Written By: James Moran
Directed By: Colin Teague
Air Date: 23rd January, 2008
Summary: It's the obligatory 'thinly veiled suicide bomber analogy' episode. But it's still fairly watchable, in spite of the apparently now insane Ianto.
It's a new pre-teaser sequence, featuring everyone's favourite pteranodon pterodactyl. Although if you don't know what show you're watching, I'm not sure why a thirty second narration would help you in your ignorance.
It's dark, and I think I see a bonsai tree as a camera pans around. But before our intrepid viewers can wonder if the backlight is broken on their TV, someone opens their eyes: a sleeper, in a twist of foreshadowing-through-staging. Something's just broken outside of the bedroom, and presumably there are no pets or kids in the house, because the titular sleeper elbows her husband awake to make him deal with the scary and possibly murderous intruders into the house. And since all good men should be willing to face down crimials for their wives, he gamely gets up and grabs a handy dandy cricket bat (presumably left over from a quick game before bed) and goes to face his destiny with the general cheerfulness of Frodo heading to Mount Doom.
Wifey meanwhile grabs a mobile and in a brief display of common sense, calls the police, who tell her that they might be round sometime next tuesday, if someone's going to be in all day, because, you know, she didn't actually press the right numbers for 999, so she probably called the gas board.
I notice these things so you don't have to.
The two burglers are awfully aggressive, considering that it would be far easier to just leg it after being caught rather than confront Frodo and his Cricket Bat, but they coldcock the hobbit and push their way into the bedroom, to have their wicked way with wifey. She's having none of it, and in a display of utter ominousness, we watch a lamp and hear screams. Now, honestly, I didn't think it was that ugly.
The Mystery Squad are on the case, pulling up in the WoodMobile, and Owen acts suspiciously like a Doctor by actually paying attention to the injured bloke who tried to carve a police car a new sunroof with his head by falling five floors (because clearly his head is made of solid concrete if he tried burgling a flat that was six floors above ground instead of just robbing a ground floor flat) and asking about his medical condition. While we're still reeling from that, Cap'n Jack starts issuing orders, sending Gwen and Owen off to the hospital with sunroof boy, which seems to indicate that the Official Torchwood Naked Wrestling Leadership Contest had been held and settled sometime in the previous week, much to the distress of the fanbrats who will, I'm sure, be crying into their chocolate milks over having missed that scene.
Jack and Tosh head inside, to get the lowdown on what's happened from an overly helpful PC. Jack tries to politely kick him out, and touches his arm to move him along. Tosh looks over and starts grinning as if she expects Jack to start mauling the poor man.
The Police officer clearly wants to join Team EvenSexierThisYearHonest, that or he's just a fanboy, as he offers up theories as to the presence of a cricket bat in the bedroom. Jack responds by inviting the Policeman around to his to play with hockey sticks sometime (is he still living in the Hub?) and shoves PC Wannabe out the door, shutting it rather pointedly behind him.
"Making friends?" Tosh seems intent on teasing.
"Not really," responds Jack, and damn, that was a cold and abrupt response, a far cry from the flirtatious Jack of old. Tosh is still standing there, smiling like she's waiting for the punchline, when Jack bends down to have a look at the pincushion.
They figure out that nothing in the room was a good enough weapon to cause stab wounds. I'm not sure why they ruled out the large chunks of broken glass as an obvious choice, but obviously my mind doesn't work the same way as those of people who think that shooting their boss is a way to resolve issues with his management style. Also, they can't figure out who did it. So, since we've established exactly who isn't in possession of the Braincell, it's over to the hospital.
Wifey, whose name is actually Beth, is engaged in lovey-dovey talk with her injured husband in between explaining that she saw and heard nothing to Owen and Gwen. They excuse themselves, and Owen says that in spite of there being no blood, he's convinced wifey did it, and comes to this conclusion through logical deduction, the cad.
