Out of
all the Whoniverse shows, I find it’s toughest to come up with Big Damn Hero
moments for Torchwood. The show places so much emphasis on the
characters’ messed-up lives that it sometimes feels like big wins come
secondary to major screw-ups or turns down dark paths. This is particularly true of Owen, even after
he starts addressing his self-destructive tendencies, but overall, I think I
found some good ones (spoilers.)
Treating Gwen in the Field (“Countrycide” –
Series 1, Episode 6)
My
first time through series 1, this was one of the few scenes in which Owen
really worked for me. We see him drop
the posturing and pretense and immediately snap to business. When Gwen is shot, his quiet, collected skill
as a doctor comes to the fore, as does a heretofore-unseen bedside manner. He’s surprisingly gentle with Gwen, and while
he still jokes, it’s to take her mind off her pain and distress rather than his
usual distancing/disarming routines.
Detaching the Bomb (“Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” –
Series 2, Episode 1)
Hurray
– nonsense science to the rescue! John
Hart has a bomb attached to his chest that’s somehow coded to his DNA (which
the team mostly cares about just because he’s handcuffed himself to Gwen.) As everyone freaks out, Owen gets the
preposterous idea to “confuse” the bomb by injecting John with stored samples
of the team members’ blood, thus getting it to detach so they can get it out of
harm’s way. Absolutely silly, but it
works in this universe, so it counts as a smart save. Nice job, Owen!
Saving Martha with the Extractor (“Reset” –
Series 2, Episode 6)
This
one’s cool mainly because of how inept Owen has been with the extractor thus
far. Since it’s a piece of found alien
tech, he doesn’t actually know at
this point whether it can do what he thinks it can, and he spends a chunk of
the episode obliterating various objects with it. When the chips are down, though, and Martha’s
survival depends on killing the alien Mayfly growing inside her, Owen remains
convinced that he can get the extractor to work and in fact saves the day,
using it to zap the Mayfly without hurting Martha.
Reaching Out to Maggie (“A Day in the Death”
– Series 2, Episode 8)
Owen
does more technically-impressive stuff here, using his new biological situation
(ie, undeadness) to get passed the heat sensors in Parker’s house and freaking
out the guy’s security guards with his walking dead vibe, but personally, this
is the more noteworthy achievement for me:
approaching a suicidal woman on a rooftop and trying to show her why
life is still worth it. Owen doesn’t
often do empathy, and at this point in the series, when he’s had such an
incredibly rough couple of episodes, he’s been pretty wrapped up in his own
despair. This makes it even cooler to
see him reaching out to a stranger purely for the sake of trying to help her.
Staying at the Power Plant (“Exit Wounds” –
Series 2, Episode 13)
What a
beautiful moment. Owen strides into the
damaged nuclear power plant like he owns the place, telling the frantic,
terrified tech to get out of there, that he’s got it under control. He has just enough technobabble to sound
confident, then waits until the tech is gone before he gets on his comms: “Tosh, you’re going to have to help me out
here. I haven’t got a bloody clue what
I’m doing.” Would it have been smarter
to hang onto the person who works there and presumably knows way more about it
than Owen? Of course, but I still love
it, both because it demonstrates his absolute faith in Tosh to talk him through
it and his compassion in taking all the risk on himself rather than leaving
someone else in a dangerous situation.
No comments:
Post a Comment