Review: Torchwood 2.13: Exit Wounds

Gray prepares to bury his brother over a petty jab spiralled
out of control.

Torchwood - Series Two, Episode Thirteen - Exit Wounds
Written 22/4/13

Watching Exit Wounds was quite a painful experience for me - not for the "omigosh this episode is so bad it's painful" kinda way but more of the "omigosh all mah feelz" kinda way. The episode represents the end of a lot of the things that I loved about the show - the death of Owen and Tosh, the final episode of a continuous 13 episode series and the final full episode to feature The Hub. While I think that the script handled a lot of this series' payoffs well, I have to wonder whether the execution of that script went as smoothly as it could have.
     The team return to the city, finding that Captain John has been causing havoc. A Hoix has appeared in a hospital, random doomsayers have appeared in an office building and there are rift spikes. As most of the team go to different locations, Jack arrives at the Hub to find John waiting, and holds him hostage as he sets off 15 explosive devices across the city. Taking him back in time via a rift spike, John explains that Jack's brother, Gray, was scarred by his experience and forced him to obey using a stitched-on explosive. Gray buries Jack in the ground in the Roman era, and then comes back, destabilising the local power plant and shooting Toshiko in the gut. Jack reawakens, having been saved and stored by Past!Torchwood, and knocks his brother out. But he's too late to save either Owen, who sacrifices himself to contain a nuclear meltdown, or Tosh, who dies in his arms.
     Gray, played by the elaborately named Lachlan Nieboer,  is a long-awaited character and the fact that he's the true villain is a decent enough twist, until the sheer extent of his supposed madness only seems to translate into a rather stilted performance. Gray is a whiny little idiot who killed my two favourite characters and I don't really think that they should have gone out in the way they did. Admittedly, I found both of their death scenes quite well done - Owen graciously accepting his slow radioactive decomposition while Tosh gracefully fell out of life before our eyes in a way which was intimate and heart-wrenching.

Four for you, Naoko Mori, for being an awesome actress
all the way to the final breaths.

     The episode's structure could have been a little more concentrated - this time last series we had a definite problem and then an even bigger one following it. This time it was more Joker-style chaos, Gray's retribution against his brother somehow including the endangerment of half a million people. The perils of the nuclear plant and Tosh's wound came up almost out of the blue, and I think that was done to make their deaths feel that much more tragic and painful. I guess it worked.
     Nowt much else to say about that, then. Exit Wounds was most certainly less gradiose than its predecessor, and instead focussed on our characters to deliver an experience which doesn't poke at our heartstrings but tears and rips at them violently like a wild animal. Owen and Tosh will be sorely missed as we leave our continuous series and, in a week's time, head on over to Children of Earth for even more pain. Fun times.

Thanks.

Review: Torchwood 2.12: Fragments

Amy Manson as one of Torchwood's many kinky bisexual
members in the Victorian Era.

Torchwood - Series Two, Episode Twelve - Fragments
Written 16/4/13

Fragments is a rather deliberately apt name for this penultimate episode of the series that follows the rather odd path of deciding to infodump us on our four non-Gwen characters. As opposed to one continuous story, the episode was seperated into four distinct flashback sequences, with a loose connector inbetween. An opportunity for fanservice of the most pure and concentrated kind, Fragments takes enough joy and intrigue in the series' own mythology to make an otherwise sedate episode worthwhile.
      Gwen oversleeps, and arrives at set co-ordinates to discover that the team have been caught up in an explosion in a set of old buildings. As each member is found, they relive how they joined Torchwood. Jack was recruited in the 1800s, working as an operative while waiting for the Doctor and eventually taking over that cell when his leader committed murder-suicide at the turn of the millenium. Tosh was hired as a way to pardon a life-sentence aquired by manufacturing alien tech for a terrorist cell who were holding her mother hostage. Ianto, fresh from the collapse of Torchwood One, begged Jack for a job and then earnt it by helping Jack catch the Pterodactyl. Owen was recruited when his fiancee was accidentally killed by an alien brain parasite. The explosions turn out to have been set by Captain John Hart, who has returned with Gray.
     I think that Torchwood is one of those shows where the backstory on its own doesn't fundamentally matter. Like Lost, you can easily watch the present story and the characters shine through on their own. Flashbacks are thus like seasonings, enhancing what's already there. Such is the task faced by anyone writing a predominantly flashback-based story in any medium, and I think that Chibnall actually pulls it off quite well.

Owen's doomed fianceé Katie.