Gwen disagrees, and Owen calls her Jessica Fletcher in a completely obscure reference that I don't get, because the only time I've ever heard that name was in an Ugly Betty episode, so either I'm just out of the loop, or Torchwood's getting its meta on. El Capitano calls, orders Owen to stay all night, and Owen tells Gwen that Jack just called to tell her to stay all night with the burgler. I like the way Owen thinks. He even cadges a pound off Gwen when she asks for a coffee. Oh Owen. I'm actually starting to like you.
The burgler comes around and points the finger at wifey, and though logic didn't convince her, a witness statement does. I'm not sure what this says about her deductive processes. Apparently looking upon Gwen's visage is enough to make the burgler flatline, and he immediately croaks.
In a segue of screeching violins, Beth is hauled to the Hub sporting the latest in Guantanamo fashion. Jack rips the black hood off her head and immediately lays into the bad cop routine. He demands to know what happened, though Beth denies everything and, labouring under the illusion that the UK is still a free country, demands her solicitor. It's worth pointing out, I suppose, that I never for a moment thought he'd actually hurt her, partly because Gwen's standing by impassively, and because Ianto's also watching calmly.
Jack is apparently not the one with an (electro)magnetic personality. As Jack pushes, a lightbulb blows up. Huh. Weird. Spooky. Obvious.
Jack leaves at Gwen's prompting, and she starts in with the good cop. He goes off to stand at the one-way mirror looking down into the cell next to Ianto, who proceeds to quote exactly what Jack said to him last night when he what Jack just told the prisoner. Apparently Jack starts to get turned on by the thought of putting shivers down Ianto's spine, and Ianto decides to play killjoy by then going "Eh, not so much."
They decide to go for the traditional 'let's test things' approach that a team of scientists always likes to default to. Gwen walks her up to the Hub, befriending the victim of the week en route, and Beth is suitably impressed by Team Spooky's Clubhouse.
Ianto seems to be in the bowels of the Rift Manipulator, and god knows what he's doing. For all we know, he may have been reengineering it to produce the best timetravelling popcorn known to Humankind. He hangs out of the water tower like a suit-wearing bat, and gives Beth a glare that could toast marshmallows (wow, these food analogies are making me hungry) and tells her not to sniff etheric resonators. I wouldn't sniff anything in Torchwood. You have no idea where it's been or what it's been in.
Owen straps Beth into a chair for her tests, perhaps explaining why exactly he's no longer a practicing physician, and proceeds to break two needles and a scalpel. Instead of immediately blaming Owen's crappy medical skills, Jack comes to the conclusion that Beth's an alien, even though she claims there's no such thing as aliens (perhaps forgetting the Cyberman invasion, the Daleks, the Webstar, the Valiant, etc.etc.) to which Jack responds by introducing her to Janet.
Janet, on the other hand, isn't impressed by the way Wifey is continually cringing and whimpering and gets bored, slinking off to a corner. Jack's continuing his bad cop routine, trying to get anything out of Beth, though it doesn't come to much.
So, time for Plan B.
They wheel out a metal chair and a "mind probe" that routinely causes heads to explode. Gwen is understandably a little nervous about using this thing, though Ianto doesn't seem to care he's going to be on imminent gore-cleanup, instead making some childish and crass jokes about electrocution that apparently even Jack doesn't approve of.
They strap Beth in, stick a tinfoil cap on her head, and tell her they're going to burrow through her consciousness and it's going to hurt like hell. Not that that's ever stopped them before. Doesn't stop them now either.
They turn on the Hat of Doom, there's a lot of screaming, CGI shots of neurons, and the lights go funny. It takes a fair few minutes, but eventually Wifey goes still, and her arm's skin turns into something that looks like it belongs on a crocodile that had swallowed a string of christmas tree lights.
She repeats an alien phrase, which is apparently her name rank and serial number, and Jack for once demonstrates that he really does have useful information apart from knowing more sexual positions than the Karma Sutra does, by identifying who she is and where she comes from. Turning off the hat, Beth is apparently none the wiser. That or she's lying.
