Category: Episode by Episode
Torchwood episode 22: Something Borrowed (5/3/2008)
‘Get back, you ugly bitch!’ The season’s comedy episode sees aliens crash Gwen and Rhys’ wedding, with the twist that Gwen’s heavily pregnant with one of them. The ensuring farce balances between comedy and soap opera, with an unwelcome return of Jack and Gwen’s unlikely romance plus Tosh’s tentative relationship with Owen, Thematically, it’s very loose – “relationships” include a cheeky hook-up with an alien shapeshifter, and Tosh having to bat away the unwelcome advances of Banana Boat.
Torchwood episode 21: A Day in the Death (27/2/2008)
‘You’re a very violent doctor, I’ve been watching you.’ What Torchwood can do, more so than either Doctor Who or The Sarah Jane Adventures, is small, personal stories. It usually prefers to file off the serial numbers of US TV shows, but when it’s on form, as it is here, it can forge a distinct identity, not focused on world-ending threats or monsters out of myth, but something darker and richer.
Torchwood episode 20: Dead Man Walking (20/2/2008)
‘I’m not the same, Gwen. I came back different. Hollow. Like I’m missing something. And I do not want to be like this.’ Series Two’s riff on Buffy the Vampire Slayer continues with an episode that’s two parts Bargaining and one part Killed By Death. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it’s not like the show hasn’t played with supernatural fantasy (as opposed to science fiction) before, but this is essentially a fairy story with Death defeated by a man with nothing to lose.
Torchwood episode 19: Reset (13/2/2008)
‘So, End of the World Survivors Club.’ Martha Jones arrives in Torchwood and the dynamic shifts. Suddenly Jack is a little closer to his cheeky Doctor Who character, Owen gets excited that he has another doctor to talk to, and everyone else has to take a slight step back to give her some space in the plot. Her background is handled in a strangely coy way: I can accept that there were Torchwood viewers who didn’t watch Doctor Who, but if anything the cryptic hints and winks at the audience about ‘a bad experience with a politician recently’ and ‘we were under the same Doctor’ are surely more annoying than a brief recap of the events of Last of the Time Lords, particularly as Martha’s TARDIS travels and consequent ‘really quite extraordinary’ lymphocytes are so important to the plot.
Torchwood episode 18: Adam (13/2/2008)
‘Now who are you and what do you want?’ Another episode that feels rooted in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and specifically Dawn’s sudden appearance in Buffy’s life at the start of Season Five. Adam’s purpose is – in some respects – even sadder. He can only exist if he’s remembered, and so he has to insert himself into Torchwood’s memories, in the process detaching great chunks of their real memories like melting icebergs.
Torchwood episode 17: Meat (6/2/2008)
‘What is this, Scooby Doo?’ I haven’t watched this since broadcast and remembered it as being fairly risible. I was wrong: it’s very funny, angry and real. The scenes of Rhys in the Hub are particularly effective, as he braves Gwen’s wrath to offer Torchwood a route into busting open the illegal meat factory. But there are loads of great moments: Rhys observing Torchwood arriving on the scene of his lorry crash; Rhys confronting Gwen, which is written and played as a real couple’s row; Tosh’s increasingly unsubtle attempts to seduce Owen.
Torchwood episode 16: To the Last Man (30/1/2008)
‘Your life will be like a thread stitching time back together.’ A year after Doctor Who did its own First World War sacrifice story, Torchwood presents its own version, with Tommy Brockless plucked from 1918 by Torchwood, defrosted once a year for a check-up until the time comes when he’ll need to be sent back to meet his destiny, saving the future, and his reward, death in front of a firing squad. The complication: Tommy has found a reason to live in Tosh, and so heroic sacrifice holds very little appeal.
Torchwood episode 15: Sleeper (23/1/2008)
‘I thought the end of the world couldn’t get any worse.’ A routine episode that’s sharper than the first series, largely built around Nikki Amuka-Bird’s sympathetic central performance as the sleeper agent. Thematically, it begins where Doctor Who: Utopia ended: with a human revealed to be an alien monster in hiding (perhaps his experiences at the end of the universe have given Jack an extra-ruthless intensity when it comes to exposing the sleeper). From there, it goes down a different route, with Beth’s humanity not erased by the alien inside, but constantly struggling to reassert itself until the predictably tragic conclusion.
Torchwood episode 14: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (16/1/2008)
‘Bloody Torchwood.’ The pre-titles sequence signals a shift from Series One, with the team (sans Jack) functioning as a unit to hunt town an alien Blowfish, only to predictably mess it up until Jack arrives – freshly back from the Year That Never Was – to save their skins. It’s funny, fast and fresh, with a sort of swagger that wasn’t entirely earned during the previous series. Then, post titles, Jack has to deal with the fall-out of abandoning his dysfunctional kids – which turns out, they’ve grown closer in his absence and now treat him like an absentee dad trying to worm his way back into their lives.
Doctor Who episode 753: Voyage of the Damned (25/12/2007)
‘But if you could choose, Doctor, if you decide who lives and who dies, that would make you a monster.’ The centrepiece of Doctor Who’s imperial phase, as David Tennant and Kylie Minogue take over Christmas with a special episode so big it spills out of the traditional hour-long slot to pack in a pastiche of The Poseidon Adventure with a side dish of Die Hard. There’s a certain absurdity to it, but it only very occasionally tips over into outright shclock, such as Elizabeth II waving at a flying replica of the Titanic and wishing the Doctor a happy Christmas.
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