Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Smell the Glove

Torchwood: They Keep Killing Suzie

And behind door number 8 of Tachyon TV's Torchwood advent calendar we have a yule log.

A metaphor for Torchwood itself: something that has all the right ingredients, the recipe's spot on, the cooking time accurate and yet every single time it always comes out looking like a steaming great big brown turd.

"Just like the hero in Partidge's proposed regional detective series."

If ever there was a look that summed up Torchwood it was what ever the script direction said when DC Swanson saw the ugly nose of the SUV plough round the corner. It's the look that screams, "Oh fuck. It's Torchwood.". It's as if they placed a mirror up to my face and captured the expression that appears regular as clockwork at 2200hrs every Sunday evening.

How this inept, incompetent, bunch of jerk circlists ever managed to solve anything is not only a ruddy mystery, but a ruddy mystery that they themselves couldn't even begin to fathom. I was about to suggest that there's more than a whiff of Clouseau about them, but that would be far too charitable of me. One problem with these arrogant tosspieces is that they're reporting to no-one. So there's no point in being a maverick and fighting against the system when, by definition of the goddamn show, there is no system in place to fight against. No stupid chief. No regulations. No stuffy organisational restrictions that you're constantly battling against. It's like you're George W Bush. And twice as dense. Jack even barks an order to the police that he's going to, and brace yourself here, to.... brake the speed limit! Gosh darn it. How maverick of him. Just like the hero in Partidge's proposed regional detective series Swallow. Perhaps, when pitching the series, RTD went tonto in the BBC canteen and forced the commissioning editor to smell his cheese?

"If only Torchwood episodes only came in pairs. Instead of being stuck with 13 of the damn things."

But lurking some beneath all this flim are actually some very clever ideas that have been so badly executed they've been left with merely a series of heat burns from the last cigarette they were offered by the firing squad. Suzie, remember her? No, nor do I. Well it appears that she planned for her resurrection before she died. Surely we should have been able to go back and watch previous episodes and see all the knowing little actions that led to this event? No. And do you know why not? Cos they pissed away her character inside of 45 minutes of the opening episode instead of, say, peppering half a dozen appearances with some meaningful character development and laying the seeds of resurrection. Now, if I can see that, I who has no experience of scripting a dramatic television series, then why can't they?

"I've given up quoting from the text, I'm so tired of the whole thing..."

I've seen better structure and dialogue from a Kerry Katona Iceland epic. Like the one where she got her gargantuan boobs stuck fast in a mountain of dirt cheap tutti-fruti ice cream only to be eaten free by 7 lard buckets armed with shovels. So well plotted and scripted that they give Torchwood a, if not run, then a wheezing breathless jog for its money.

And if you want some satisfying freezer action, don't go to the Torchwood morgue. That's why mums go to Iceland...

The Torchwood Bumper Book of Date Rape Techniques has this to say about They Keep Killing Suzie: Ianto's preoccupation with the button on the top of stopwatches was triggered by the fact that his half-Cyber converted girlfriend's nipples used to double up as timers for hard boiled (left nipple) and soft boiled (right nipple) eggs.

Suzie of the Dead

Torchwood: They Keep Killing Suzie

To quote Sean Alexander :'Complete tosh, obviously. But for once entertaining tosh.' I fully agree with what Sean is saying here. I am not pretending that Torchwood is perfect (which it isn't. Nothing is, not even Doctor Who), but I do enjoy it, and this week I enjoyed it once again.

To me it is one of the best things on television at the moment, not that you have to agree with me of course. My girlfriend, who is half-and-half about Torchwood (and was a big fan of the first series of Doctor Who but not so much of the second series) said to me at the end of the first episode that she didn't think that was the last we would see of Suzie, and she was right. I had to admit at the time I wasn't as sure as she was about it, but then again I don't always notice the obvious. It did seem a bit strange at the time to have her on the front cover of the Radio Times as a regular character if they were just going to kill her off in the first episode.