I'm going with lying.
She's apparently a sleeper agent for something called Cell 114. And we don't find any more reasoning behind why they infiltrate and destroy worlds, because, you know, we don't really care about silly things like rationales, because rationale is for pansies and scifi fans. Apaprently Sleepers gather information with their implants, which can also generate false scanner images. In Wifey's case, this includes the entire Torchwood database.
Ianto throws a strop that the aliens know more about Torchwood than he does. This isn't exactly something that's difficult if you actually think about the consequences of driving around in a Torchwood branded car, wielding Torchwood branded weaponry, and selling T-Shirts in the tourist office with the slogan "I visited Torchwood's secret lair, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."
They make the obvious decision they need to do something, and the first thing they do is... tell Beth she's a murderous alien infiltrator. She doesn't take it very well, but then who would? Gwen steps in with a remarkable Star-Trekian definition of Human (being that Humanity is in our minds). Jack stares at her blankly, like he's not sure whether to hug her or roll his eyes at her.
Beth asks if the fact that she's never going to have a normal life, or kids or any of that make up for 'feeling' Human, which is, to be honest, a pretty good comeback. Wifey 1, Bleeding Heart 0.
She wants to be fixed, Jack says she can't be. Alien-Beth is kinda inevitable, and she'll be the herald of the invasion. Very bad, generally. She asks if they're going to kill her, and though Gwen immediately denies it, Jack looks at her with "Of course we're going to kill her, you idiot," expression, which makes me wonder if Torchwood under Gwen's tenure was taken up with giving alien invaders reassuring hugs.
Back to the Den for a Discussion. Jack points out they have to kill her, while Tosh puts forward the sciencey option of cryogenics with a rather disturbing perkiness.
In the meantime, we see that in the Official Torchwood Naked Wrestling Leadership Contest, Owen lost to Ianto as he can be found up on a catwalk, watering the plants, while Ianto loiters... somewhere else. In fact, I don't think we've seen Ianto doing anything at all in this episode. Clearly, Ianto has mastered the ability to shirk as much as possible. He's probably up in the tourist office, playing Metroid and working on his standup routine.
They take Beth to cool off, and she abruptly staggers, crying out, thinking of murder and stock footage. I wouldn't scream so much. Jack's probably got a much more disturbing mind and you don't see him yelling all the time. Apparently this is Beth being destroyed by the alien persona at an awfully convenient moment, story-wise. They run faster to Cryogenics. Which is apparently just Owen's little tiled den of horrors.
Wifey makes Jack promise to kill her, Tosh zaps the implant, Gwen sympathises, and Owen shoots Beth full of drugs. There a not at all ominous shot of a scan of her implant which, apparently, none of them thought was important enough to look at. And this would be why aliens think Humanity is an easy target, I would assume.
We see some sort of business man drinking with his wife and telling some unkind story with much aplomb. There's a beeping noise and rather than it being the latest obnoxious ringtone, it's apparently his implant. Like Wifey, he has the funny skin condition on his arm, and when it appears (that'll teach him to go playing in the poison ivy) his face goes all blank, and he apparently stops blinking.
The wife starts making noises about demanding to know what's going on, and becomes a right pain in the neck, so, on the way out, Husband has a go at being an amateur chiropractitioner. It shuts her up, at least. A paramedic, meanwhile, stops attending to a collapsed man to stand up and leave, and somewhere else, a woman in a chavvy gold top lets go of her baby's pram and walks off, leaving it to run into traffic even though, in the previous shot, it had been about to hit a bollard.
Continuity is for wusses.
The last member of the Funtime Gang is downstairs in the morgue, and we find that apparently you shove caskets in Owen's drawers, and they appear in the morgue. Awesome. There's sad music as Gwen watches Ianto filing Wifey away, and on the way out, he nudges her with his elbow and they walk out arm in arm. Aww.