    And that was probably because I really did enjoy seeing the characters' pasts. As a Lost fan, I'm pretty used to having an entire storyline set out in flashbacks, and the way that Chibnall handed this material was just as satisfying. I especially enjoyed Jack's segment, which filled in a few of the gaps in his own enormous personal mythology, as well as Owen's, which gave insight into how he came to be such an opportunist near the start of the series. I felt that Tosh's flashback was a little odd - UNIT don't really seem the type of organisation to hold people in gulag-style prison camps - but it had some nice character moments thrown in there to make up for it.
     This look back into Torchwood's mythology may have not meant a lot in the long run, but it was a fun hour that shone a light on most of our major characters. I'm rather sad that we're this close to the end of this run, really - I've been having a lot of fun looking back over my favourite series of the show, and it's for episodes like these that I can say that's true.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Series Two ends with the return of John and Gray in Exit Wounds.

Review: Torchwood 2.11: Adrift

Jonah Bevan, having returned from the other side of the Rift.

Torchwood - Series Two, Episode Eleven - Adrift
Written between 13th and 14th April 2013

Chris Chibnall is quite possibly one of the most inconsistent writers that I've ever encountered. Not, of course, that this is an inherantly bad thing; while we may get abominations like Dinosaurs on a Spaceship over on the parent program, sometimes the dice fall in the right arrangement and we get a piece of television as heart-wrenchingly sad as Adrift, a Gwen-centric story that has me and the vast majority of viewers in tears by the end. And that's a good thing. Generally.
      Andy calls Gwen to tell her about a suspicious disappearance - 15-year-old Jonah Bevan has gone missing, seemingly in a flash of light, and Jack can be seen on CCTV that night. Jack skirts around the issue, leading Gwen and Tosh to launch an investigation. They find that Cardiff has a Missing Persons epidemic - and all of the disappearances match up with "negative rift spikes", showing that the Rift is taking people and scattering them through space and time. Following the trail, Gwen is led to Flatholme Island, where Jack fills her in on the fact that sometimes the people taken are brought back, but they are allways mad, aged and/or physically scarred. Undeterred, Gwen brings Jonah's mum Nikki (Ruth Jones) to see an aged Jonah. She tells Gwen to never do the same for anyone else, as seeing her son transformed in such a way has robbed her of her hope.
     The episode does what Torchwood does best - taking a supernatural phenomenon and transforming it into a more human issue. Chibnall doesn't give himself too much technobabble or mad aliens to work with, and the result is a story that is primed to blow on the tear ducts. Ruth Jones imbues Nikki Bevan with a simple normality that underscores her discoveries at the end of the episode, and the juxtaposed shots of Gwen filing away the investigation while Nikki throws away all of Jonah's old things is just god-damn heart-breaking. It was a central dilemma that had no easy answers, and that I think sums up what Torchwood should be about.

What was happening with Rhys this week?

     There was also some focus on the Gwen-Rhys relationship, but I really didn't like the way that was handled. Rhys felt a bit like an abusive husband, forbidding Gwen from talking about the problems she'd been having at work and shouting at her for even mentioning it, before eventually conceding when Gwen's just been to Heartbreak Hotel and breaks down in tears in front of a candle-lit supper. It's a characterisation that comes out of nowhere - both in the theme of the series, where Rhys ends up being pretty cool with the whole Torchwood thing and is pretty much onnipresent come Children of Earth and Miracle Day, and within the flow of the episode, where he begins in the morning saying how lucky he is to have her.
     Adrift is, if not my favourite episode of this series (which is A Day In The Death), certainly the best written. It's what Chibnall does best - human dilemmas, secrets, basic dramas that we can all relate to. I'm probably repeating myself by this point, but that's all there really is to say. Adrift managed to explore a side of Torchwood that we haven't seen before, not only evoking an emotional response but giving deveopment to Jack and Gwen in a thorough and fascinating way.

Thanks.

Review: Torchwood 2.10: From Out Of The Rain

Okay, I think you might be trying a little too hard to be creepy.