In my first review I said that I thought it was good that they were able to do that, to prove that not any character was safe from dying in any episode (well apart from Jack that is) and I still think it was a good thing that they did it, but bringing her back for an episode was also a good thing.

It is not uncommon is science-fiction for previously dead characters to come back at random intervals (although strangely not that often on Doctor Who), and in the glove, or ‘the risen mitten’ as Ianto dubbed it, they had a good enough reason to bring her back without having to go into a lengthy explanation of how it happened. Here we knew that the glove could bring people back to life, so why couldn't they bring her back to life if they wanted to, not that they probably would have wanted to if they could have helped it I would imagine.

I did wonder how they were going to get around the time limit thing on the glove, but again here it was part of the plot, why Suzie could be resurrected for longer than just two minutes, because it would have made for a very short episode if they had. It could have been possible with the episode being called They Keep Killing Suzie that they would just resurrect her for two minutes then have to do it again and again, killing her each time, but as she was already dead that wouldn't really work would it as you can hardly kill someone who is already dead. Being Science Fiction it doesn't really matter if it doesn't make completely sense in the real world but perhaps even that would be pushing the silly stakes a bit high.

Suzie's plan was a little convoluted, if I’m being honest, I mean killing yourself so that you can be resurrected three months later just in time for her to kill her dying father. She would have to have been very sure that this would have happened otherwise her plan would have failed, but you could say that if anyone knew the way Torchwood worked then she did, as she was the second in command before her betrayal.

I liked the fact that Gwen seems to have replaced Suzie in every way possible and I must admit that with Suzie and Owen, I would never have put two and two together on that one. Perhaps there were more discreet than his is being with Gwen at the moment, as Tosh didn’t seem particularly jealous of Suzie, so I am not sure that she knew that they were knocking each other off.

That was quite a nice bit of characterisation there and also some nice internal continuity for the series. In fact by now if you didn't already know that this was a Doctor Who spin-off, I am not sure that you would be able to tell that it was. There was precious little links to the parent series in this episode (and the past few episodes to be honest) and that is the way it should be, after all you don't need to have watched Doctor Who to appreciate Torchwood and conversely you don't have to watch Torchwood in order to appreciate Doctor Who, they are complete separate entities and are all the better for it.

I thought the episode was very well written, considering it was written by two complete newcomers (Paul Tomalin & Dan McCulloch), but the episode smacks far too much of RTD and the first episode to have been solely written by the two newcomers. For one thing this was a sequel to the first episode and there were quite a few of RTD’s trademarks in the episode, most notably the view that there is nothing after death, and not bright lights etc and some very funny lines.

The acting honours in the episode went to Indira Varma who was excellent as the slightly scary and definitely mad Suzie Costello and by the end of the episode you were glad that Jack pumped her full of lead and killed her off once and for all (or not as the case may be) after what she did to Gwen. Yasmin Bannerman was good in her brief role as Detective Swanson (very much the Gwen type character of this episode) and even though only John Barrowman and Eve Myles had much to do in this episode of the regulars and both of them were strong as they were in the first episode of the series.

Ianto had precious little to do as usual but he got the best lines in this episode. I wasn’t too sure about the final scenes between Ianto and Jack although I am pretty sure that was put in to please the slash fans that have being hoping that Jack and Ianto would get it together. I didn’t have the faintest idea what they were implying until I thought about it.

As for Owen and Tosh, well they did at least get some decent lines and Tosh was the one who came up with the idea of using the ISBN number (and was the person who destroyed the glove as well), which I didn’t think was as dumb as it sounded. Someone suggested that they could just have got the poems online and looked up the ISBN number of there as well. True they could have done that but that wouldn’t have been very dramatic would it? It also made sense within the episode itself, as they need the exact same copy of the said text that Suzie had, as that was what she would have used in the first place when planning the lock down.

I won’t lie and say I thought this was the best episode of Torchwood, but it was a very strong episode, very dark and atmospheric, and was well directed by James Strong. It kept my attention for the full fifty minutes and had me engaged throughout which means that, for me, at least, the episode worked and I look forward to the last five episodes with anticipation.

