Torchwood 'Everything Changes' - Rating B

Opening credits – very trendy, very Supernatural.

The camera pans across the bright lights of Cardiff and before I continue on to demolish this particular programme, let me say congrats to the production team for setting their show in the city in which it’s filmed. Very refreshing. So, on to our very first continuity error, less than 30 seconds in, as we pan across the bright lights of Cardiff reflecting into the perfectly clear sky and then zoom down to the street where it’s…raining and by that I mean, pouring. Did this rain start at roof level or what?

Anyway, it’s apparently raining in Cardiff, but only at street level, and we pan down on a very dead blonde guy who looks remarkably like the dead blonde guy in Blackpool. Considering the 45 minutes of pain I’m about to endure on your behalf, I swear a dancing and singing David Tennant would be very welcome sight about now.

Crime Scene Investigatory-type people are doing Crime Scene Investigatory things as the crane shot takes us over to some extremely wet police officers. A female police officer with no name as yet pushes through the cordon and completely nicks some guy’s coffee. Since this is the first introduction of our ‘heroine’ I’m not sure how I feel about someone who just randomly takes someone else’s beverage but anyway, on with the show.

‘No name’ has just arrived at the scene and she and a much taller guy who I guess is her partner discuss drinks and pizza on Friday and other random chit chat while the Crime Scene Investigatory people continue to work in the rain. Incidentally they’re dressed in all-body raincoats that make them all look like giant condoms.
See, the Torchwood puerile obsession with sex is already getting to me.

Suddenly everyone’s kicked out and she who does not yet have a name wants to know why they’re all leaving a dead body in the street in the middle of the rain. ‘Orders from above’, ‘clear the area’, ‘special access’ and ‘Torchwood’ expositions one of the giant condoms and suddenly a black convertible appears and out jumps Angel, Wesley, Cordelia and Fred, clad in cool black coats, who walk in the universal cool-hero phalanx through the line of cars…sorry, sorry wrong show. Suddenly a black van appears and out jumps four people clad in cool black coats who walk in the universal cool-hero phalanx through the line of cars.

Who’s Torchwood, asks Miss ‘I still don’t have a name’ and then as he gives some enigmatic response, giant condom man steals her bleeding coffee. I mean, oh my God, who goes around stealing and drinking other people’s coffee like this? And what the hell was the point of this endless coffee stealing anyway? The camaraderie of the sharing and caring public service? As a public servant myself I’ve got to say, as much as I love my workmates, I don’t regularly walk into the building in the morning say, geez it’s cold out there, just got here and missed the coffee run so I’m gonna nick your half-drunk cappuccino, thanks very much, and don’t worry, I’ll make sure that hepatitis is round the floor in no time flat.

Anyway, orders from above is apparently not enough for PC whoever ‘cause in two seconds flat she’s up some stairs and onto the balcony of a nearby carpark, her movements not unnoticed by one of the men who I refuse to pretend I don’t know is the wonderful Cap’n Jack Harkness. She peers over the concrete railing down onto a very nice shot of dead-blonde Blackpool guy ringed by the Torchwood people.

Captain Jack suddenly goes into a bizarre speech about women using birth control and this meaning there’s oestrogen in the rain and he can taste it and…ew. Less than 3 minutes in and this show has already lost me. This speech, aside from moving Cap’n Jack from the lovable non-conformist we adored in Doctor Who and establishing him as ‘Cap’n Jack: Pervert’, also has scary misogynist overtones about the evils of birth control and oddly, environmentalism. I’ve heard women blamed for some strange thing in my times but increasing the levels of oestrogen in the food cycle is one of the more bizarre. Oh, and apparently birth control rain is something Jack luurves about this planet and it means he won’t get pregnant…again. Whatever.

