Top Five Big Damn Hero Moments: Toshiko Sato (Torchwood)

Given how often techies’ main function in a genre show is to type dramatically and occasionally wave a gadget around, their contributions tend to be important but not showy.  So, it’s kind of impressive how much variety I found in Tosh’s big moments (spoilers.)

Saving a Family (Series 1, Episode 7 – “Greeks Bearing Gifts”)

At Mary’s urging, Tosh takes the pendant out for a spin, allowing her to hear other people’s thoughts, and she overhears a man planning to kill his ex-wife and children.  In swoops Tosh with a golf club for the save!  While I know it’s all part of Mary’s plan to win her over, I like that Tosh’s positive experience with the pendant involves saving multiple lives.

Leaving the Formula (Series 1, Episode 12 – “Captain Jack Harkness”)

Tosh and Jack are stuck in 1941, and their only hope of getting back is the formula to control the Rift Manipulator.  However, it’s not with Ianto and Owen, but with Tosh on her laptop (with a dying battery.)  Tosh races to copy it onto paper but, knowing it won’t last 50+ years, takes a photograph of it.  When she sees that the bottom of the photo got cut off and she can’t make another, she rewrites the rest of the formula in her own blood (since pencil would fade) before sealing it against the elements and hiding it where Gwen can find it in the present.  Go Tosh!

Encouraging Tommy (Series 2, Episode 3 – “To the Last Man”)

With Tosh’s relationships, “unlucky in love” doesn’t begin to cover it.  In this case, the WWI soldier Torchwood has been keeping on ice is finally being sent back to his own time, where Tosh already knows he’s going to be killed.  It then falls to her to convince this young man she really cares about that he has to go back, in order to heal a wound in time.  Never mind her heartbreak at losing him – she’s forced to cause him the emotional pain of returning to the war, all the while knowing he won’t make it.  It wrecks her, but she does it anyway – that’s grace.

Infiltrating the Pharm (Series 2, Episode 6 – “Reset”)

Techy, creative, slightly-morbid Tosh for the win!  The Pharm lackey they’re counting on to get them inside meets an untimely end, but Tosh has an idea.  They hide in the back of the car and put his dead body in the driver’s seat, rigging him up so he won’t slump over, with Tosh driving the car remotely via gadget.  Love it, and I love how pleased she is at having figured it out.

Trying to Stop the Meltdown (Series 2, Series 13 – “Exit Wounds”)

Here’s another example of the Tosh who soldiers on and does the job even when her heart is breaking.  Owen is at a nuclear power plant in crisis and desperately needs Tosh to talk him through how to shut it down safely and quickly.  Unbeknownst to him, Tosh is slowly dying from a gunshot wound to the abdomen, but she does absolutely everything she can.  Even though this ends badly for both Owen and Tosh, I still love this scene between them, especially her continuing to help until the very end, never letting on that she’s a goner as well.

Favorite Characters: Toshiko Sato (Torchwood)

I’m always in favor of a nice realization of the Geek Girl archetype in genre stories, like Willow on Buffy, Hermione in Harry Potter, or Simmons on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  Tosh is a somewhat different version of this character, since she’s pretty decidedly a Geek Woman, but she has a lot of the same qualities I enjoy in this type while bringing some of her own traits to the table.

Though she (retroactively) appears first in a series 1 episode of new Who, we get to know Tosh much better on Torchwood, where she serves as the team’s tech expert.  Whenever a problem calls for computers or complex equations, she’s there, and studying alien gizmos is one of her favorite pastimes.  She’s most in her element when she’s doing fancy tech wizardry with the Torchwood software, but she also makes for a pretty adept field agent.

There are several typical Geek Girl personalities – Tosh skips quirky/bubbly and know-it-all, coming to rest far closer to wallflower.  This is probably her most frustrating quality, a shy, long-suffering tendency to stay in the background.  Not that it’s entirely a bad thing; she keeps on keeping on, getting the job done without needing recognition for it.  However, she can be too much of a doormat at times, and her unrequited crush on Owen isn’t big on dignity.  On a team with a lot of big personalities, Tosh can get lost in the shuffle. 

Which is a shame, because she’s often awesome, and I don’t think she usually realizes that.  While her trademark action tends to be vigorous typing, her computer skills reveal cleverness and creativity in equal parts.  She’s a master of mocking up false web trails, she hacks like a ninja, and she can coax almost any piece of technology into assisting her with inventive solutions (for just one example, I like when she makes a program to trace the route of a particular face backwards to the start of her journey via Cardiff’s CCTV system.)  When she works through a problem, she adjusts and course-corrects so seamlessly she doesn’t even notice how ingenious she is.

In the field, she’s generally level-headed and capable.  She can keep her head in most crises, she’s not shy about using her gun, and she puts her quick wits to good use in the direst situations.  She’s usually the one to talk others down when they freak out, to bring them back to the immediate issue and get them focused again.  If she has a major weakness, it ties into her shyness and loneliness.  She’s so used to being passed over and ignored that she can be easily led by someone who makes a show of appreciating her.  These plots can be tough to watch, both because it’s no fun to see a smart woman be manipulated like that and because it makes it clear that she has a pretty low opinion of herself.  However, they always highlight how little acknowledgement she receives from the rest of the team, and these storylines often resolve with the others realizing they shouldn’t take her so much for granted.

Finally, Tosh has the best quality of all my favorite Geek Girls:  an enthusiastic desire for knowledge.  Her intellect isn’t dry or insular – she’s wonderfully curious, and it’s great to see her fascination for alien artifacts, devices, and species.  She’s driven by a need to know how things work, to understand the universe.  This is the sort of woman who designs a computer program to search for common derivations in known fragments of assorted alien languages in her spare time, just because she wants to know.  Doesn’t get much better than that!