Category: Torchwood
Torchwood episode 7: Greeks Bearing Gifts (26/11/2006)
‘So, I’m shagging a woman and an alien.’ Tosh becomes the last of the regulars to lead an episode, and that becomes almost a statement. Even more than Ianto, she’s the one who’s just there doing technical support – the IT department of Torchwood. I like that the episode plays with this, leaning into the disparaging perception of the rest of the team and notably not concluding with a rousing endorsement of Tosh’s importance to the group (which would have been the Star Trek: TNG Reg Barclay approach), but banishing her again to the margins.
Torchwood episode 6: Countrycide (19/11/2006)
‘When was the last time you came so hard and so long, you forgot where you are?’ Very much The X-Files: Our Town in the style of Dog Soldiers, as cannibalistic hicks pick off visitors. The typical theme of these things is “metropolitan folk” confronted with an older, harder way of life and having to rediscover their own capacity for savagery in the process, and there is a bit of that here, as Owen disparages the countryside and Gwen struggles to comprehend strange, rural rituals. But mostly it’s just running round in the dark shooting guns and screaming.
Torchwood episode 5: Small Worlds (12/11/2006)
‘What else could I do?’ Unlike Doctor Who, Torchwood always carries the possibility that the team might lose. This establishes the kind of threat – something from folklore coming to haunt the real worlds – that might sit in the parent series. But whereas it’s unthinkable that the Doctor would bargain with a child’s life for the sake of the Earth, this isn’t even the last time Jack will.
Torchwood episode 4: Cyberwoman (5/11/2006)
‘I was on top of you, I could feel your hard on.’ Chris Chibnall’s first pass at writing a partly-converted Cyberman abandons the body horror of the concept in favour of a CyberBikini with focus drawn to the breasts, lower belly and pubic area – and to make sure we can’t miss it, James Strong includes shots of Dr Tanizaki eagerly caressing them while eulogising Lisa’s ‘bare flesh’. It would be an uphill struggle for the episode to overcome the tastelessness of this, and sure enough it doesn’t. Instead, it unfolds into a standard “lockdown” episode with a hungry Pteranodon and a last minute brain transplant that’s so half-bothered the makers genuinely seem to think accents are hard wired into the body rather than the brain as the English Lisa suddenly turns Welsh.
Torchwood episode 3: Ghost Machine (29/10/2006)
‘I know what you did.’ This is more like it, mature where Day One was just aiming to be “adult”, and with a righteously angry edge to about the way men abuse women and get away with it. It’s also the first episode to expand the characters beyond Gwen – and surprisingly, Owen is the focus, which is good because Burn Gorman is excellent. The reveal is that behind the cynicism and laddishness, he has the strongest sense of justice in the team. His instinct when confronted with an image of rape and murder is to hunt down and confront the perpetrator while the rest of Torchwood is more interested in the stolen ‘ghost machine’.
Torchwood episode 2: Day One (22/10/2006)
‘Woman possessed by gas knobbing fellas to death.’ This doesn’t feel like the same programme as the first episode; of the uncanny intruding into real life, and it’s disheartening that we’re already into the kind of “monster of the week” procedural that took Doctor Who a series and a half to get to. Gwen’s clearly still meant to be our Rose character, but this manifests through her being outraged or disbelieving about pretty much everything she sees (CRIMINT, photo IDs, dead bodies), and being a bit useless even at standard police work (letting a suspect run past her). No wonder most of the team seem to view her as a bit of a liability.
Torchwood episode 1: Everything Changes (22/10/2006)
‘Is that what alien life is? Filth? But maybe there’s better stuff out there, brilliant stuff, beautiful stuff. Just they don’t come here.’ From the off, this is meant to offer a very different take than the parent show. That was all about seeing the wonders and terrors of the universe; this is set in amongst the detritus, the things that fall to Earth. It’s rooted in death, and sex, and filth, and the worst of human nature. It ends with one of the team outed as a killer, committing suicide and her body being shoved inside a wall of freezers – the implication being, you work for Torchwood and this is where, sooner or later, you end up.
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