TW #21 : A Day in the Death

"My name is Doctor Owen Harper, and this is my life. A life that is full of action. And violence. And work and wonder. Secrets. And sex. And love. And heartbreak. Death. My death. The death I survived. The death I'm now living through. Except.... this isn't living. Every day is the same. I get up. Get ready for work. Same as everyone else. The thing is, I'm not the same. I get to work and everyone is doing the same old thing. Babbling away about aliens, weddings. I'm not real. Three days ago I died. And they think I'm fine. But they're wrong."

Episode 21 :            A Day in the Death.
Companions:           Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper, Ianto Jones, and Martha Jones.
Air Date:                 27th February 2008.

Owen Harper chats with a suicidal woman on a rooftop, reflecting on his adjustment (or lack thereof) to his new life (or lack thereof). Will a mission with Torchwood assist in his salvation or bring about the end of the world?

I thoroughly enjoy this episode of Torchwood despite having elements that say I shouldn't. Firstly, there is no threat. No villain. No apocalypse on the horizon. It is simply Owen sitting on a rooftop with a young woman who is thinking of committing suicide. He tells her what has happened to him and that he can't die, and runs her through the day he has just had. A Day in the Death is about Owen coming to terms with what he has for his humanity and realizing that sometimes the universe throws something at you that just makes you understand that there is more out there and it isn't all bug eyed monsters.

A Day in the Death is the sort of episode that shouldn't work but does really well. It is a breath of fresh air for a show that is routinely dark and gritty to show us the same wonder that we normally experience through the eyes of the Doctor. For all the negativity in the show at this time, this episode has a great upbeat ending that I didn't see coming. I give this a big thumbs up.

Unfortunately this is the last we see of Martha. After three busy days with Torchwood she is off back to UNIT. Don't worry, she'll make another appearance soon enough.

TW #20 : Dead Man Walking

"There was a light, a tiny speck of light and I was rushing towards it, like down a corridor, and it got brighter, and brighter, then suddenly there were these gates... these big,pearly gates and there was this old geezer and he said, "You've been a very naughty boy!"

Episode 20 :            Dead Man Walking.
Companions:           Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper, Ianto Jones, and Martha Jones.
Air Date:                 20th February 2008.

Owen has died. Jack decides to return him to life for a few minutes. No one could have guessed the consequences.

Owen has been shot dead. Jack decides to seek the aid of a psychic girl who guides him to the location of the second resurrection glove whilst hinting that it would be unwise (use shows us the tarot card Death). Jack has to enter an abandoned church now used by a large number of Weevils to recover it. When used on Owen it brings him back but keeps him around, a walking talking corpse. Unfortunately this has allowed the entity Death to enter the mortal world and begin a killing spree to allow it to remain.

This story is a bit of a strange departure but I kind of like it anyway. I find it odd that the entity of Death is a real thing. It doesn't quite fit the Whoniverse but at the same time it does. Death appears as a skeletal figure sheathed in a black fog and drains the life out of it's victims leaving them looking like they died of old age. It is hinted at this is the shape moving in the dark that has been mentioned before when someone has been killed and revived. Maybe it was this and not Abaddon? It also implies strongly that there is an afterlife even though throughout Doctor Who we are told (admittedly by the Doctor who may not know any different) that there is no such thing. If there is then it sheds a dark light over the whole universe when you consider how many people have died during the Doctor's adventures. And do Daleks and the like go there too?

Ultimately Death is defeated as it can't use Owen and he keeps the entity at bay until it is forced to return whence it came. But at the end Owen is still very much undead and walking around. This version of immortality is very different to Jack's. Owen doesn't degenerate but he retains any injuries now caused to him and suffers the problem of not being able to eat, drink, sleep, have sex or use the bathroom. It is more a living hell really than immortality. At this point I am beginning to reconsider the show somewhat. We are told that Torchwood is about protecting mankind and preparing them for the future when in fact, as you look back, the underlying theme of nearly everything in the show (past and future) is death. 

TW #19 : Reset

"I'd rely on Martha if the world was ending. It fact... I did."

