Torchwood got off to a rocky start for me –
despite some hints of its potential, it was largely uneven for the first couple
episodes, and up and down throughout quite a bit of its first season. However, there were a handful of episodes
that I thought worked, and for me, this was the first one to reassure me about
what the show really could be. Forget
glimpses and moments; this was a fairly solid episode altogether, and it’s what
helped me stick with the show until I made it to the next solid one.
When Gwen
confiscates an alien device from a young delinquent, it activates in her hands,
showing her a young boy frightened and alone in a Cardiff train station during
the London evacuation. The team realizes
that this “ghost” is a remnant of emotional energy converted by the device into
an apparitional presence. Other places
in Cardiff are similarly charged with lingering emotion, and Owen comes across
a ghost he can’t let lie – past, present, and future collide before it’s all
said and done.
One thing
I do appreciate about Torchwood is
that, due to the nature of the Rift, it’s not always about fighting
aliens. Just as often, it’s about alien
technology in human hands, which offers more variety in the case-of-the-week
narratives. Here, I really like the
concept of the ghost machine. It’s not
exactly original, but it’s well-done; the scenes of both the past ghosts and
the present encounters are really effective, especially Gwen’s talk with Tom
and Owen witnessing Ed and Lizzie. I
also like the added note that the machine makes the user, not just see the
ghosts, but feel what they’re
feeling.
It’s that
note that really sinks into Owen’s part of the story. I could buy him getting invested in what
happened with Lizzie and Ed, anyway, but having felt Lizzie’s emotions, it
makes all the more sense why he gets so obsessed with it. The empathic nature of the machine forced him
into Lizzie’s shoes, so in a way, when he looks for Ed in the present, it’s for
both their sakes. By now, I’ve seen Torchwood enough that I can find the
good parts in Owen amongst the early unpleasantness (with the exception of
“that scene” in the pilot,) but my first time through, this episode was my
first indication that, while still damaged and jerkish, Owen could be more than
just an a-hole.
Other
little bits that I like. The “Splott”
conversation still cracks me up, and the gun training montage is good, though
more for its entertainment value than for its likely effectiveness – there are
plenty of times in Torchwood’s first
season where Jack doesn’t quite feel like Jack, but having sexually-charged
gun-training sessions with his employees totally seems like something he would
do. And although Gwen/Rhys doesn’t
always work for me, I do pretty much always like Rhys, and in this episode, I
like the reminder Gwen gets of how much she loves him; she could use that every
so often.
On the
flipside, I think the twist with the machine in the second half doesn’t really
make sense, given what’s already been established about how it works. There are a few cheesy scenes that I know are
supposed to be serious, which just makes them cheesier, and as usual for the
early episodes, there’s not enough Ianto.
No comments:
Post a Comment