I’m a little mixed on Torchwood’s series 2 finale. It’s decidedly imperfect – Torchwood gonna Torchwood, after all. Still, it’s a head and shoulders above any other season finale on the show, and there are some fantastic parts in this episode. It marks the end of the true Torchwood era for me because, while series 3 and 4 both have their moments that feel quintessentially Torchwood, it’s never quite the same after this one (premise spoilers, which involves a guest star spoiler.)
It’s the end of the season, so that means it’s all hands on deck for Torchwood 3. Jack’s old lover/partner/nemesis Captain John is back in town, and he ignites chaos all across Cardiff, scattering the team in different directions to deal with the fallout. But while the rest of the team is trying to hold the city together, it’s Jack John is interested in, and the plan John sets in motion is bigger than either of them.
Any appearance by Captain John is gonna be a good thing, always and forever. I previously reviewed and sang the praises of “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” so it was only a matter of time before I came around to John’s other big episode. I like that his character is an utter liar and deeply honest, that he can cause serious destruction and harm but he’s not eternally on the side of evil. If his appearance in “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” is pure fun, there’s a lot more going on here, especially between him and Jack. After falling out of interest with Spike by the time Buffy and Angel ended, this show and this role reminded me how great James Marsters can be as an engaging baddie.
If the stuff about Jack’s Time Agent past is always good, the stuff about his childhood past is far less good. Throughout the season, the hints and glimpses we get of this plot aren’t winners, and it culminates here in a storyline that’s somehow overwrought and underwritten at the same time. It’s the clunkiest part of the finale by far, and it leaves me shouting, “Let’s get back to John blowing stuff up and Owen being king of the Weevils!”
Much like “End of Days” in series 1, this episode features lots of assorted time/space fires burning all at once, so our heroes need to divide and conquer to put out all of them. Gwen and Ianto both acquit themselves well enough, but Owen and Tosh are the real headlines here. Owen is heroic and surprisingly selfless, putting himself in danger to really protect others rather than for his more typical self-destructive reasons, and Tosh performs tremendously under intense pressure. Though the two are physically separated in space, they share a number of strong scenes together, and Burn Gorman and Naoko Mori both knock it out of the park.
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That’s right, I’m still on Tony Leung Chiu-wai in the Shang-Chi trailer. My mind may very well live here from now until September (possibly with a brief hiatus in June if In the Heights is as amazing as my soul wants it to be,) at which point it’ll explode from the awesomeness. Before the trailer and first-look images dropped, as I was eagerly waiting for anything from this movie, I thought, “Just give me a taste of Tony Leung Chiu-wai as the Mandarin. Just give me a glimpse, something to hold me over.” But he is all over that trailer and a big contributing factor in the number of times I’ve watched it this past week. The majority of the dialogue in the trailer is his (and again, he sounds fabulous – I can’t wait!), and throughout, Wenwu is just serving looks every which way. Whether it’s him doing the “stone-cold gang boss busting tables with his Ten Rings powers” thing to delight the parts of me that love triad action thrillers or him giving me full-on “glorious ancient-China wuxia king” regal badassery, Leung is all my best takeaways from this trailer. I’m so here for the Ten Rings being bracelets, tell me more about the scenes that look like they’re set in the far past, and give me everything about Wenwu and his complicated relationship with Shang-Chi. I saw a Twitter post about “human Infinity Stone Tony Leung [joining] the MCU [to] poison my mind with pure hype,” and that’s about where I am right now.
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