Anyway, back to Blackpool and Cap’n Jack wants to know the progress of a kind of metal hand thing (a bit Cybermen actually) that one of his team has on her arm. She says there’s nothing yet as it takes time and the glove needs to “grants her access”. One of the guys, who is so familiar it’s driving me crazy, says to hurry up ‘cause he’s freezing his ass off and a Japanese woman gets the odd shot here and there showing her fiddling with something that looks remarkably like a PDA. Whatever it is she looks pissed at it. Finally, the glove is working and Suzie (a name, we finally have a name, yay!) holds it behind Blackpool’s head and he’s alive! Now I’ve got a close up he doesn’t look anything like the dead blonde guy in Blackpool.

Japanese girl tells non-Blackpool he’s dead and they only have two minutes and can he remember anything? Ensuing conversation establishes that yes, he’s dead, he doesn’t want to be dead, he was stabbed in the back from behind and that he didn’t see anything. Cap’n Jack finally introduces himself for the benefit of our still nameless heroine overhead and asks John (his name’s John) if he saw anything after he died. John confirms he saw nothing of anything called an afterlife and, filled with the comforting knowledge that life truly has no meaning, John expires.

Torchwood has an argument over whether John should have been told he was dead, noting that the last guy they tried it on thought he was just injured and spent the whole time screaming for an ambulance. “Maybe there’s just no right way of doing it”, say the Cap’n. He looks straight up at our fearless (we could only hope) heroine and yells “What do you think?”

‘Run away, run away’, is what she and she takes off across the carpark and into the street looking freaked out (great look for a copper, love, well done, what poise). I’m surprised someone doesn’t mug the gutless wonder just for fun.

Later…the Nameless One is home, having dried off, changed and taken advantage of the extensive police force hairdressing facilities. She’s still looking a bit freaked out and steels herself before going into the apartment to say hello to nice, solid, boring boyfriend. He says the murder was on the news and asks if she was there and she totally lies and says she wasn’t. Like, why? It’s not like she wasn’t supposed to be there, she was on duty. It doesn’t matter, you say? Ok, let’s move on.

Boyfriend then proceeds to prove he’s a really nice guy by saying how he’s still up ‘cause his mate came over but they only drank lemon tea ‘cause his mate’s worried about diabetes. See, he not only made his mate the tea he also drank it himself. That’s consideration, that is. He offers her leftover Chinese and she says that no, she’s knackered and goes off to bed to sleep (in TV land this is shorthand for ‘we’ve been together so long we can soooo keep our hands off each other now and hark, is that a sexy new paramour I see on the horizon?’). I brace myself for the inevitable break up in future episodes as TV writers simply don’t do normal monogamous relationships.

Back at work the next day and no name (seriously, I can’t keep this up anymore so she’s Gwen from now on) asks an older police officer that I will call Gina (is that just a family joke or do other people get that? I’ve always wanted to know) to check up on the Cap’n for her. Gina says she’s busy but will check it out if she’s got time. In the large police room of exposition, some male Officer Nobody is explaining that last night’s murder victim is the third in a row, but that the only thing that links the victims is the way they died. Ok, I hate to nitpick this show, at least quite this much, but if the only thing that connects these victims is that they got stabbed, then how the hell do they know it’s the same perpetrator? Unless there’s something else that connects these crimes, the briefing should have been about three separate and probably unrelated murders. Sorry Russell, three unrelated stabbing victims do not a serial killer make.

Anyway, back to exposition time where PC Who (ooh, I like that. I should have called Gwen PC Who instead. In fact, I will) is telling everyone that the first two victims were stabbed in the front but that-Blackpool John from last night was stabbed in the back (see, they weren’t even stabbed in the same way). While this very important information is imparted, our heroine is contributing by…handing out coffee?? What? Well, apparently this is an episode of Doctor Who, albeit from 1964. I mean, don’t get me totally wrong. I get it. Russell wrote this scene and someone said ‘hey Russell, your main character is a beat cop so why oh why is she in a briefing that only detectives would be invited to?’ And Russell said, good point, well done, now how do I get her into the room? And I have no problem with this at all. But honestly, is handing out coffee the best he could come up with? This is a normal day at work for these guys and I very much doubt anyone else makes their coffee. Plus you’ve just reduced your main character to mindless doormat and that’s a bad idea in a season premiere.