No-one Really Dies In Marvel Comics

Torchwood: They Keep Killing Suzie

Congratulations! They Keep Killing Suzie (GOD, that's such an obvious South Park joke) sets a new world record for the Hundred Meter Ceasing To Make Sense. It actually managed it before the end credits to Greeks Bearing Gifts! Of course it was all deliberate, you know. It was really a metatextual thesis on expectations and life-opinions being pre-programmed in advance, and by extenstion thereof through the cyclical nature of time, the ability to extrapolate your entire future existence from birth to death and eventual rebirth, peppered here and there with observations on the inherent logical contradiction of projecting so-called 'reality' through the unreal phosphor-dot medium of television.

Or maybe it was just bollocks.

Somebody watched The Wheel In Space and decided it wasn't dumb enough. It's not Chibnall-stupid, where the plot goes from A to B only on the back of the cast being complete neanderthals; it's more like Windows XP-stupid, which takes an infuriating smug delight in vaunting its self-perceived cleverness by insisting on stopping at all points from C to Z on the way, whether you want it to or not. Suzie hatches a revenge scheme worthy of the Cybermen, one thought out from the logical progession of interrelated chance events that could be stomped flat simply by one person standing up and saying don't be stupid, elephants aren't pink. Run it past Orac and even he would advise the laws of cause and effect to take a running jump.

For Christ's sake, I defy anyone to adequately explain HOW that preposterous Nintendo Power Glove can restore the mental faculties to a person who splattered their grey matter all over the Cardiff pavement. Or how Suzie knew where to aim the bullet to do just enough damage to kill herself without piercing anything, you know, vital for when she came back to life. Love & Monsters only just got away with the head-in-a-paving-slab from being a pastiche of the parent show; I don't give a toss if it's magic life-energy nonsense, I'm not buying for an instant that Suzie's doing all this when her brains are still missing for half the episode. As for how she knew Gwen would be able to use the glove in the first place, you could explain it in terms of the soul link formed between Gwen and Suzie if Gwen was so strongly in Suzie mind at the point where she died. It's just that the writers didn't really bother to, they only sort of hinted at it. And backstorying the 'life-knife' - I said 'cool', Ianto - in episode eight to explain away the huge logical gaps about its usage in the pilot episode is still SEVEN EPISODES TOO LATE.

"Run Suzie's revenge scheme past Orac and even he would advise the laws of cause and effect to take a running jump"

And yet, assuming you're not massaging your temples by the time the plot reaches cruising speed of two to the power of complete balls, there is still is lot within the episode with the potential to keep you watching. Like the circuit-combination of knife and glove, somehow it hooked me in and sucked my soul away right to the very end, no matter what idiocy it threw up in between to try and break the connection. The team-dynamic of the group as a working unit is leaps ahead of anything we've been offered prior to this. Genuine respect for each others' positions? That's certainly a new one for this show. The combination of Suzie's cynical desperation to cling to life and Gwen's naive compassion is devastating - as it bloody should be, since it's more or less the same predator/prey relationship they wheeled out last week. Some of the dialogue absolutely sparkles. Even Ianto manages to claw back just a little of his self-respect, so something must be going right for a change. A big meh to his scene at the end though; I'm just too sexx0red-out with this series to honestly care any more one way or the other.

We're back - however temporarily - to the old Jack we used to know, and on occasion love; the one that can casually defuse a situation with a choice one-liner and rattle on with funny anecdotes about his previous bed-ins. Ah, took me right back to The Doctor Dances, that did. Has the new, harder, no-second-chance Jack been exorcised into the night though? Not a bit of it. BANG. Why though does Jack waste precious time eating humble pie to the police instead of telling them flat out, get us out of here or more people will die and this time it'll be YOUR FAULT? I remarked after Greeks Bearing Gifts that I couldn't imagine the police being in any way impressed with Torchwood, and guess what? Right no-brainer that was.

