There’s a device on Earth that allows its users to view the past and the future with perfect clarity. If this was Doctor Who, someone would be using it to take control of the world. It’s Torchwood though, so some lowlife is using it to blackmail grumpy old murderers.¹ Enter the team from Torchwood, to save the day… or just make the day slightly less crap, anyhow.

They’re still a bit of a ramshackle unit. Jack doesn’t appear to have much control over his staff — in fact it’s surprising that he even thinks he has. Owen’s going rogue, Gwen’s quite happily breaking the ‘don’t take the cool shit home’ rule, and Toshiko’s still refusing to get any sort of character development.² Alright, that’s not strictly relevant, but it is vaguely annoying.

What’s good in this episode is the excellently portrayed and thoroughly believable effects and consequences of the alien device. Well, the ones before the dodgy self-fulfilling prophecy bit, in any case. Gwen’s flashes of her life with her boyfriend and the opening scene with the lost boy are particularly touching. Most impressive though is Owen’s witnessing of a rape/murder in the past, and his reaction to it. His dodgy intention to rape people with alien devices in ‘Everything Changes’ was somewhat alienating, but it seemed clear that he hadn’t — like a large chunk of the viewers — thought of it as rape. Perhaps his intense reaction to the death of Lizzie is in part because he sees something of himself in the murderer. In any case, despite his faults, Owen remains for me one of the most intriguing characters.

But for all the enthralling intensity, there’s a fair amount of wonkiness too. It must be fun watching a show like this when you haven’t seen oodles and oodles of genre television, but if you have, the warning signs go up the second Gwen sees her bloody hands in the future and tells herself what happens. “Ah ha,” you say to yourself, “this prophecy will come true… but not in the way she’s expecting. For that is the way of prophecies.” I think it’s about time a prophecy came exactly true. I don’t know who’s managing Fate’s PR these days but they’re doing a rotten job of it. And on a more basic level, to get yourself fatally stabbed the way Ed manages seems… implausible. But I’ve never thrown myself onto a small knife in someone’s hands before, so I can’t be totally sure.

And then we come to the overwrought philosophising. When Jack and Gwen talk at the end, you can practically feel the author beating you over the head with the themes of the episode. Step away from the themes, Ms Raynor, put your hands behind your head and never make Jack say anything like “a million shadows of human emotion” again.³

Overall though, the tone of this story feels very right⁴ — this is where I’d like Torchwood to go, dealing with the subtle, human consequences of big sci-fi devices. That said, there’s a Cyber-babe in a skimpy outfit next week, so I might not get exactly what I want.

1. How’s that for a TV show? I’d watch that. ↩
2. She’s still the cutest of the group though. ↩
3. A million seems a conservative estimate in any case. The technobabble was largely good this week — the best Who science is the stuff that makes a certain amount of emotional, hyper-logical sense but doesn’t get bogged down in the technicalities. I like the idea of various emotions and strands of consciousness echoing throughout time — simple, effective, and opens the door to psychics later on. ↩
4. Well, except for the weird Jack/Gwen gun flirting. I don’t particularly like guns, or people getting off on shooting them. ↩

This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Thursday, November 16th, 2006. It concerns such pressing issues as Torchwood, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.