Written By: Joseph Lidster
Directed By: Andy Goddard
Air Date: 27th February, 2008
Summary: Like a day in the life only with less of a pulse.
Coming soon!
Now this episode, I really liked. I really couldn’t give a toss about the whole ‘breaking into an old man’s house’ subplot except insofar as it gives Owen a chance to come to terms with his own death and subsequent rebirth. I was going through the episode expecting them to find some way of fixing Owen, since they had failed to do that previously, and was surprised when he remains thoroughly dead and zombified at the end of the episode. But, you know, I’m glad. I don’t want them to “fix” Owen’s death any more than I want them to take away Jack’s immortality. It’s a part of their characters now, and to take it away would be a nice old hitting of the reset button. I don’t want that. I want to see how events shape our characters (even if it seems to not get shown so very often).
The book-ending of the story with the device of Owen standing atop a building with a suicidal woman serves decently as a device to drive the plot, I suppose, and there was a vague worry that he would jump (although, you know, it wouldn’t kill him, it’d just leave him in an extremely broken body), but it does remove any danger that he would expire during the flashback sequences.
And it was rather heartening to see alien technology that’s beautiful, and a message of peace, a response to a call that Earth sent out decades ago. It makes a nice change from, as Suzie put it, all the shit that comes through the Rift. I think it would be rather soul destroying to have to deal with that all the time, so when something comes along that’s different… it’s nice.
But anyway, to Owen. We needed an episode in which he comes to terms with things. Obviously, he can’t spend the entire series wallowing, or the audience as a whole might be very tempted to bury him in concrete and have done with it, but you’ve got to address it. Burn Gorman, between this episode, and “Adam”, has proven to my mind that he is one of the, if not the most, capable actors in Torchwood. He was so poorly served in the first series, I see now, by the one-dimensional character that Owen was. I don’t think you could have given this storyline to any of the others (not to disparage the other actors, they’re great, but I think Burn Gorman is brilliant) and have it done justice.
I also think that his line about TinTin and the dog was delivered brilliantly. The bit that made me feel like Torchwood are a bunch of Human beings who’re at ease with each other enough to wind each other up was when Owen unwraps the piece of white cloth Jack threw at him to discover it’s a TinTin t-shirt. Am I the only one that thinks that’s Ianto’s doing?
Speaking of which: teehee, Ianto is as obsessed with coffee as fandom thinks he is. There’s a professional coffee machine in the Hub!
In fact, the scene with Ianto and Owen standing over the machine gave a little bit of insight into both their characters. Owen feels Ianto’s won, but, as Ianto says, he didn’t think they were in competition. Owen clearly thought they were, however. His disparaging remarks about Ianto being ‘the tea-boy’ is partly linked, I think, to some subtle feelings of inadequacy (warning: amateur psychology ahead). Ianto was one of the few people around the office that Owen could lord it over. Tosh is clearly a masterful technician, Gwen was clearly Jack’s favourite as far as the Humanity aspect of things goes, which just leaves Ianto, who was a fairly easy target for Owen’s ire. He was always stressing his “Doctor” title whenever they met new people in series one, bringing special attention to one of the few things that he could point at and say ‘look, I’m better than you’. You’ll notice that both his drawing of attention towards his MD and his sniping at Ianto for his apparent lack of importance at Torchwood have disappeared this series, when Owen seemed to settle down somewhat in Jack’s absence.
The ‘shagging Jack’ comments, of course, don’t seem to have abated. I think were snarky attempts to take swipes at Ianto’s closeness with Jack. As I said in the previous review, I think that deep down, Owen really admires Jack. Ianto’s spent virtually this entire season standing, literally, behind Jack, backing him up silently, quite often framed as standing just over his shoulder, or within the room itself. It must have rankled to have Ianto step up quietly when Jack suspends him, taking away his security ID and gun. Ianto clearly isn’t taking any pleasure from it, but having someone you had previously been so dismissive of because of his low status take everything away from you, in fact, take away everything you have left, and then be relegated to the ‘tea boy’s’ duties while he sits in on briefings and mission plannings… it had to have hurt a lot.
Ianto doesn’t seem even slightly tempted to rub it in, apart from a reminder that they’ve all been through shit, which is actually not so much rubbing it in, as saying ‘you’re not special, we’ve all had things happen that hurt us, so stop trying to attack us’.
His defensive response of “it’s not like that” to shagging Jack, and Owen’s weary response to it, though, to me seemed like a case of protesting too much. He was too quick and defensive. Methinks Mister Jones is not entirely confident in their relationship himself, and Owen, I think, sees that. But, anyway, that’s a ponderance for another time.
One who sort of deserved the attack she got was Tosh, however. I think Owen was uncomfortably on the mark with what he yelled at her in his flat. Suddenly he’s the safest sort of man there is. He’s hardly going to be going after random women in pubs anymore, given that he’s got no blood flow to his… extremities. He’s not even going to demand anything of her, physically. She’s all that there is for him anymore. It drives her to have confidence to do things I doubt she usually does, like dropping buy randomly with pizza and beer (insensitive or what?) and ranting at him about her day (at Torchwood, which he’s just been suspended from). The fact that he reacted so strongly to her behaviour isn’t surprising.
I was unhappy about the way it was worked out between them in the end. He hasn’t so much chosen her, as she’s the only one left. Anything he might have had with Gwen has been so thoroughly forgotten about, you wonder if someone was spiking the drinks with Retcon, and, as he said, Jack and Ianto clearly have each other. That leaves him on his own. Except for Tosh. They didn’t get their date to see if things would work out between them. They just wind up on course for something by default.
I think if Tosh was smart, she wouldn’t fixate on Owen so much.
And finally, to Martha. She does even less in this episode than in the previous one, and she continues to fail to impress me with her medical skills. Her solution of stitching together Owen’s sliced hand is, to me, stupid. Why force him to have to restitch his hand every couple of weeks? Surely a tube of superglue (given that they use glue in surgeries) would have been a better choice? It would have stuck the skin together, remove the need for ugly stitching and the need to redo those stitches, and it’s not like Owen has to worry about things like toxicity.
Her kiss with Jack also surprised me. Not the kiss itself, but his response to it. He barely responds, keeping his eyes open, staring at her, the very definition of passive. That’s the most unenthusiastic I’ve ever seen Jack. I think he cares for her, as someone who also travelled with the Doctor, and as someone who helped save the world, but I don’t think he feels that way about her. In fact, given the way he’s not been flirting with people (witness his curt response to Tosh’s ‘making friends’ query in Sleeper) he seems to have settled down somewhat in that regard. Though, to be honest, I was always of the opinion that he only flirted to put people off their guard, and he never followed through unless he meant it. It seems that his relationship with Ianto (and notice how Ianto was standing there, completely unconcerned, throughout) is solid enough that he doesn’t seem to feel the need to pursue anyone else.
Some days, I really don’t understand Jack Harkness. Anyway, I think Martha was somewhat superfluous in the last couple of episodes. Yes, useful for Reset, where she had a defined role, but in these last two, she was definitely more in a cameo role that could have been filled by any one of the other characters.
Looking forward to seeing her next time she’s in Doctor Who, though. Hopefully she’ll be a bit less Mary Sue-ish by then.
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