Review: Torchwood 1.7: Greeks Bearing Gifts

Tosh doesn't like the mind-reading Pendant.

This episode was written by a man who I've always relied upon to produce good television in a variety of forms. He is the main writer and conceiver of the excellent Being Human, as well as the writer of two very good episodes of the modern Doctor Who. Here, however, his style doesn't seem to translate, and the issues surrounding this mistranslation are hampered further by poor direction and Daniela Denby-Ashe's miscasting seals the terrible, terrible deal.
     Daniela Denby-Ashe (rightfully stereotyped as Janey from My Family - eleven years is too long)
plays Mary, a strange woman who, after appearing to be shot in 1812, appears at the site of a Torchwood investigation and starts to seduce Toshiko. To this end she presents Tosh with a pendant that gives her telepathy, much to her distress. Using this pendant Tosh hears about the rest of the team's thoughts - Gwen and Owen's affair, Ianto's self-pitying dark mumbles and the dead emptyness of Jack's mind that comes from immortality. She also, in between arguing and bonking Mary, discovers the depravity inherant in human nature and actually saves the lives of a family about to be murdered based on the killer's single-minded thoughts.
     Mary, however, reveals herself as an alien (from a race that Sarah Jane Adventures would later call the Arcateens). She wants to get the tech that the team recovered from the site. A shaken Tosh lets her right on into the Hub, where she's eventually tricked into using the item, a transporter, which teleports her into the centre of the sun.
    We waited seven episodes for this first Tosh-centric episode and it's such a shame that it wasn't given the justice it deserved. Aside from a plot that relies on one woman's idiocy, (Just TELL TORCHWOOD like you said you were going to! This is clearly causing you distress, and there is a clear and open option avaliable!) the episode is reserved not for the examination of Tosh but for the other characters. I mean, sure, she cries a lot, and has an irritating monologue at the beginning, but like a few other centric episodes (Cyberwoman comes to mind) this side of her character is never seen before or since. Whithouse's gift for witty dialogue made some of the mind-reading bearable but it often went too far, stretching to the point where everyone on the street was on some sort of register.

Mary reveals her true form.

     Also, I thought the point of a centric episode was to make it easier for the audience to empathise with the character in question. Here Tosh, who had previously been shown to be a shy but proud computer nerd, became a whimpering, anal slacker. Of course she is reacting to Gwen and Owen playing football in her area, which is understandable. The amount of sports this group plays near all of the alien artefacts, you'd think they thought it was a youth club. I really didn't like her personality here for a variety of reasons, and that's pretty much mission failure.
     But, hey! The concept of Mary and the pendant are what's really important here, at least as far as I can tell. Toby Whithouse does specialise in great fantasy concepts, and I think that here he focussed on that a little more than the overall characterisations. The idea of the Arcateens is great - a societal system run by telepaths where abstract concepts and ideas are their method of communication. What let it down by a massive margin was Danby-Ashe's performance. It isn't necessarily that she's a bad actress, it's just that she is fundamentally wrong for the part. This character is supposed to have seduced the normally heterosexual Toshiko into bonking her, and yet she appears less sincere than a Coallition politician. (Agenda, you say? What agenda?) In fact, the only reason she seems to be here is so that we can have a full compliment of bisexuals in the cast.
     I haven't really commented on direction in my previous reviews, mainly because it doesn't get in the way of things. Here the direction is filled with fast-forwards, which make the whole ordeal feel like they filmed a two-hour long episode and needed to fit it in. This potent epilepsy-hazard style is just really unpleasant to watch and adds next to nothing to the episode. Case in point: There's one scene after Tosh bonks Mary where she's sat in a bed looking mopey. That's alright. Then there's a whoosh and the camera zooms out incredibly quickly to reveal... more of the bed.

Mary stalks Tosh

     I wasn't looking forwards to reviewing this episode because unlike the other stories in this series that are wrong in certain areas and great in others, Greeks Bearing Gifts is more of a decent show that's been skewed into something ugly. With Toby Whithouse at the helm this episode had great potential but it didn't deliver, and that's a real blow for me.

Thanks.

(The next review will be more Torchwood, but this time Miracle Day's "Middle Man".)