Top Five Big Damn Hero Moments: Owen Harper (Torchwood)

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.

Favorite Characters: Owen Harper (Torchwood)

Okay – so the first (few) times I watched Torchwood, Owen did nothing for me.  Granted, I acknowledged from the first that he’s a lot better after series 1, but I was cynical about the course correction, regarding it as a too-little-too-late attempt to make fans like him.  Somewhere along the line, though, he started to grow on me, and on my most recent Torchwood rewatch, I actually found myself appreciating Owen quite a bit.  Much of that is down to Burn Gorman’s excellent acting, but overall, I’ve learned to enjoy Owen for what he brings to the show.

Like many Whovians, I was completely turned off by Owen’s ugly ethics in Torchwood’s pilot.  It’s what initially put Owen in my doghouse and kept him there for a long time.  “That scene” still bothers me, and I will never, ever be okay with what Owen does in it.  However, inexcusable as it is, I’ve come to believe that RTD and co. really didn’t consider its implications.  I think they were going for roguish and id-feeding, along with what they probably assumed would be a cheap laugh, and no one realized that they ended up with heinous and gross.  So, while the incident itself remains awful, I’ve grown more inclined to blame the writers for it rather than the character, especially since it’s the only time we see Owen do anything like that.

This reassignment allows me to look more generally at Owen without that distasteful, deal-breaking scene clouding the lens, and more generally, he’s fairly interesting.  I get a better sense of the character I think the show set out to create, a man who uses his antisocial behavior, sarcasm, and lightly-taken sexual encounters to keep people at arm’s length.  In many ways, he’s a somewhat more extreme version of the leading man in the “hate” portion of a love/hate romance – plenty of moments in which viewers (and Gwen) can say, “What an unfeeling jerk!” and yet, there are just enough flashes of genuine humanity that we’re kept on the line while he slowly becomes a better person.

As is typical with characters of that sort, the show rolls out his tragic origin story in due time, but it mostly avoids the woobified bad boy trope.  We learn what caused Owen to put up his walls, and it’s truly terrible, but Owen, Jack, and the audience are the only ones who are ever made privy to this traumatic experience.  It’s shown only in flashback with no present-day discussion, rehashing, or dramatic in-show reveal, and as such, there’s no character to exclaim, “This is why Owen is the way he is!”  The knowledge doesn’t sweep any of his callousness or insensitivity under the rug, doesn’t romanticize the recklessness that masks his issues.  Rather, it only contextualizes him and makes him a fuller character.

What’s more, I’ve started to recognize the groundwork laid for the rehabilitated Owen of series 2.  Where before I grumbled at all the centric plots for a character I didn’t really like, I now see that Owen takes gradual steps toward change almost from the start.  He’s a character who really learns from his experiences and takes things to heart, even if the visible change is slow to peek through.  As early as episode 3 of series 1, events occur to make him examine his behavior, and all throughout Owen’s time on the show, he reacts to everything that happens to him and grows accordingly.  He’s often resistant to it and backpedals frequently – some of it is Owen-will-be-Owen stuff, whereas I think that, other times, he’s wary of letting his guard down after so long – but his overall trajectory is always moving forward, and now I can see the trail that connects the different versions of Owen that the show gives us.