Certainly an improvement on last week. In fact the more I think about episode 6 the more I dislike it. Rex and Esther were agonizingly incompetent and Gwen became a terrorist. And for anyone who was all like, “yeah, you go Gwen - explosion yeah” consider that Gwen was trying to expose a concentration camp on UK soil, by blowing up. “Look everyone; a Nazi-esque solution to the present problem…err but don’t bother looking for any evidence of it, cuz I blew all of it up.” Whistleblowers get taken seriously, investigators get taken seriously, but people who respond to things they don’t like by blowing them up DON’T. The character of Gwen Cooper knows this, why would she blow a giant military complex up. Her actions, in my opinion are horribly contrived and kinda insulting to the audiences’ intelligence.
But enough about last week; this week’s better and sees the return of the Gwen who isn’t violent and is motivated by moral dilemma, rather than sudden psychopathy.
It’s also nice to see the overall narrative going in the right direction; last week was mostly internal storylines, but this week we start to get to the point of the story. The flashbacks are good and it’s nice to see Captain Jack as an immortal again. However, the love story does get a bit slow and how it links to the end of the episode is quite predictable. I’d have preferred to have this flashback in an earlier episode, to make the ending more effective. We see a bit more of the show being used as social commentary, in the discussion about religion and homosexuality in one of the flashbacks.
It’s been stated in both Doctor Who and previous series of Torchwood that when you die, you simply cease to be, a particularly good quote for this comes from a 2005 Moffat episode of Who which describes life as “the Universe’s way of keeping meat warm”. It’s nice to see that Jack doesn’t take the hardline atheist approach to the religious argument; at no point saying that he has actual knowledge that there is no God or heaven, within the Doctor Who universe and that setting yourself by a religion is pointless.
This has the effect of making the altercation more of an argument and the fact that Jack isn’t willing to just tell Anjelo that his religion is completely off the mark is quite a good way of showing that he cares about him enough not to start dismantling his beliefs, but only questioning the most harsh parts of them. It also gives a fair bit more depth to their romantic relationship, easily topping Jacks last onscreen relationship, which seemed to revolve around demanding sex off Ianto, then getting it.
To stay briefly with the element of homosexuality in television and in particular Torchwood, I can say categorically that this episode is going to be a far better measure of whether BBC complainants are actually homophobic or not. Basically there’s a gay sex scene in this episode; now last time there was one of these, the Beeb got quite a few complaints about it. That last one was intercut with a heterosexual sex scene, as Jack and Rex got respectively laid, within their own gender preferences and had people crying at the BBC’s door (or at least the complaints section of their website). This episode - no heterosexual love scenes, so lets see who complains. Before it wasn’t clear what was being complained about, whether it was the gay sex scene or just the sex scene in general, but this episode will lead to a far better picture.
Either way, the complainants don’t hold much water in my opinion. If they’re saying that the scenes shouldn’t exist because of the homosexual parts, while it’s not fair to say that they’re homophobic, they don’t really have a leg to stand on. Let me try and explain that a bit more; simply because they’re more comfortable watching a heterosexual love scene than they are watching homosexual one doesn't mean they hate gay people. I don’t consider myself homophobic, but I wasn’t comfortable watching John Barrowman get it on with Anjelo and I admit that the sex scene from an earlier episode between Rex and Vera didn’t make me uncomfortable.
The difference between the complainants and myself is that I didn’t feel comfortable with that scene, but I knew that the writers had every right to put it in the episode. Torchwood is a post-watershed program; there are limits on how much sex, violence etc can go in them, but in the 21st century we have to accept that sex is sex and whether it’s sex that makes the majority of people uncomfortable or not is irrelevant. I should point out that the BBC has already responded to the complaints with a politely worded but fairly strong “fuck you” and it is positively thrilling to see them do something like this, especially given the sheer ridiculousness of some of the complaints they’ve entertained in recent years.
Well this discussion’s gone on for a bit longer than I thought it would. Back to the episode I think. So we finally start to get some answers to how the miracle started; we don’t get them precisely, but there’s a scene in this episode that I think pretty much gives away how it started (it involves an old Italian lady and a small bottle).
Other than that and the flashbacks, most of the episode takes place in a car. It doesn’t quite manage to replicate the tension from episode 2, as the threat of death is significantly less immediate, but it does the job alright and serves as a platform for Gwen to get back to normal.
The exchanges between Gwen and Jack are also quite good and show some pretty good development on the part of both characters. Rex and Esther spend most of this episode in the background, which is a shame, given that Esther’s killed her first person and Rex just lost his love interest. I was kinda hoping for a bit of development on both counts but who knows, maybe next week. One thing I will say is that, while she’s far more in character, Gwen seems less intelligent than normal; you might be able to tot this up to being emotionally involved with the situation, but I just thought she really acted a bit dumb.
So there you have it, not much to say, it’s better than last week and we start to get some answers. Recommended.
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