Anyway, next scene: outside a set of townhouses that look so much like where I lived when I was in London that I’m suddenly nothome-sick, PC Who is grilling nameless partner (for God’s sake give these people names!!) about Torchwood. He says they’re special ops, she points out that doesn’t mean anything and nameless partner that I can’t help thinking is kind of cute, says he’ll bet 10 quid they’re DNA specialists. He then makes the only vaguely amusing joke in the entire episode about CSI Cardiff and measuring the velocity of a kipper. Not exactly Champagne Comedy but the best we’re going to get.

Ooh, bar brawl, and once again our favourite incopetent copper contributes to the best of her ability by walking in, watching her partner do all the work and then getting knocked out. Oh, well done. At least this latest example of Welsh police force training and bravery under fire serves a plot purpose because, next thing you know, we’re at some sort of hospital or medical centre where a doc is checking out her head and probably reassuring her that there’s no actual brain there to damage so she’ll be fine.

As she’s leaving, still rubbing her head (possibly to reassure herself it’s still there), she sees a big dark coat with a mysterious man in it billowing up some stairs. It’s the Cap’n she thinks, and pelts up after him to encounter a sealed-off area at the top of the stairs. In the first use of actual brain cells in this episode, instead of just walking on through what looks like some kind of medical quarantine (this is so what I expected her to do), she instead waylays a porter and asks him the purpose of the seal. He says he doesn’t know and off she goes, through the seal and into the corridor behind it.

The light coming through the seal behind her, the vague mechanical noises and the long corridor would all come together to make something kinda scary if we hadn’t seen it all before. A man appears at the end of the corridor and she apologises for no apparent reason (I do this too so can’t gripe too much; I’ve even apologised to desks, rubbish bins and traffic lights) and walks up the corridor towards him. Realising she’s now in a scene from a horror film, she mutters ‘Clever’ to herself, disparagingly, and continues to walk toward the strange man all the while asking him about the Cap’n and his mysterious dark military coat. As she gets closer, she realises this guy seriously doesn’t look human but takes his brown lined skin and big nasty teeth as a mask. This proves only that she definitely didn’t watch Doctor Who as a girl as this guy has Doctor Who prosthetic monster written all over him. Then she says something about being sorry if she’s interrupting but that they can “stop this now” and I so don’t know what she’s talking about. Stop what? He’s just standing there.

Anyway, to cut a long recap short, he starts menacing her and the porter from earlier that we shall call the ‘unnamed member of the away team’ comes through the seal to give her the important news that he doesn’t actually know anything. His appearance is of course the cue for a discussion on the wonders of today’s prosthetic masks followed by a long-drawn out death rattle as the monster sucks out all his blood.

Torchwood appears suddenly and overpower the assailant or something and all I can think is: where, precisely, have they been this entire time…I mean, she’s been in that corridor talking to the monster they’re after for like two or three minutes. What the hell have they been doing?

Once again, PC Who is running away and is looking shaken and generally freaked. She goes to the carpark to freak out in public as usual and sees the Torchwood black van of coolness drive past her. She jumps in her police car (abandoning her partner in the process – isn’t that like an actionable offence for a police officer?) and chases after the Black VOC through the scenic streets of Cardiff. She calls in the VOC’s numberplate then talks to Gina who has searched high and low for Captain Jack Harkness and hasn’t found him anywhere. She says the only Captain Jack Harkness on record was an American volunteer in London during the blitz who disappeared in 1941, thus referencing ‘The Empty Child’ and ‘The Doctor Dances’ episodes from Doctor Who. Now THAT is quality television. Seriously, that two-parter is the best bloody Doctor Who episode ever. And scary? I still can’t hear a kid calling to ‘Mummy’ without getting chills down my spine. This show is mindless pap compared to that.

Anyway, on to the car chase that ends up at the beautiful Roald Dahl Plass in Cardiff Bay. Really, this place is so scenic I honestly regret all those times I bypassed Cardiff to go drinking in Dublin. She parks the car, the Torchwood gang are in her sights and then a fellow police officer appears and tells her she has to move her car as she’s not allowed to park there. When she looks back, the Torchwood team is gone!