Torchwood - Series Two, Episode Ten - From Out Of The Rain
Written between 1st and 2nd April 2013

Fucking circuses, man. Clowns, harlequins, circus freaks. There is nothing funny about the Circus, and the history of freak shows and mistreatment of all sorts of peoples and animals doesn't exactly help their reputation. Only a week after the fun domestic runaround, we're given this creepy masterpiece, which manages the Moffattian feat of making you afraid of old glycerine film reels.
     Gwen, Ianto and Owen go down to the Electro, an old cinema that's been reopened for a couple of nights to show some old films. In a film that appears out of nowhere, there are images of the Circus, and Jack is a member - the man who cannot die. It turns out that the Ringmaster has escaped from the film, and is planning to use the souls of the living dead that he creates to bring others out of the film as well, to live on forever. Heading down to the Electro, Jack gets a modern film camera and films them all, exposing the film to kill them once and for all. The bottle containing the breaths of the people taken is nearly emptied, and the only person to survive is a little boy with a weird face (who'd later play Jackson Lake's son.)
     The two villains, the creepy Ghostmaker (Future Davros actor Julian Bleach) and the creepier Pearl (Camilla Power), have a wodnerful mixture of cheese and genuine disquiet, which only seems to amplify the effect. Their motivation is only to continue existing and performing, and like in a similar story from their parent show, the lengths they go to to do this are what make it work. That, and Julian Bleach's astoundingly weird voice, which is, I wager, why he was hired to be Davros in the first place.

Trailer-shot.

     The episode's atmosphere is arguably what makes it so memorable, though - not just the framing of most of the shots with a very dark emphasis in mind, but also in the haunting organ music that evokes both the vaudeville and the distinctly alien. Peter J Hammond's previous story, Small Worlds, is also heavy on this kind of atmsophere - except here it's a little more focussed.
     From Out Of The Rain is good. It maybe pushes the celluloid creatures idea a little into the realm of disbelief, but the sheer effective weirdness of the villains and the way that the episode's music and direction compliments them means that it becomes something of a petty concern. This is the sorta Torchwood story that gives little kids nightmares, and that's awesome.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Chibnall shows that he can actually write, just not for Doctor Who. It's his best story, the haunting Adrift.

Review: Torchwood 2.9: Something Borrowed

Gwen's sudden pregnancy turns some heads.

Torchwood - Series Two, Episode Nine - Something Borrowed
Written 31/3/13

So, yeah. Those past three weeks were a bit heavy, and so this week we return to a fun Torchwood runaround that manages to fit in as many mother-in-law jokes as it does attacks by alien monsters. That consistant optimism and humour does make it rather rare for this series, but that's not something to be poo-pooed - in fact, it feels like just what we need.
      The night before her wedding, Gwen is out chasing a shape-changing alien called a Nostrovite. The alien bites her arm, and come the next morning she's full term pregnant with the alien's egg. Proceeding with the wedding regardless, Torchwood are forced to intervene when a second Nostrovite, the mother, arrives to come and rip the egg from Gwen's stomach. Despite some close shaves, Rhys is able to use the Singularity Scalpel to cure Gwen, Jack uses a big fucking gun to kill the Nostrovite and the two get married, with their families getting a huge dose of Retcon.
     The episode's biggest focus was on the love triangle between Gwen, Rhys and Jack, with Gwen and Jack's intensely passionate platonic relationship being referenced to many times. The whole Jack/Gwen ship was mainly teased at in the first season, before the writers obviously discovered the 2006 equivalent of Tumblr and began shipping them like mad. As much as I feel that rampant shipping for shipping's sake does not a captivating story make, I do like the dynamics of the triangle and I love the way that it's played.

Nostrovites and hilarious makeup.

     So yeah. Something Borrowed didn't really make much of an impact on me; it was a fairly standard runaround that felt a lot more Doctor Who than normal. That doesn't necessarily make it a bad episode, but for me at least it felt odd coming between last week's in-depth psychological analysis and next week's old fashioned creep-fest. I suppose it's good that we can have one last little island of levity before we advance onto the rest of the series, which is pretty much three and a bit episodes of depression, sadness and pain.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: A hopefully more in depth review of From Out Of The Rain

Review: Torchwood 2.8: A Day In The Death

Owen lets out his frustration at being unable to die.