Episode 19 :            Reset.
Companions:           Jack Harkness, Qwen Cooper, Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper, Ianto Jones, and Martha Jones.
Air Date:                 13th February 2008.

Martha Jones arrives at Torchwood after reports of numerous deaths. A medical researcher has been injected with "Mayflies". The "Mayflies" cure all illnesses before killing the patient, and Martha has got one...

Reset is the start of a trilogy focusing on Owen Harper and the return of Martha Jones, now a UNIT doctor. This episode has Jack call Martha in to help investigate a series of bizarre murders. Ultimately the investigation leads them an unscrupulous medical research firm which is using aliens to perfect medical cures  and not caring that one or two attempts have gone awry. When Martha is captured and implanted the team have to go in and rescue her. Unfortunately Owen is shot and killed during the extraction.

This is the sort of stories that Torchwood should be doing. It fits well with the premise of the show and much better than some of the episodes, and they are plausible within the confines of the Whoniverse. Thankfully that is what Reset gives us and it makes it a great episode to watch.

It is nice to see the return of Martha Jones, tying the two shows together. We get some nice references to Doctor Who as well. Torchwood should be it's own show but one thing it has lacked has been a real sense of being part of the same universe.

The episode ends with Owne getting shot, doing perhaps the one selfless act of his (on screen) life, protecting Martha. A bit of a shock at the time as I rather like Owen and his dark persona. But this won't be the last we see of him.

Reset is the sort of episode that  we should have seen more of each season and it has been a nice breath of fresh air to see it again doing these reviews.

TW #18 : Adam

Adam: You always remember what you killed, don't you, Jack?

Episode 18 :            Adam.
Companions:           Jack Harkness, Qwen Cooper, Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper, and Ianto Jones.
Air Date:                 13th February 2008.

An alien with the power to change memories infiltrates the team. With Captain Jack caught up in the memories of his lost family and Gwen struggling to remember Rhys, it takes Jack's love of Ianto to reveal the truth. Yet there's always a price to pay.

The premise of this story is another typical and over used science fiction trope, the addition of a new team member who everyone knows but is in reality a psychic extraterrestrial with the power to insert his existence into the memories of others. It has been done so many times before in shows like Star Trek and while Adam is no different it isn't bad either. Some care has been made to make this work. Adam is inserted into the opening credits just like the rest of the team members, giving pause to the regular viewer.

The episode itself is typical of Torchwood in that despite being an entertaining forty five minutes nothing actually happens. There is no real plot other than Jack slowly coming to notice that something is wrong and then fixing it. Fixing it in such a way that this episode only happens for us the viewer. Every member of Torchwood has it retconned at the end.

What does make the episode is Adam reviving the memories of the younger Jack losing his little brother, Gray -  whom Captain John Hart mentioned having found at the end of the first episode of this season. We learn that Jack's home isn't Earth but another colony and that they were attacked by some terrible race who may have taken his brother. Finally after all this time we are getting something on Jack's back story. Enough to pique the interest but not too much. The rest of the team get sort of personalty switched by what Adam does to them but their interactions aren't as interesting as the experiences Jack has.

The problem with Adam is that it simply feels like a filler episode with no real addition to the story other than the flashback to Jack's past. I would have just preferred something more tangible out of it.

TW #17: Meat

"Have you never seen something so mad, so extraordinary... That just for one second, you think there might be more out there?"

Episode 17:     Sleeper.
Companions:   Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper and Ianto Jones.
Air Date:         6th February 2008. 

Gwen is forced to reveal Torchwood's true nature to Rhys after he follows her to work and accidentilly uncovers the truth behind the mysterious alien meat. Is there a price to pay for Rhys, Gwen, or Torchwood?

Meat is a fairly interesting story. Again nothing original but played just right so that it works. The story follows the team as they investigate a new source of meat that is coming onto the market in Cardiff. Some strange whale-like creature has washed up through the rift and been taken by some men who are looking at making money from it. The creature regenerates any flesh taken from it and grows as a result. The meat is packaged as something like beef and sold on with no one any the wiser. When Rhys becomes involved he has to infiltrate the gang so that the Torchwood team can close the operation down for good.