Of course, then we have the ominous zoom in and reveal that actually wifey's still awake. I KNEW it. Lying all the way. The lights go dead, and Gwen seems to be holding the Braincell when the first thing she checks is Beth's casket. She's escaped through the tunnels, and Ianto quips they need to change the locks, in a clear demonstration of saying you're going to bolt the stable doors now that the horse has eloped to Spain with a giraffe. Seriously, why the fuck did you people not change the locks the moment you realised an alien sleeper cell had all your codes?
Humanity is screwed.
Apparently while they failed to turn off Beth's implants and freeze her, they did take her off the Sleeper cell network. And you'd think that the moment Jack said 'network' he'd realise she wasn't alone, but then Gwen still has the Braincell. Hmm. Headscritch time.
Wifey has apparently gone back to the hospital. She runs through the standard 'I love you but I have to leave you for your own sake' speech and then hugs him. There's a strange sound, and suddenly he's dying. Her arm has turned into the Arm Of Doom, and turned into a sword. We've all wanted a sword arm, deep in our heart of hearts, but I'm not sure why exactly the AOD felt the need to kill Wifey's husband, but she's clearly upset. Jack and Gwen arrive a moment too late, and they finally figure out that she's got a weapon in her arm. Pretty fucking obvious, right? They run out of the room with her.
A man is at home with his wife and two kids. The doorbell rings, he goes to answer it. It turns out to be scary Husband (not to be confused with Wifey's husband) who asks the man his name and then stabs him to death in front of a screaming wife and children. Yeah. You've just earned your post-Watershed timeslot. Feel very proud of yourself, Torchwood.
A tanker, like the ones that are generally the bane of every motorist's life while driving down motorways, parks up in a car park, and the paramedic gets out. A car stops and tries to get him to move out of the way. Not sure why; there's plenty of space to drive around, but that would deprive us of the sight of a man fleeing for his life. The paramedic pulls something off his arm and sticks it on the tanker. Always bad.
In the hospital, Jack reports it's 'all over' in a serious case of "famous last words" and the wall promptly explodes.
In the Hub, the earth moves. Ianto looks confused. He didn't think Jack was back so soon. In fact, Jack's breathlessly asking Gwen if she's alright as they lie, dirty on the floor. Oh, the innuendo I could come up with.
Back in the Bunker, its all hands to the stations... well... two hands to their stations. Ianto just stands around with his hands on his hips watching. Tosh reports that a tanker blew, and it's taken out a military fuel line. Owen reports that the head of the city council has been murdered. He's been stabbed seven times in the chest, once in the forehead. Sound familiar?
Actually... no it doesn't. I had to rewatch the episode from the start and there is no prior mention of this. Well done with the edit there, guys. I'm guessing, however, that that's what happened to the dead burgler in the opening.
Why is that important? Ianto knows. Ianto knows everything. The murdered man is the city's emergency coordinator. Tea Boy then goes and blows his appearance of omniscience by letting on that he just read the bottom of the screen.
Stupid! Never let them know how you maintain your appearance of godlike knowledge! Fool!
Jack points out that "it's starting right now" in continued defence of his 'Mr Obvious 1897-2008' title.
Chav!Sleeper walks into a building (labelled "Communications") holding what looks like a misshapen rusk, and Torchwood immediately demonstrates exactly what happens to your budget when you move to BBC2 by having a massive explosion that's on screen for less than ten seconds.
All the phones go dead. Remember that. It's an important point.
Jack figures out what they should have realised the moment they found her, i.e. that sleeper cells normally number more than one person. He gets aggressive and shouty, while Gwen uses her much vaunted 'Humanity' to persuade Beth to use her implant, and Wifey admits that there's at least one more and she can track him. To the WoodMobile!!
Husband is driving purposefully to some destination while he starts fiddling with his arm like its a PDA. Meanwhile, Jack has apparently had an idea, and it's monumental enough to stop them from chasing the terrorist bent on killing them all.