Torchwood - Series Two, Episode Eight - A Day In The Death
Written 30/3/13

At some point in our lives, we all experience bouts of sadness. And some of us experience depression, whether clinical or otherwise. Whether it's grief at the loss of a loved one; guilt at one's own misdeeds; or simply a way of looking at the world that doesn't leave room for any hope - most of us know what it feels like. A Day In The Death is my favourite episode of Torchwood because it doesn't just feature some smashing character work for Owen Harper, but it provides what I feel is a comprehensive analysis of depression and provides a case for simply enjoying your life to its full potential.
     Owen meets a girl on a rooftop who is about to jump. Revealing to her his bullet wound, he goes on to explain through flashbacks what led him to that point. After the events of last week, Owen is decommissioned and put on coffee duty. He is frustrated at his lack of perception or feeling and he is bitter at the way the world is carrying on while he must stay static and unfeeling. He tries to drown himself, but he is unable to, and he tries to keep his mind off of his nature by going on a mission, bypassing heat-sensors and infiltrating the alien horde of dying billionaire Henry Parker (the late Richard Briers). The artefact he's looking for is an alien messaging device whose energies are keeping Parker alive, and upon its removal Owen is unable to give Parker the kiss of life. Owen summarises his speech to the girl on the roof by saying that despite that, there's always something worth living for - even if it is mundane.
     Owen's condition - feeling numb all over, having deep trauma on the inside despite working in normal conditions in the day to day - is a clear analogue for depression. The episode takes that up and uses the sci-fi to make it more fluid. We see Owen reject his day to day lifestyle (throwing away all of his food and drink, which he can no longer digest), become seperated from his friends and feel a mixture of complete numbness and intense outrage at the world. It's a chart of the journey into depression, as well as the slow and painful trek out of it.

Owen and Parker talk about death.

     Christine Bottomley's Maggie is perfectly balanced as the mouthy but fundamentally tragic suicidal woman, who is reeling from the aftermath of a wedding day car accident that rendered her a widow after an hour of marriage. She provided a human counterpoint; a way to work the viewer into the depressive mindset through a more identifiable tragedy. Richard Briers didn't get to do much as the dying Henry Parker, but his death and his life-long optimism about life on other worlds helped underlined the episode's messages about how your attitudes towards living your life affect your overall mood. Parker was happy because he did what he enjoyed, because he found that one spark of hope to keep him going.
     I'm probably reading too much into what is a fairly simple episode of a cult television show. But A Day In The Death is just perfectly written, and sees the end of the Martha Trilogy in a style that's instantly memorable and is, in many ways, moving. A Day In The Death may not provide a perfect metaphor for the deep psychological effects of depression, but does a damn good job of approximating it to a point where it's pretty difficult to tell the difference.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: We learn for the first time that if you live in the Who Universe and you're marrying a man named Williams, you'll never change your surname. It's Something Borrowed.

Review: Torchwood 2.7: Dead Man Walking

Death speaks through a resurrected Owen.

Torchwood - Series Two, Episode Seven - Dead Man Walking
Written between 23rd and 24th March 2013

I don't quite know how to explain to you just how awesome this week's episode is. It's not my favourite episode - that's next week, but it's for many of the same reasons. Dead Man Walking manages to both bring back Owen, but also gives us an epic villain and an equally epic climax, which ranks up there as one of my favourite television moments. Even before that, the establishment of Owen's partial death is a fascinating plotline that will continue to have interesting ramifications for the remainder of his time on the show.
     Jack halts Owen's autopsy and heads to an old church to grab the second of the two Resurrection gauntlets - last seen in Everything Changes and They Keep Killing Suzie - and then uses it to bring him back to life. For some reason, the effect is permanent - Owen, despite having no heartbeat, breath, bloodflow or unconscious reflexes, is fully alive. An energy monitor shows that something is growing and changing his body- not visibly, but Owen mentions that he can feel something approaching out of the darkness of death. That turns out to be Duroc, a being who lives beyond the veils and requires 13 victims to remain on Earth forever. Owen stops him from taking his last victim, a Leukaemia patient, by having a fist-fight and winning.
     The mythology built up around the episode is dark, foreboding and fun, and like when Doctor Who covered Satan, there's enough awesome biblical shit to make it feel worthwhile. I will say that Duroc isn't exactly scary - I would have preferred if the CGI skeleton was just hinted at rather than being obvious, as it ends up looking like a Doom villain. But the final showdown, despite how much it's cheesed up, what with the Littlest Cancer Patient and the inspiration speech to keep on fighting through the chemo, is still just completely epic on all scales. I don't really think that you can have a fist-fight with the Grim Reaper and not make it awesome, but still.

Owen catches Death's lunge. Aww, yeah!

     Of course, it would usually be a tendency of this blog to point out some of the episode's weirder breaks in logic, especially regarding Owen's ability to talk without any breath and the fact that his body doesn't seem to be rotting away even when his cells aren't getting any oxygen. But I think that, despite my track record of being incredibly anal in this department (oo er), the episode is just too good for me to start nitpicking. Dead Man Walking is a brilliant mid-season story and it's only gonna get better from here.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: My favourite episode, A Day In The Death.