Later, it’s raining again in Cardiff (at least the weather is realistic in this show) and Gwen is in her policey car finding out that the number plate of the Black VOC doesn’t exist! Torchwood must hope it never ever has a traffic violation. The guy who imparts this information calls her Gwen and I have to wonder, honestly, if this is the first time they’ve said her name or if I just missed it before. I mean, we’re nearly halfway through. Suddenly, PC Partner opens the doors and plops himself into the car, complaining that he had to walk to find her and I again wonder when she’s going to face disciplinary action.

Anyway, PC Who and PC Partner go off to the Millennium Centre so she can tell PCP about the disappearing Torchwood team. He’s cold, he’s wet, he had to walk halfway across town to find her, and he is thus unimpressed with her disappearing people story. He also shoots down her ‘porter-killed-by-monster-or-possibly-weird-man-in-Halloween-mask’ yarn, telling her that all the hospital staff have been accounted for and none of them have been either injured or killed. He then tells her that she’s not? well? (oh, the bump on the head – there’s continuity for you: I had consigned it to the plot rubbish bin) and actually manages to call her ‘sweetheart’ without being patronising. I like PC Partner. I’ve definitely decided on cute.

As they walk off, we see they’re being watched. Dum dum.

Home again, and Gwen lies to nice boyfriend about having to work tonight and apologises for not ringing earlier since he’s spent the last God knows how many hours cooking her dinner. He forgives her in 2 seconds flat and off she goes… …to stand around in the Roald Dahl Plass (at least it’s not raining anymore) trying to work out where the Cap’n went.

She asks around and actually finds a pizza place that delivers pizzas to ‘Torchwood’. I mean seriously, what secret organisation would order pizzas under the name of the secret organisation. That’s surreptitious. “Hi, Pizza Hut? Yeah, I’m with ASIO and I’m on an undercover surveillance mission in the van parked outside that Ambassador’s House…yeah, could you send me two supreme pizzas with…”. Urgh!

So PC Who ?buys? two pizzas and takes them to the delivery address. And here I have to gripe further because the front for Torchwood is apparently some kind of tourist information centre and the guy behind the counter is wearing, wait for it, a suit. A suit. Obviously when Torchwood did their undercover training, the definition of ‘anachronistic’ wasn’t covered. Look it up, boys.

Painful as it is, we then have to endure the fake wall, the sewer/corridor and the secret elevator before we are let into the bowels of Torchwood itself. She steps into the room through a round doorway and a rusty steel door rolls into place behind her. She looks around and sees a hand in a jar and I so had to have someone else explain to me that this is the Doctor’s hand. That is just weird, by the way. Where the hell did he get it? Was Jack, what, standing below the Sycoraux spaceship (another good Doctor Who episode btw) waiting hopefully for one of the Doctor’s body parts to come flying down from the sky? Did someone find a severed hand in the street and say, hey, I think this severed hand belongs to a 1000-year-old Timelord so I’d better give it to Torchwood? Maybe we shall never know.

So Gwen is looking round the inner workings of Torchwood and she sees the aforementioned Doctor-hand, someone welding and an internal column that looks remarkably like the Tardis console. I can only assume that’s deliberate. Do you think Jack has modelled Torchwood Three on the Tardis? And I thought I was an obsessive Whovian. Jack walks downstairs and sits at his desk, the welder takes off her welding hat thing and she’s Suzie and we see Japanese girl doing something with sound waves. And can I just note that at no point, no point in this entire scene, where she thinks they haven’t noticed her but they’re actually ignoring her, at no point do we see a knife. This is important later.

Anyway, familiar guy (who I looked up on the internet and his name is Burn Gorman and he has been in just about everything), says he “can’t do this” and they all start laughing. They were only pretending they hadn’t noticed her. It was a joke! Ha ha. Not. Even Jack admits he hadn’t come up with the punch line yet. The Torchwood team point out that they could see her standing in the freezing rain for the last three hours and Jack asks who the hell orders pizza under the name of Torchwood. THANK YOU. Burn admits it was him.