Tosh is shaming scifi scientists everywhere by admitting she can't just 'hook something up'. The phone are dead. All of them. Everywhere. When Owen won't accept it, because we all know Tosh is god when it comes to tech, Ianto gets in on the act. Phones aren't working. And apparently, tin cans with bits of string are on the outs too. Those crafty aliens!
Jack's idea apparently didn't involve stopping for a quick orgy, but involves an actual radio, although I'd like to know exactly how a radio signal penetrates underground, but in TorchwoodLand it does. So there. Jack and Gwen get in touch with the rest of Team Spanky who want to know what they can do to help.
They work out which way he's heading, and Tosh performs that TV-easy hackery (Ianto calls it obscene - Tosh looks flattered) to discover that the military has been a group of very bad boys, and they've been keeping secrets from Torchwood. I can imagine Jack having some very sharp words and meetings with military commanders soon. Possibly involving spankings.
You know, I'm sorry, I'm not sure how I got on this whole spanking thread. The point is: the military is keeping ten nuclear warheads on the site that Husband is heading for. This is how they take over, apparently. Good plan. I like it.
Tosh wants to know what happens if they fail. Jack points out they won't feel a thing, but, you know, he's a dashing hero, so why worry. Cue the "let's have sex" joke that was relentlessly spoiled in the previews. But at least we know that there's very little chance of a Tosh/Ianto/Owen threesome. Pity. Shame that Team Sparky doesn't really have much confidence in their glorious leader, hmm?
Husband arrives at the army base and goes all Rambo, ignoring bullet shots thanks to his hand little personal forcefield, and wipes out the guards in a frenzy of blood and gore. He's so hardcore he can even wield rifles one-handed. Recoil's for wusses, yo.
Jack comes up with his second sensible idea of the day. Just as Husband enters all the codes to unlock the doors to the big scary weapons, he runs Husband over. All I can say is that the WoodMobile must be made of neutronium. Hitting an invincible alien doesn't even dent the radiator. But it does seem to at least break the guy's leg.
Husband retaliates by putting his sword arm straight through Jack's chest. Gwen sort of rolls her eyes and gets on with the business of frying the guy's shields. Husband makes the usual litany of threats (we know you, we're ready, blah blah blah) Jack hauls himself off the sword arm once she's done, and has apparently developed the ability to suffer no grievous wounds anymore, since he doesn't have any ill effects afterwards. Given, though, that we could clearly see him holding the sword under his arm, Jack's actually just a big faker.
In retaliation for ruining his favourite coat, Jack shoots Husband while uttering some ridiculous Hollywood-esque putdown. Husband continues the Torchwood tradition of dying while imparting the knowledge that 'something's coming for you' and then blows himself skyhigh in a rather expensive looking pyrotechnical display combined with egomaniacal laughter.
Back in the Hive of Scum and Villainy, Tosh is apparently unhappy with something Jack is asking her to do. Ianto appears, looks at Jack, who ducks out of the way with a peculiar 'oh shit' expression. I think Ianto's cross about something. He didn't look happy. Took me watching the scene about four times before I figured out he was picking at duct tape and the radio thing that Jack had attached to the WoodMobile.
Gwen goes to see Wifey, to tell her that they're ready to freeze her again. Beth is apparently guilt ridden, and that's never a good start to a conversation. She knows that when she turns into an alien she won't feel guilty. She asks Gwen to remember Beth, and suddenly she's brandishing her sword arm at Gwen, backing her out of the lab and threatening to kill her.
Team Jumpy appear in second, pulling out their guns (Tosh apparently keeps hers in her bin). Everyone starts yelling. And then Jack yells for everyone to calm down, which, you know... *giggle* We saw you in Cyberman. Not exactly a pillar of calm.
Wifey doesn't sound very sure of herself as she threatens them all, and their species. She wishes Gwen luck and the moves to strike her, and is immediately riddled with bullets in a classic case of Suicide By Torchwood. She lies dead, sword arm broken off.