Review: Torchwood 2.6: Reset

Martha joins the team as Owen practices
with the Singularity Scalpel.

Torchwood - Series Two, Episode Six - Reset
Written between 21st and 23rd March 2013

And thus begins four more weeks of Martha-based gushing here at Nostalgia Filter, as I manage to expertly line up Martha's reappearances in both Torchwood and in the main show. And although this trilogy of Torchwood stories is centred more on Owen, this first part is most definitely an attempt to put Martha's character to work in a much more gritty environment. Well, I say gritty. There are time in Reset when I feel like I've switched over to CSI Miami, where the plot is incredibly condensed exposition for a good half-hour and characters who'd usually be making jokes every five seconds are talking seriously about issues that are resolved five seconds later.
     Martha arrives on the scene on Jack's request, to help investigate a string of deaths in South Wales all related to a hypodermic syringe to the eye. The deaths are part of a conspiracy, that the team discover through a survivor is linked to a drug called Reset, which seems to remove all pathogens and mutations from the body. The distributor, the Pharm, has been killing the research students because of the unfortunate side effect of the drug - it causes alien larvae to grow inside the person, killing them. Martha elects herself to sneak into the Pharm with the brand-new (but later to be re-used in Children of Earth and Miracle Day) contact lens cameras, but she's caught by institute leader Aaron Copley (Alan Dale, or as I call him, Charles Widmore) who uses her as an advanced test subject due to her time-travel enhanced immune system. The gang rush in and shut down the facility, as well as saving Martha's life using some alien tech, but as the alien subjects are euthanised Copley arrives and kills Owen with a shot to the heart.
     The first half of the episode is very condensed, bearing much more resemblance to later series' and their affinity for spy dramas like Spooks and 24. There's a particular scene in a corridor where Gwen and Martha are talking completely seriously in almost complete exposition, and it feels completely unnatural to hear. That isn't to say that the concepts themselves are bad - the entire concept behind Reset freaked the shit out of me when I first saw it, and the line between the Pharm's unregulated scientific exploration and Jack's compassionate protectionism is nicely stroked. But it just didn't feel like Torchwood in the way that it was written.

Owen removes an adolescent Mayfly.

     I did however love the episode's relationships, all of which were written in a very captivating way. I wouldn't say that Martha fits perfectly into the team, but she does bounce off of the others with a great deal of competancy. Jack is the fun big brother, Gwen is the girly best mate, and Owen is a flirty colleague with whom she has a great deal of chemistry. Elsewhere, and for the sheer bittersweetness of it all, Owen agrees to go on a date with Tosh just before he goes off and dies. Owen and Tosh's relationship is very subtle; while he often seems ignorant to her pining (especially in the first series), there are often signs that he either reciprocates those feelings (as in Adam) or is at least is willing to try.
     Owen's death leads us into a series of episodes that both tug on the heartstrings and feature some outstanding acting, writing and direction. The first part of what may informally be called the "Martha Trilogy" did have a rampant pace and a lot of great ideas, but a lot of the time it seemed to forget that it was Torchwood and not some flashy spy drama on Sky One. Despite that, it's still fun and it's a good start to the mid-season arc.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Gloves come in pairs. How will Owen react when he becomes a Dead Man Walking?

Review: Torchwood 2.5: Adam

Remember?