"Don McLean just woke up with a start, looked up at the platinum disc hanging on the wall for American Pie, and said "Shit, do I really sound like that?"

Some of the bizarre direction left me scratching my head a bit. What's with all the sudden 'time slip' slo-mo bits? During one of those I half-expected Tom Baker to stumble in, stage a faint, nick the glove off Gwen's wrist and leg it. The club scene is a bit laughable in the way the gang's stakeout duty couldn't be less inconspicuous if the Dragnet theme was playing in the background. Having said that, the other clubbers are clearly so far out of it to even notice or react when the action starts - I've been in clubs like that in my formative years. The 'abusive dying Dad' bit was, at best, throwaway. And while Suzie could be genuinely Silence-Of-The-Lambs creepy, I bet Gwen would have freaked out a hell of a lot more if the coffee had started dribbling out through the hole in Suzie's jaw. Admit it, you wanted that to happen too.

The 'big questions' about the meaning of life and death - it was all school debating society stuff wasn't it? Meanwhile Max Vilmio from The Ghosts Of N-Space is laughing right up his sleeve. Still, marks for effort. There was on the other hand NO reason to shovel on that supposed 'moral' - that this is all there is, so make the most of it - quite so thick with that sappy overlong song at the end. We GET it, already. Somewhere Don McLean just woke up with a start, looked up at the platinum disc hanging on the wall for American Pie, and said "Shit, do I really sound like that?" We now have our heavy evocative season-end foreshadowing about something in the dark, as well - checking Ianto's stopwatch, it matches up roughly with THAT point in The Satan Pit - though again, ultimately it's total crap because it dies on its arse the moment you realise Suzie's scheme was set up to escape the knowledge she imparts that she couldn't possibly have acquired before she'd actually died in the first place sod this I give up.

"Do you suppose at some point through the rift there'll come a giant cosmic settee where all the odd socks and gloves and things go missing down?"

In the end I enjoyed They Keep Killing Suzie a lot for what it was, but I'm still unable to shift the nagging doubts about the approach of the show, that decisions are being made for entirely the wrong reasons. What, precisely, did they hope to achieve with that episode name? Aside from being false self-parody, they had to hide it for several weeks to not give away the (yeah, right) 'surprise' - all documentation has refered to the episode as simply 'They Keep Killing', which is a much more dramatic and suspenseful title (or would be if Countrycide hadn't already left such a nasty taste in the mouth). John Nathan-Turner's wonky liver could probably have kept a secret more appropriately than this.

Give RTD credit for one thing though. 'Gloves come in pairs.' I applauded that last line.

Do you suppose at some point through the rift there'll come a giant cosmic settee where all the odd socks and gloves and things go missing down?

The Humper Book Of Sexually Torchwooded Diseases has this to say about They Keep Killing Suzie: Jim Shooter has been contracted to write a season two episode with the working title of Secret Wars III.

They Keep Killing Torchwood

This week Torchwood returned to doing what it does best - being fucking awful.

After last week's blip (which I'm sure had more to do with the number of GnTs I'd downed than any real upturn in quality) They Keep Killing Suzie plumbed new, distressing depths.

Now, before I go on I would like to stress that I take no pleasure in kicking this lame dog while it's down. I don't make a habit out of running blogs for things I can't abide. If I did I'd be updating my James Blunt site instead (incidentally, is it just me or do the opening bars of You're Beautiful sound like the theme tune to The Incredible Hulk?), or I'd be hunting down screen grabs for my collaborative Holby City blog whilst checking for comments on my Anthea Turner RSS feed.

I repeat - THIS WAS NOT THE PLAN! I was looking forward to this show. There's a post by me buried somewhere in this blog where I actually whoop with delight when they announced that Torchwood would go to a series. I wanted it to succeed. Hell, I expected it to succeed.

So, this will be the last review of Torchwood I will write until the show delivers an installment that is even half-decent. I'm not talking 2001: A Space Odyssey here, I'm talking a below-par episode of Star Cops. Until then, I'm outta here! And that includes Doctor Who, too.

Sigh.