It's time for the post episode chat between the leads. Gwen walks into Jack's office. She displays that she really has developed as an experienced Torchwood officer by pointing out that they actually know a helluva lot about their enemy and makes me believe, for half a second, the "Torchwood is ready" statement.
And then I remember this is the team who nearly destroyed the planet thanks to their own petty concerns. Never mind then.
The episode ends on Jack stroking the broken blade in an altogether Freudian fashion, and we just hope that he doesn't have any plans with Ianto this evening, for Ianto's sake.
In my right paw, I have Ianto from Series 1, and in my left paw I have Ianto of series 2. While these two Iantos share certain similarities, such as a certain taste in suits and a Welsh accents, they are, otherwise, completely fucking different.
What happened?! It's like the writers recast GDL in a new role that happened to share the same name as his old one. Developing a certain sense of humour is one thing, but Ianto of the left paw was doing everything short of mugging at the camera, and I think he may have even been doing that at one point.
Perhaps I'm being too hasty. It is, after all, only the second episode of the series, and the Ianto we saw in last week's episode definitely seemed like a natural outgrowth of someone who'd finally been given a chance to grow over... I suspect a year or so... more of a sense of humour, but with that glimmer of the person that we remember.
So perhaps I should say that in my left paw, I hold Ianto of Sleeper, who needs a short sharp kick in the bollocks to get him to stop cracking wise in every single goddamn line he has. At first I laughed, but the continual attempts to be funny eventually left me going, "Hahaha... ok, really stop that."
And, I have to admit, the screwing around with the chair, faking electrocution left me with a deep sense of unease. Maybe he was trying to make a point, but it felt more like there was a 14 year old in the room, messing around, and Jack's reproachful look only served to back that up. I laughed, kinda, then felt instantly bad for doing it. It was a really crass thing to do, and sat very uncomfortably with the character we've previously seen. You would have thought that Ianto, of all people, would have more sympathy for someone caught up in alien machinations beyond their control.
In fact, he was kinda acting like Jack. He was so constantly making one-liners that there was no hint of what he might actually be thinking. It was almost like a bit of a defence screen. We get a brief hint of the character we're used to seeing, and that was in the morgue, where he wordlessly nudges Gwen to offer her his arm.
Since I concede defeat and admit that yes, Ianto and Jack have clearly slept together at some point (though I refuse to be drawn on whether that's the case currently - I would lean to not, as a tenuous date does not lead me to believe they have what we shall call a stable and secure relationship), this makes me wonder if he's embarrassed about it, and is employing the easiest technique he can think of to keep people off guard. Jack, by contrast, suddenly seems more serious. He makes what could be construed as a vaguely flirtatious comment to the Policeman Of The Week, but it's clearly habitual, and he doesn't seem to take kindly to Tosh's inference otherwise.
I hope this wise cracking clown isn't in the next episode. I'd like my regular Ianto back, please.
Continuing with the theme of dissecting the characters, Gwen actually seems to have developed that 'core of humanity' rather than just having it listed on her character bio on the website. For the first time since I've seen her, you can see that. We've seen her be the leader of Torchwood, even though she's apparently decided to defer to Jack, and now we see her interacting with a clearly traumatised woman/alien who's a victim of her circumstances.
And before everyone freaks about Gwen's comments about Jack's manners in bed, I think that she dug herself into a hole and suddenly realised what she was saying a minute after she said it. Although Ianto's following comments made me think that at some point they'd been having a threesome and immediately cracked up at the thought that the writers were truly screwing with the minds of the viewers.
Owen is sticking with his more tolerable attitude. The vicious bitterness that seemed to be lurking between he and Gwen at the end of last year is nowhere to be seen, and this is, unfortunately, the effect of them having so much time off screen and away from us. We don't see what happened to patch things up. He still demonstrates an abominable bedside manner (brandishing a scalpel isn't going to win him the Torchwood Award For Cuddliness), and clearly he worked in the NHS at some point, given his opinion on hospitals.