Torchwood - Series Two, Episode Five - Adam
Written 18/3/13

Ah, another adventure for the intrepid Torchwood crew. Handsome Jack, caring Gwen, sexy and confident Tosh, shy and nerdy Owen, dark and troubled Ianto and, that old favourite, Adam. And if you're thinking something's wrong with this picture, then you're cleverer than I am at writing article openers. Through what is a remarkably simple premise, the writers use this episode as a fun attempt at alternate character interpretation, as well as allowing us a pile of exposition for everyone involved - especially for Jack, helping to explain John Hart's final words to us back in the series premiere.
     Gwen returns home from a weekend in Paris with Rhys and finds a new guy, Adam (Bryan Dick, Being Human, Eric and Ernie), fully integrated into the team. A touch of the shoulder reveals that Adam can create false memories of himself, and he appears to have sculpted the crew around that. Gwen's encounter means she forgets Rhys, to his dismay. Owen and Tosh's roles have reversed, with Owen now an awkward nerd with a crush on sexy and confident Tosh, whom Adam has brainwashed into being his lover. When Ianto discovers that Adam doesn't appear in the record, he makes him think that he's a murderer. Despite Adam's mind-meddling having allowed him to remember his father and little brother Gray, he soon discovers Adam's true nature and gives the team amnesia pills in order to kill him.
     It's probably just my own double-standard, but the crush from Owen's end seems a damn sight more creepy than when it's the other way around. I loved seeing the alterations in the characters, and I think the actors relished the chance to play their characters in such differing ways. For me, it was a very clear demonstration of the sheer talent of Naoko Mori and Burn Gorman, who blend between those characterisations in a way which makes it clear that despite their personality changes, these are fundamentally the same people. I also loved the look into Jack's past, with some awesomely shot desert sets representing Jack's homeworld. Despite being a character with a long and varied history, this is the first and only time that we really get to see Jack's origins in any detail, and the desperation with which Barrowman delivers his pleas to remember his brother and father are heartbreaking. It's the kind of meaty drama that he gets a lot of in this series, and I'm glad for it because they're some of his best moments.

Adam corrupts Jack's last good memory of his father.

     The titular villain is one I find a fascinating character. Character actor Bryan Dick delivers a wonderful performance which sways between confident people person and dark, sinister monster with a desperate streak a mile long. The way he brainwashes Tosh is tantamount to sexual assault, and that's the first in a series of dark and desperate actions that make Adam's villainy some of the most personal and vicious that I've seen in Torchwood. His dickery is such that although he gives the excuse that he needs people's memories to survive, he seems to just enjoy hurting too much for that excuse to have any leverage.
     Adam is one of the series' classic episodes, showcasing the ability of the actors and writers in a way which is both entertaining and profound. For once, keeping the sci-fi to a minimum and focussing exclusively on character allowed a lot of the cast to really shine, and it was really fun to see our characters working on so many different levels. And I'm repeating myself now, so I'll finish it there. Adam is really good, and if you haven't seen it already, go watch it.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: I get yet another three weeks of gushing about Martha Jones, as well as getting to review three of the best Torchwood episodes ever made. Looking forward to it... it's Reset.

Review: Torchwood 2.4: Meat

Rhys finds out the truth.

Torchwood - Series Two, Episode Four - Meat
Written 16/3/13

I'm not quite sure where the meat of this episode lies. (My only pun, I promise.) On the one hand, we have a very well-executed main plot that sees long-suffering boyfriend-cum-fianceé Rhys Williams (Kai Owen) upped into a main(ish) character. On the other, we have a literal Space Whale Aesop whose intentions I'm not quite sure of. Something to do with vegetarianism. The problem with vegetarian messages in sci-fi is not so much the content, which I sympathise if not fully empathise with, is rather their sheer frequency.
     Rhys owns a lorry firm, and is called when one of the trucks gets involved in a road accident. He arrives at the scene to find Torchwood investigating, and is shocked to see Gwen there. The team find alien meat, and knowing the company's origin, Jack immediately suspects Rhys. The welshman acts on his suspicions and sets up a racket with the company supplying the meat. That night he and Gwen have it out, with Gwen bringing him to Torchwood to prove to him that she does in fact catch aliens. Using Rhys's racket, they go in to the warehouse and find a massive, regenerating whale. After a gunfight, Owen is forced to euthanise the whale before it grows out of control. When Jack wants Gwen to follow protocol and retcon him, she refuses and, after realising he loves her too much to fire her, he lets it slide.
     Kai Owen has played an often unappreciated role in the series, and following a homologous progression with its parent show, he's very much been the Mickey Smith. There are times in the series where he can be a bit of a prat, but after Gwen's standard transformation from audience identification figure to One Of Them, we sorta need Rhys to be the everyman. His interactions with Gwen, and the weirdly introductory episode it creates, are nice to watch in a heart-warming way, and that's purely because Owen makes Rhys feel like such a normal person.

Everyone's having a whale of a time.
(Sorry, I know I promised, but I couldn't help myself.)