Still, since I'm here I may as well put the boot in one last time.

So, let's get this straight: Suzie Costello (remember her? no, thought not) sets up a plan to get revenge from BEYOND THE GRAVE! Before she's even dead. You know, just in case. She does this by making this fat bloke go mental every time someone mentions Torchwood (believe me, I know the feeling) so that said organisation will drag him into a cell where he will, at some undisclosed moment, start quoting Emily DIckinson at the walls, which will then shut down the entire base. Ta Da!

Suzie cleverly surmises that all of this will happen after THEY BRING HER BACK TO LIFE because they would have to do that in order to catch the fat bloke in the first place. After all, Torchwood are so unbelievably useless they would never work it out without her. Despite the fact that she knows that the glove doesn't work for any of her colleagues, she correctly guesses that her replacement will be a bloody natural at it. Christ, she's a clever one, that Suzie.

And then, instead of creating a phrase so obscure that no one except her would ever utter it (I dunno, something like, "Torchwood are Ace!") she uses the ISBN number of a book she JUST HAPPENS TO LEAVE LYING AROUND IN HER GARAGE! What are the chances of that, eh?

Honestly, I've seen Dalek masterplans that are less convoluted.

Tonally, it's all over the place. Sure, the maker's of Torchwood love nothing more than throwing in some grisly scenes of corpses with their throats cut because it makes them feel like they are making something gritty and adult, like Prime Suspect or CSI, but then they can't resist taking the piss by throwing in a comedy scene where the cops gather around a phone to enjoy Torchwood's predicament. While Gwen slowly dies. Ha bloody ha!

And then, as Jack pursues Suzie and the ever-so-gullible Gwen (just what do you have to do to get sacked from this organisation?) and he swears to her that he'll kill her they play tender, tinkly piano music over it! The fuck??? Then Owen cocks his gun like he's in an episode of Miami Vice and the sad, sorry mess is complete.

And what the hell is going on with Ianto and the stopwatch at the end? What am I supposed to take away from that scene? Are they going to see who can ejaculate over a digestive biscuit first? WHAT? One minute he's pawing a cyberwoman, the next he's making really obscure innuendoes to his boss. Why????

And to top it all off, Murray Gold's score sounds like somebody doing some DIY with a mitre saw. Again!

Still, there are loads of people on the OG forums who gave this episode 5/5. So if this review offends your sensibilities, head over there instead. And it's not all bad news. My cat, Captain Jack (somebody shoot me) bloody loves the show. As you can see, he can't get enough of it. Then again, he's also obsessed by discarded Kit-Kat wrappers so he might not be the best critic...

The Bumper Book of Bile has this to say about They Keep Killing Suzie: No, seriously, you couldn't make this shit up...

Torchwood and Costello (Deceased)

Complete tosh, obviously. But for once entertaining tosh.

So, perhaps the most predictable turn in Torchwood yet sees Psycho Suzie - wearer of the resurrection glove (or should that be ‘magic mitten’) - brought back from the great beyond some three months after blowing her own brains out in the pilot episode. How - and indeed how - has her body been kept in near perfect preservation is of course something that this episode deems unnecessary to address (three months and no cellular decay) as are a great many things in this script from a pair of newcomers whose names I failed to take note of.

So, in a nutshell. Someone is killing Cardiff residents, leaving them brutally butchered and with the word ‘Torchwood’ daubed in their blood at the murder scene. The Jack Pack - complete with gratuitous slo-mo - are called in by Detective Swanson (played by Jabe herself, Yasmine Bannerman from Season One’s ‘End of the World’) who pretty much sums up the whole of this rag-tag bag of oversexed, over-confident orifices as the bunch of twats they clearly are. But seeing as Torchwood themselves seem to be the catalyst of the murders, then it’s only right that they solve the case. So far, so good.

