Review: Torchwood 4.3: Dead of Night

This week’s episode of the Welsh drama was much an improvement, even if the only reason that I say so is that the episode felt a lot more like standard Torchwood fare. That does, however, include some of the old Torchwood’s issues, but overall it was more engaging than last week’s slow crawl. Dead of Night still has a lot of work to do, but it’s a step in the right direction.

     This week the main cast came together in a much more Torchwood-esque way, leading them from the corrupt Brian Friedkin to PhiCorp, a medical company. They track the company back to a warehouse where it turns out PhiCorp has been storing non-narcoleptic drugs (the painkillers that the Miracle needs) for over a year. Rex disagrees with Jack’s attitude and goes off on his own when they realise that everyone (including Rex’s ex-CIA mentor) has been poised against them.

     As armies of Anonymous-esque people wander the streets claiming to be “soulless,” Oswald Danes’ television career leads to him being beaten up by some policemen. Kitzinger is waiting for him and brings him to a PhiCorp conference – she works for the company. Rex by now has also rejoined the Torchwood team after bonking Dr. Vera Juarez, who’s also at the conference.

     Gwen uses the Camera Contact Lenses from Children of Earth to hack into Kitzinger’s PhiCorp computer while Jack faced Oswald Danes to try and settle his own guilt with killing his grandson last series. Turns out Danes is still a freaky paedophile and, as Jack reasons, is so self loathing that he wanted to be executed, and is now suffering because of the Miracle. Unfortunately Jack is escorted out by PhiCorp’s guards, who’ve now got a vested interest in Danes – PhiCorp is exploiting his new cult of personality to push through legislature to allow PhiCorp to take a monopoly over all pharmaceuticals and to allow all drugs to be bought without prescription.

     Part of the fun in this week’s team dynamic was the near-constant American-British discordance, almost as if the show is trying to translate the cultural differences across the audience. It really stands out and it isn’t very interesting in the long run, and on my end felt very condescending. For example; everything Gwen said Esther would “translate” into an American version. Also strange was that this episode cut out some sex scenes that were present in the American version – usually it’s the opposite. Not that those sex scenes were at all necessary – in any way. Maybe Rex bonking Juarez was important to the plot but I still don’t see how Jack picking up a barman did anything to advance the plot.

     The episode had a lot more ties to Children of Earth than we saw in episodes one and two, in ways that actually made some sense – Jack misses Ianto, is guilty over killing his grandson and has kept the only gadget they had left, the Camera Contact Lenses. It may not really gel with the new American audience, which is always a consideration now, but I liked the stronger continuity that went together with said references. One of the strongest points in the episode was a touching telephone call between Gwen and Jack, talking about the events of that storyline. As someone who thought that Jack’s actions at the end of Children of Earth were extremely out of character, I was glad to see (albeit after three hours) that the character acknowledges this.

     Now it seems we actually have a face behind the villains of this story (except for Danes, of course.) PhiCorp’s activities are perhaps more villainous to us here in the UK with Universal Healthcare, as the call for the ability to “buy whatever drugs you want” is nothing new to the American system (from an ideological point of view.) What an alien presence wants America’s money for I really don’t know, but it’s an interesting concept that I’d like to see developed.

     Overall this week’s episode felt like it actually went somewhere and it advanced the plot into unseen directions that were fun and gave us a lot to think about. There was still a lot of things going on that were unnecessary, such as random sex scenes and arguments for the sake of argument, but Dead of Night was a deeper exploration of our characters and a fun romp that showed that this miniseries is heading in a direction close to being to the right one.

Thanks.