     The moral message of the episode is either, "Be careful to make sure that your sources of income are legal and ethical" or "Don't kidnap an alien and use it for meat." The setup of the caring Jack who wants to save the whale whether it's sentient or not versus the evil criminals who see the whale as just "meat" and an opportunity to start a profitable business. I will admit that it's not a topic I'm overly concerned about, but regardless I felt that it wasn't either weak enough to let us ignore it or strong enough to make us thing... it sorta just hung there without anything to give it a kick up the backside.
     Despite the aimless nature of its moral message, the episode's character moments for both Gwen and Rhys pulled it into a much more interesting shape. I'm still not sure about the Space Whale, and the use of second-rate CGI doesn't exactly help, but the episode had its heart in the right place, and as a way to introduce Rhys into the world of Torchwood it was suitably low-risk. Rhys will continue to be an important character, especially in the last two series, and this was where that influence started.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Something is wrong, and even the title sequence has been fooled... but what does it have to do with Adam?

Review: Torchwood 2.3: To The Last Man

Tosh and Tommy bridge the gap between times.

Torchwood - Series Two, Episode Three - To The Last Man
Written between 14th and 15th February

After writing the third episode of the first series about time-travel related ghosts, Helen Raynor brings us this third episode which focuses on a theme of time-travel related ghosts. I kid, I kid. To The Last Man brings a remarkable amount of depth along with that plotline, and manages to bring us a focus on Tosh that is both fun and more tragic than a box full of puppies sailing over a waterfall.
     In 1918, two Torchwood employees are told by an apparition of Tosh and a solider named Tommy Brockless that they need to take his past self and stick him in Torchwood's freezer. Fastforward to the present day, and it's Tommy's yearly wake-up, and the hospital where the apparition appeared has begun to see the appearance of ghosts from 1918. While Tommy and Toshiko go on a date, both faving feelings for the other, Jack reveals that it's time for Tommy to return to 1918 to save time, even if it means that Tosh must send him to his death.
     My favourite part of the episode was the central romance between Tosh and Tommy, which is treated in a way that only Torchwood can. She seeks solace in him because of his old-fashioned values and the fact that she doesn't have to put up a front in his presence, wheras he sees the pretty girl that wakes him up and looks after him every day. There's also some nice reinforcement of Tosh and Owen's relationship, as he seems genuinely concerned that she will get hurt when she has to send Tommy back.

Amnesiac Tommy is confuzzled.

     The episode's concept itself was very well executed, making use of time travel in a way that Torchwood doesn't often get to. Tommy's perception of the majority of the 20th Century as the space of a few months allows for some interesting perspectives, especially when he laments the beginning of the Second World War "three weeks" after the First. The way that the time-travel element is used to push tragedy into the storyline can seem a little forced in places, but the overall effect is a great one and you do feel sorry for Tommy upon his return.
     To The Last Man, despite being deriviative of Helen Raynor's last script for the show, is an excellent one-off love story for Tosh that manages to combine an awesome set of sci-fi ideas with a tragedy that has a hell of a lot of punch. It's been rather odd to see how much of this series so far has relied a hell of a lot on shipping to make certain ideas hit home, but that's probably just me reading into things. Like usual.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: We introduce Rhys to the alien world in Meat.
P.S. Be careful when image searching for "To The Last Man" with the SafeSearch off if you're of a squeamish disposition about certain acts of male intimacy...

Review: Torchwood 2.2: Sleeper

Beth (Nikki Amura-Bird) has no idea what she is...

Torchwood - Series Two, Episode Two - Sleeper
Written between 9th and 10th March 2013

How often have you heard the question, "What does it mean to be human?" It's a typical sci-fi staple, really, something that you're bound to find anywhere you look. Hell, it's so ubiquitous in fiction that we have a series that is literally about Being Human. (I'm still mourning, go away.) This week, Torchwood takes a standard murder mystery plot and gives it a shake-up with another well-acted guest star and a set of moral dilemmas about the nature of humanity enough to satisfy any English Literature student.
     The team are called to a burglary where the two burglars have been stabbed brutally despite there being no knives in the room at the time. The second burglar dies with his deathbed words speaking of being afraid of the woman in the house, Beth (Nikki Amura-Bird, before Survivors), who Jack immediately brings into the Hub. Despite having her own electromagnetic field and inpenetrable skin, Beth is adamant that she is human. A mind-probe reveals that she is the first of a set of alien sleeper agents, implanted with false memories to blend in but constantly absorbing information in preparation for invasion. Beth gains enough control over her alien tech to help Torchwood stop a small invasion attempt, but she sets up a situation that forces Torchwood to kill her, prefering that death than losing her mind to her true self.
     Beth, for what could have been an undersaturated guest character, is surprisingly well characterised. The themes surrounding her loss of identity and the threat she poses to those around her is explored without her ever becoming anything less than a convincing human being. Her "death by Torchwood" demise is also pretty deep, and manages to bring an adult side to the series that doesn't rely on its old adolescent machismo. It's hard to see what we would do in that situation, and the show does its best here to represent that in a captivating way.

