TW #24 : Adrift

"The scream lasts twenty hours every day. Before the rift returned him, Jonah had looked into the heart of a dark star. What he'd seen had driven him mad."

Episode 24 :            Adrift.
Companions:           Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper, and Ianto Jones.
Air Date:                 19th March 2008.

When a local teenager disappears, Gwen is drawn into an investigation that reveals a darker side to Torchwood. Hundreds of people have disappeared without a trace, but Jack is obstructing attempts to find them. The answer seems to lie in the Rift - literally - and as Gwen follows the trail, she makes a shocking discovery.

As the description above shows, Adrift is quite a simple story. What Gwen finds out during the course of the story, when not being given the cold shoulder by Jack, is that the Cardiff rift doesn't just deposit the strange and unusual into the streets of the city but it also snatches people away to somewhere, anywhere, in time and space. Seventeen of these people have been returned over the years but they never return intact. They come back scarred, both physically and mentally, and for their own benefit they have to be locked away in a remote location. It is the sort of story that Torchwood needed at this time. We see a lot of strange adventures in the show but we rarely see the repercussions of the Cardiff rift's existence.

Adrift is a story that gives Gwen plenty of screen time as well as PC Andy Davidson, a little used police colleague of hers. The episode revolves around her investigation. It seems that most episodes like this center on Jack or Gwen, and it would be nice to see everyone else get some more of the screen time.

The episode is more in keeping with the sort of episodes that I wish there had been more of during the early years of the show rather than the typical monster hunt episodes. As I mentioned we rarely see the consequences or after effects of the adventures we watch every week in the Whoniverse. In Doctor Who the titular character vanishes off after seeing the climax of his adventure but Torchwood is fixed to a single location and yet we never see the consequences.