Then the team take turns to use the glove on each of the victims so they can get a heads-up about what happened. Jack can’t do it, as he doesn’t seem to have the life-force mojo required (I’m telling ya, M Night Shyamalan is watching and poised to ring his lawyer on this one) so Gwen - as Suzie’s replacement - takes a turn and, following one or two false starts, the team decide to bring back Suzie as one of the victims appears to be her late husband. ‘Cept that once she’s back she’s now as difficult to get rid of as ol’ Captain Indestructible himself. And - surprise, surprise - she’s sucking all the life-force out of Gwen in order to keep herself going. So far, so huh?

‘They Keep Killing Suzie’ has all the faults of most of the other Torchwood episodes so far - unrelatable characters, hackneyed plots, shouting in the place of tension building - but for once I’m gonna put my critic’s hat on hold and suggest that this is the best episode, at least conceptually, since ‘Everything Changes’. There’s something really sinister about the concept of bringing someone back from the dead with all the memories of their demise intact and it’s this that keeps the somewhat more unstable elements of the script in check. Such as the whole Usual Suspects inspired plotting of having Suzie plan her own resurrection (ahem) from beyond the grave and the totally padded out sequence in which Jack and co - finding themselves trapped inside the Hub once again - ring the local police to help them out. And as for the ISBN of a book being the get-out clause, I mean…

But for the first half-hour this was almost compelling. Quick-paced, grisly and adult in a way that Torchwood simply hasn’t been even nearly enough. It touches on questions about the after-life and whether we live on after death (such use of subtext also being common to director James Strong’s Who entries this year) and the idea of linking Suzie with Gwen (both literally and metaphysically) is really quite clever. As is Suzie’s plan to infiltrate Torchwood with a programmed plant whose recitation of an Emily Dickinson poem is enough to paralyse the entire base (though the likewise effect that the word ‘Torchwood’ has on him will only gain sympathy with a number of contributors to this blog).

Then, inevitably, it all goes a bit tits up. Suddenly Suzie’s drawing Gwen’s life-force out of her, despite the glove not showing any previous such capability. And we’re into race-against-time mode as gullible Gwen takes Suzie for a ride; reducing her survival time to some arbitrary amount of minutes as though the Eye of Harmony has just been re-opened. And what exactly is Suzie’s motive in all this, beyond the obvious of getting her life back? Some half-arsed revenge plot against her terminally ill father suggests an under-developed child-abuse plot-line. But surely her long-term hopes aren’t to get her job back amongst colleagues she has either betrayed or tried to murder. We all know that every single member of this organisation is fucked up, but this would be something else.

In fact there’s such a whole shed-load of stuff that doesn’t make sense that it seems churlish to even bring them up. Oh, go on then - just a couple. Whatever happened to the glove resurrecting only the recently dead (Suzie, perfectly preserved visage notwithstanding, has been dead three months after all)? And was it really necessary to make such a big deal out of the murder sub-plot when it’s just a McGuffin anyway? How about the fact that Suzie starts to wear a headscarf only once the hole in the back of her head starts to heal up (before would have been better, no?). And where - given that Gwen almost buys it in this episode - has her boyo boyfriend got to; isn’t this now four straight episodes since his last appearance? I mean, just where is the domestic agenda?

And I’m guessing that the title is some kind of riff on the similarly monikered Avengers episode, but why? They only 'keep' killing Suzie right at the end, so why bother at all. Unless Ianto was responsible, seeing as he’s got bugger all to do these days than name the Torchwood treasure chest in between brewing up.

Yet another episode which promised much, but delivered little. For once the sex and swearing are almost noticeable by their absence, so at least I can’t be accused of finding fault for these and nothing else. But there’s no getting away from the fact that Torchwood has been an unmitigated failure in carving itself a niche as intelligent, original sci-fi for a post-watershed audience. Too many good ideas have been squandered now for me to be left with any hope; and this episode illustrates this failing concisely. Even the ending’s trite: being Torchwood we get a nice little coda set to a musical montage, as Gwen and Jack smirk at each other like a pair of coffee commercial c*nts. Maybe it’s because I’m long past caring but I actually smiled at this point.

Next week

: frankly, who cares?

