Torchwood Miracle Day: Episode 4

At last, some progression! We know some stuff now.

There were some things about this episode that I really liked. For example, showing the two ends of the extreme, by having Oswald Danes, juxtaposed with a fundamentalist, distinctly religious looking woman, who is leading the ‘dead is dead’ campaign.

This was a nice change to the habits that T Davies generally exhibits when writing a series. The best of these is that neither of the parties concerned in the fight could be construed as right. This is evident earlier series’ of Torchwood and especially in series 1 to 4 of the revived Doctor Who, where we typically have one character who’s dogmatically correct, while the bad guys are always wrong.

This episode works by having the story of Oswald Danes largely separate from the Torchwood mission. 

On that point, the Phicorp assault is quite good and done in a relatively realistic way. Although there’s no secret as to which film they lifted the security settings, for Phicorp’s server room, from.

The personal dilemma of Esther is alright, but felt a bit frustrating and I wondered if she was heading towards the Amy Pond level of annoyingness, based on her seeming inability to listen to anything that Rex tells her to do.

The bad guy for this episode is also a bit of a stumbling block. He seems a bit wooden; I wondered for a while whether he was supposed to be parody of Haratio Caine from CSI: Miami.

One thing I did like about it was the way that when he started monologing, the first thing that happened was that Gwen started taking the piss out of him.

We also find out that the Miracle is something to do with Jack giving the as yet unknown villains something in the past. Was this done, during that period when he worked as basic Torchwood muscle? I mean, during this time, he sold 12 kids to an alien race, because Torchwood told him to.

Is this the building of a Torchwood theme, of the darker parts of Jack’s past coming back to hurt the whole world. It could be a Torchwood version of the old actions have consequences concept.

The personal interest in the overflow camps for Gwen, didn’t really seem necessary, but it looks like it’s gonna be important next week.

On that point next week marks halfway point in this series, so hopefully, we’ll see some 24-style mixing up of the story.

Until then, this episode is more than watchable, a really nice improvement on last week.