At last we are getting Rhys into the story more rather than being a background character as he was throughout the first season. He really is the center to this one and it is nice so see a character who isn't one of the Torchwood team get the spot light in the show. Although I didn't remember Rhys being so up himself as much previously even when you consider that he's having to deal with Gwen having a secretive new job.

Although different in appearance and design, the poor creature reminds me of the star whale from one of the early 11th Doctor stories, The Beast Below. They reused the sound for that so is it a juvenille or similar species? Probably not but nice to think that we can link them together. Both episodes also focus on human abuse of an alien animal.

There is more sense of the surreal in this episode. I can watch Doctor Who and see strange aliens, mysterious worlds and the like, and it never or rarely causes me to ponder it. Meat is a good Torchwood story but it feels out of place when you drop something like this in although that is maybe the point of the show. Doctor Who is science fantasy while Torchwood perhaps shows us how bizarre such events might be if you see them from an everyday person's point of view.

TW #16 : To The Last Man

Jack: [draws a line on a piece of paper] Linear time. [balls the piece of paper up] Screwed up time. Imagine your life is a straight line, from birth to death. Now, try drawing that line on the paper without flattening it out.

Gwen: It's impossible.

Jack: That's why we gotta stop it.

Episode 16:     To The Last Man.
Companions:   Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper and Ianto Jones.
Air Date:         23rd January 2008. 

Once a year, for a single day, Tommy Brockless is defrosted in the Torchwood hub to make sure he's still working. He is kept alive until the day he is needed, when ghosts appear at a hospital and it is clear that the time has come.

Much like Greeks Bearing Gifts in season one, To The Last Man focuses on Toshiko above all other regular characters. She has fallen in love with Tommy Brockless, a soldier from the first world war but must deal with the fact that he must return to the past and die so that the present and the future can be saved. As a science fiction troupe it is nothing new but the episode is well written and perfectly acted out to carry the emotional resonance that it needs. The only issue with this particular story is that it doesn't explain the how and why of Tommy's initial crossing over which makes the loop a paradox. But hey, this the Whoniverse and such events seem to be common place.

The ghosts that are sighted are phantom images of the nurses and patients at the soldier's hospital in 1918 where Tommy was taken from by early Torchwood team members. There is some interaction but I really felt that the "ghostly" encounters could have carried a more frightening countenance than what they did. Although it is a love story for the most part, a hint of the horror of the Great War via the "ghosts" would have improved the story immensely much like they did in Ghost Machine.

To The Last Man is one of the more interesting episodes of this season and worth a watch.

TW #15 : Sleeper

Tosh: You said we weren't allowed to use that again.

Jack: It's just a mind probe.

Ianto: Remember what happened last time you used it?

Jack: That was different. And that species has extremely high blood pressure.

Ianto: Oh, right, their heads must explode all the time.

Episode 15:     Sleeper.
Companions:   Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper and Ianto Jones.
Air Date:         23rd January 2008. 

A burglary turns into a slaughter and Torchwood suspect alien involvement. When the investigation escalates into a city-wide assault, Jack realizes the whole world is in danger.

Sleeper is a story about alien invasion but not the sort that we normally see. In this story we have an infiltration by aliens referred to by Jack as Cell 114. They come to Earth disguised as humans but with their true identities locked away until triggered. At which point they show certain shape-shifting qualities and try to disrupt Earth's defences. The team have found one who they help retain their human identity and try to thwart the invasion.

When this story first aired I figured that the invasion by Cell 114 was going to be the overarching plot for this season. It sets itself up perfectly for that but alas no, Sleep is simply a one off episode with no connection to anything else. The events are never referred to ever again. In hindsight this does spoil the episode for me because by itself the story doesn't do anything. You can't drop something major like this down and then just walk away in my opinion.

Sleeper isn't a great episode anyway. There is nothing to drive the main characters forward either with their own stories or the show in general. Already season two shows that it isn't going to be as good as season one. We know that as the show goes along it gets weaker and weaker each season. I do wonder whether Torchwood should have been left with just the one season?