(The ‘Torchwood’ Book of yadda, yadda, yadda has this to say about They Keep Killing Suzie

:

director James Strong re-watched the climax of ‘Arc of Infinity’ for inspiration for this episode).

Death by Torchwood

Who wrote They Keep Killing Suzie?  Speculation suggests that this is the episode that Russell T Davies mentioned rewriting from top to bottom in a recent issue of Doctor Who Magazine and it certainly shared many of the same qualities as the opening episode -- excellent dialogue, pacing, characterisation and the sense of Torchwood as a team rather than a bunch of individuals thrown together. 

If it wasn't for that bloody awful music cue at the end this might have been only the third episode which didn't make me wince at the thought of having to come on here and write about it.  But here I am writing floridly for the first time in weeks.  And having also seen the disappointingly disappointing Pan's Labyrinth tonight.  Perhaps I'm just in denial about everything.

It was fairly inevitable that Suzie would be resurrected after the closing scene of Everything Changes and against all the odds they didn't waste the opportunity.  Although the rejuvenation glove is the kind of magical device familiar to anyone whose played role playing games, its execution, sapping the life force from Gwen was excellent, especially the 'You're being shot in the head ... slowly ...' moment. 

Indira Varma is the missing link of the entire series and her performance was by turns gruesome, sympathetic but importantly wierdly convincing.  As she sat in the car almost channeling Eve Myles speech patterns I genuinely wondered if they were going to drop in a real surprise and let Gwen die, Suzie carrying on with some of her personality.

Seeing Torchwood from the outside once again proved to be a highlight, with the brilliant Yasmin Bannerman's comic timing seeming to coax from John Barrowman the sense of fun that's been lacking in previous episodes.  In other series she would be a recurring character, like Kate Lockley in the first few seasons of Angel, helping Torchwood from the outside but not getting too close. 

The one genuine laugh I think I've had in weeks occured (and I want this marking on the calendar) when her entire office were huddled around the speakerphone to hear that Torchwood were locked in their base.  Frankly like large sections of this episode, these scenes looked like they'd drop in from the alternate reality where Torchwood is the best thing on television.

Of course, not everything worked.  The chat surrounding what to call the glove and knife was a bit blank and not a patch on the similar scene in the film Tremors (Graboids?).  Once again there was a sitcom like attachment to the Hub presumably because, having spent half of the programme budget on the set they want to get the most use from it.  There was another visit to what looks like the worst night club in the world (last seen in Day One).  The cavalier attitude to continuity -- as they're speeding at night to Gwen's rescue in the Torchmobile, Owen explains she only has minutes to live only to arrive in broad daylight, or should that be the dawn of the dead?  Oh and that final music queue crashing in like a someone with the Best of LeAnne Rimes cd at a student party.

There's also still that ever present lack of interest in the fate of humanity which tends to make it difficult to care about any of the main characters too much.  Although calling the amnesia drug, some might say a blatant steal from Men In Black, 'Retcon' has a modicum of cool, it's generally their fault that Max is in the brain sucked condition he's in, but there were Jack and Owen treating him like an animal when he actually deserved their compassion.

But all of these seem like nitpicks in an episode that was doing everything we'd hoped Torchwood might be doing from the off -- asking the big questions about life and death within a soup of humour, cartoon fantasy with sprinkling of violence.  Even Tosh was likable and Ianto seems to have regained is original cool.  Owen gained something related to character detailing when it was revealed he'd tupped Suzie before Gwen -- so that's a pattern with him is it? 

We even found out what was in store for all Torchwood personnel -- you're stuck in a freezer, the rest of your life in a lock up garage -- these are the details that we should have been hearing all along instead of the insistence on focusing on plot over anything else.  And the movement in the darkness?  I think Jack is going to look Death in the eyesocket and offer to show him his stopwatch.

Next week:  Business as usual as another ex-cast member from As, If runs through a storyline which will look strangely similar to one from Star Trek: The Next Generation (The Next Phase if anyone cares at this point -- "C'mon Data, put it together...").