd see him laughing with his mates, playing football, scoffing his breakfast.  And now I just hear that that terrible noise."  "I thought you wanted to know what happened to him," Gwen replies.  "I did," says Nikki.  "I was wrong.  It was better when I didn't know.  Before you, I had hope."  For all Gwen's efforts, we see that Jack was right after all.

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 10: "From Out of the Rain" (TW)

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.

The Ghostmaker and Pearl regard their silver flask. ("From Out
of the Rain") ©BBC

Far and away the biggest problem is that no explanation whatsoever is given for these events.  There's not even a semblance of a rationale provided.  Okay fine, these Night Travelers can essentially steal people's souls (that's not how it's pitched, but that's basically what's happening) -- maybe that's what that silver flask does.  But nothing remotely accounts for why these Travelers were able to escape from the film in the first place, and that's something of a problem.  No rules are established; so when Jack decides that the way to stop them is to film them and overexpose the film, while there's a sort of logic at work it feels like they could have made just about anything up.  The way the other Travelers emerge from the screen, meanwhile, feels totally random, as if it's time to introduce a new threat without really coming up with a reason why.  (It also doesn't help that Julian Bleach, as the ringleader of the Night Travelers, seems to be trying to do his best Vincent Price imitation, which is a bit distracting.)

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 9: "Something Borrowed" (TW)

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.

Gwen is escorted up the aisle by her father. ("Something
Borrowed") ©BBC

It is rather funny at times, but it really needs to go the whole way to be successful.  Instead we get some jokes that are decent -- along with a few that fall flat -- but ultimately it doesn't go all the way.  It doesn't do enough with the situation of Gwen suddenly pregnant and trying to handle the reactions of everyone there -- a few quiet jokes ("Oh, we must have had way too much to drink," one of the bridesmaids says, wondering why they hadn't noticed that Gwen was pregnant at her bachelorette party) but that's about it, and they really needed a lot more to make this part work.  You can tell they tried a bit (as opposed to just slipping some jokes in) because there are just enough moments that seem almost funny (Tosh's reaction to "Banana Boat", the way every guest is dosed with Retcon at the end) that you wonder what the committed version would have been like.

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 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.

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.)

Owen fights Death. ("Dead Man Walking") ©BBC

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.

March 6: "Reset" (TW)

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.

Martha is readied to become the next subject in the Mayfly
clinical trial. ("Reset") ©BBC

One of the key components this time around is the introduction of Martha Jones.  It's a pleasure to see her back, even if it's without the Doctor.  This is clearly a Martha that has moved on since "Last of the Time Lords" -- she's now working for UNIT and is called in to assist Torchwood with some unusual deaths.  It's also great to see her and Jack interacting -- they're two people with a shared experience that the others can't even imagine, and the bond that therefore exists is easy to see.  This also means that she fits in with the group rather effortlessly, and we don't have to worry about a lot of tedious "but can she be trusted?" nonsense.  And Freema Agyeman continues to be great, which means any scene she's in is that much better -- particularly when she is sent undercover to infiltrate the Pharm.  (The fact that her cover name is Samantha Jones -- the same name as the eighth Doctor's first companion in the BBC books -- is probably a coincidence rather than some sort of deliberate in-joke.)

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 5: "Adam" (TW)

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.

Adam implants unpleasant false memories in Ianto's mind.
("Adam") ©BBC

And in fact, Adam's true nature is rather clever, of a type we haven't really seen in Doctor Who or any of its spinoffs before: he's a being that exists purely based on memory, by implanting false memories that enable him to survive and thrive.  He also has the power to change people's personalities by suppressing some memories and implanting others -- so Tosh is confident and self-assured, and Owen is nerdy and meek (and we see how much of Burn Gorman's performance as Owen is just that, a performance).  It's an interesting change that adds some new dynamics to what we've been getting.  And Adam has additional powers -- not only can he implant unhappy memories (such as making Ianto believe he's a murderer), but he can insert himself in existing memories -- in particular, Jack's childhood memories, where we learn more about the "Gray" that John Hart mentioned in "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang".  Adam possesses an impressive power, and it's only when things keep failing to add up that Jack becomes suspicious and works it out.

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".