Having a sword-arm all the time can't be good for balance.
Or dexterity. It's why we tend to not have sword-arms.

     This week also managed to fit in a few pieces of horror in there as well, with some of the other re-awakened agents. Two of them effectively become suicide bombers, including one who was pretending to be a young mum, while the superior agent brutally murders a man in cold blood in front of his family before attempting to use nukes the blow up the world. (Although what any alien besides the Slitheen would want with a chunk of radioactive rock is beyond me.) On their own, the alien sleepers, with their in-build forcefield (I gotta get me one of those) are a really cool idea, and one that's properly executed.
     Sleeper always gets a tad faded over in my memory of the series, and that may be because it wasn't as immediately memorable as the two stories flanking it. But as a piece of science fiction it's a fairly well-execution exploration of the "what does it mean to be human" question, with some classic horror and a few very quotable lines thrown in. Torchwood has pretty much fully thrown off all predeliction towards its prior silliness, and it's operating as a piece of sci-fi for a mature audience. And that's awesome.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: I debate (jnternally) on whether I ship Tosh/Owen or Tosh/Tommy more... it's To The Last Man.

Review: Torchwood 2.1: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

It's Thursday. Or "Torchwood Time", as I'm tempted to call it. (I probably won't, it's a bit crap.) Having moaned a lot through live reviews of Miracle Day and gone back and complained (and gushed) about the first series, I'm going to fill in the gaps on my Torchwood reviews. Not really a problem for me, though. These are the best two seasons of one of my favourite shows.

The "you, you, not you," scene is one of my favourite
Character Establishing Moments in TV.

Torchwood - Series Two, Episode One - Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
Written between 5th and 7th March 2013

January 2008. A year gap since the last series, although with a lovely series of Doctor Who (that I'm coming to the end of reviewing at the moment) plopped in the middle. To say I was hyped wasn't really the word. After having a bit of adolescent Rose-rage after Series Three, I was probably more excited about the new series of Torchwood than I was about the uncertainly of having Catherine Tate as a new companion. I wasn't disappointed; Series Two is my favourite series of the show and its premiere more than sets it off on that path.
     A month or so after Jack disappeared in End of Days (and had all the adventures with The Doctor that I'll describe in my Who reviews next week), he reappears. Despite the team's curiosity about his absence, they are distracted by the arrival of handsome Time Agent John Hart (Buffy's James Marsters). Hart is a former lover and colleague of Jack's who claims to be looking for some dangerous artifacts that have fallen through the Rift. While searching, Hart sets up traps for the team and kills Jack on the roof, but Ianto saves Gwen, Owen and Tosh in time to catch Hart in the act. When Hart's treasure turns out to be booby trapped, Owen is forced to help him to remove the bomb, which is thrown into the Rift. Hart is sent off on his merry way, but not before giving Jack a mysterious message about someone called Gray.
     The episode's plot is fairly by-the-by, but it's carried by the phenomenal performance by James Marsters, who is probably my favourite Torchwood guest star by a long shot. Captain John Hart takes all of the personality traits we love in Jack and then puts them into a villain, allowing them a lot more free reign. But it doesn't end up boiling down to the stereotypes that Jack's character can often fall into, as John is given some decent characterisation - he's not just greedy and nihilistic, but he's bitter that his lover has rejected him for what he considers a humdrum life. I love every second that he's on screen, it's amazing.

Let the shipping commence! (Or continue...)

     And, rather nicely, the characterisations get spread out a bit more this series - the effect is rather immediate. The writers seem to be shipping Jack/Gwen fulltime now, while simultaneously shipping Gwen/Rhys just to torture the fanbase. To make up for that, the relationship between Ianto and Jack, hinted at in the first series, becomes a tad more open and explicit. I liked that the series touched upon Jack's motivations for coming back to Torchwood after meeting Ten, which could have been easily ignored otherwise. It's little details like that in the episode that I do rather like.
     Torchwood's return was handled spectacularly, managing to mix in a variety of quiet character moments with a decently tense plot and guest character that lights up the screen with his every appearance. It wasn't a masterpiece of the order that later episodes in this series would produce, but it was immediately fun and managed to avoid a lot of the mistakes of the first series while still maintaining that fun promiscuous spirit that made the series enjoyable.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Nikki-Amura Bird is a frightened alien in Sleeper.