Tosh, on the other hand, has ditched the geek look and is dressed this week as the Hot Lady Scientist. I mean, seriously. I'm not a lesbian, but there are moments when I realise I could definitely be bisexual with the right incentive. More to the point, she doesn't seem to have that vague sense of discomfort which she had last year. She's confident, almost serene, and dresses and acts like it.
In short, basically every character has undergone an overhaul from last year, and some from last episode. It's like the writers went "Wow, I think we made these guys fucked up beyond redemption," and instead of slowly writing their way out of it, changed their characters off screen and have the new ones on camera like they've always been there. I'll be honest, the new characters (with the exception of Sleeper!Ianto) are more likeable and more engaging than their series 1 counterparts, so I'm not objecting too much, but there's a vague feeling that you've turned over two pages at once in your book, and you've missed something important.
I suppose I should actually touch on the story at some point.
This was clearly a setup episode. The writers seem to be laying threads for the rest of the series (or future series) to return to later. Last week there was that aside from Spike, and this week it's alien terrorists. They're alright as a recurring threat, I suppose, but they didn't hook me very well. So far, Torchwood had not proved its strength in arcing plotlines, since every episode has been a self-contained story, so we'll have to wait a few episodes to see if/when this pans out. The idea of sleeper agents is clearly relevant, in the modern world, especially when two of the three 'activated' sleepers go and blow themselves up in a rather uncomfortable mimicry of suicide bombing.
Science fiction does real-world commentary best when it's done subtlely, so we'll see how this works. At the end of the day, this wasn't so much a story about the alien sleepers, it was about a woman who thought she was Human and was suddenly confronted with the loss of her husband, her life, and her very identity. We knew right from the start how it would end, and it's never fun to be proved right.
Watching it, my mind was drawn to parallels with the Family of Blood in Doctor Who's last series, which similarly had the 'hiding in plain sight' premise of someone pretending to be Human, and what happens when they realise they're not who they thought they were. John Smith genuinely broke my heart, but I couldn't find myself feeling the same way for Beth. Perhaps it was the sobbing and crying that grated, or perhaps it's simply that we didn't have enough time to feel sympathy for the Human Beth, but it just didn't hold the same emotional resonance for me when Beth sacrificed herself as John Smith did. Perhaps that's because Beth didn't sacrifice herself for the greater good, she committed suicide by proxy because she was frightened of herself, and couldn't live with the guilt of what she'd already done. There's a clear distinction here, but I think Torchwood would be better if it steered clear of ground already trodden by its progenitor, since we, as viewers, can't help but draw inevitable comparisons.
The story wasn't helped by two other factors. First, the last sleeper looked like he just wasn't pay attention, and looked sort of drunk. It's not a good look for an alien sleeper. Supposedly these people were actually alien agents with false memories so, surely, when they were activated, they wouldn't look blank so much as purposeful. Instead, we get the three sleepers walking around acting and looking like zombies. The only thing that was more laughable was the rather gratuitous use of fake blood.
When the woman sees her husband killed in front of her, the tight shot of her wide eyed face, splattered with blood, actually had me laughing, which was not the reaction I suspect the director was after. When you approach that level of gore, my suspension of disbelief hits the circuit breaker, and I become acutely aware of the fake blood, fake violence, etc.. It's probably why I found the last horror movie my friends made me go to intensely hilarious and why I was nearly kicked out of the cinema for laughing while my friends sat around, petrified and shaking at the screen. DW's Blink showed that the most intense sort of horror is the sort that you don't even see.
Of course, this is Torchwood. I'm starting to think they have a gore quotient they have to meet every episode. Hopefully the rambo scene satisfied them for the next month or so.
Overall, this is the weakest episode of the series so far, but given that we're only two episodes in, that's hardly a damning statement. You can clearly tell that Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang was filmed later on, since the actors all seem much more at ease with their new characters. Three weevils out of five approve.
Next Week: As far as Torchwood is concerned, timelines are about as fixed and stable as your average child celebrity's personality, and Toshiko falls for a man out of his time.
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