Gwen asks about the porter and Japanese girl explains how she covered up porter guy’s death. They discuss how Gwen saw them bring a guy back from the dead and Gwen asks for a synopsis of the plot of the show since she’s officially a star. “What’s Torchwood”, she asks. “We’re Torchwood”, says Jack, “it’s all around you”. And I have to go wuh? Did anyone see Torchwood in Army of Ghosts and Doomsday? They had so much money they could build Canary Wharf to reach a spatial disturbance and I’m supposed to believe it’s now four people in a basement in Cardiff who can’t even afford proper lighting?

The Cap’n tells Gwen he’s going to show her the murderer and she follows him down some stairs to some holding cells, all the while continuing to ask the question I’m glad she’s realised he hasn’t yet answered: who’s Torchwood? A pterodactyl flies above their heads. Into the holding cells, which look nice and basementy and Gwen comes face-to-face with the creature from the hospital. It’s called a Weevil, apparently, and is an alien. Jack says there’re a couple hundred Weevils living in the sewers and every now and then they go ‘rogue’ and come to the surface. He says this is happening more and more often.

Jack provides Gwen with a chair so she can sit opposite the Weevil and “look into its eyes”. I have absolutely no idea why he wants her to do this and this is very unimportant so let’s move on.

Back in the faux-Tardis, Gwen is getting her introduction to the team. We finally find out that Burn’s name is Dr Owen Harper, Japanese girl is Toshiko Sato and Suzie’s last name is Costello. Suzie is noticeably not working on a knife. Just saying. Finally, we meet anachronistic Ianto who cleans up after the team and is still wearing a suit.

Gwen notes that since the whole team is highly highly super classified Jack shouldn’t be telling her their names and has finally twigged that being a police officer won’t help her if they decide to kill her, dump her, and cover it up. Jack just looks enigmatic, but I think he was trying for mysterious, and starts giving his team instructions before swanning out telling Gwen to follow him. And, oh so painful, she says she’s getting tired of following him and he says, God, I can barely even type it: “No you’re not, and you never will’. Urgh. I’d ask who wrote this dialogue but unfortunately I know.

Now we get to a bit I actually thought was kind of cool. Jack gets her to stand on a paving stone and they go straight up onto street level in full view of everyone. It’s an invisible lift and as long as they stand on the paving stone no one can see them. Jack calls it a perception filter and explains that it only works on that exact spot. That’s not actually the cool bit by the way. The cool bit is the explanation for this phenomenon, which references the Doctor Who episode Boom Town. Jack says he doesn’t know what caused it but if he had to guess he’d say that a ‘dimensionally transcendental chameleon circuit’ was once on that spot and ‘welded its perception properties to a spatial-temporal rift’. That is a quite a cool explanation. Even the fact that it’s the Tardis, not the chameleon circuit, that’s dimensionally transcendental and that the Doctor’s chameleon circuit is actually broken cannot dissuade me from thinking this is cool. Jack says he think ‘invisible lift’ sounds cooler. Then he makes a Welsh joke.

Jack and Gwen are having a drink and Jack cites yet more Doctor Who episodes as proof that humans have all the evidence they need that aliens do exist: the spaceship over London from ‘Christmas Day’ and the Cyberman invasion from ‘Army of Ghosts’ and ‘Doomsday’. Gwen’s finally twigged that Jack is an alien catcher and she asks him who he is. Since they have been introduced, I’m assuming she means she wants to know his personal history. Jack hasn’t worked this out, however, and he tells her he’s “Captain Jack Harkness”. She points out that the only Jack Harkness on record disappeared in 1941 and Jack notes that couldn’t possibly be him, in a way that ensures everyone knows it actually is. He outlines Torchwood’s “if it’s alien, it’s ours” motto and says Torchwood is separate from the Government, outside the police and beyond the United Nations.

Oh God, I‘m tired and am so so bored of this pap. This seemed like a good idea when I started this last night.

Jack says no one in Torchwood is allowed to take any alien artefacts home and, since this is a television show, this naturally segueways into a sequence showing that every Torchwood employee (yes, all three of them) has alien artefacts in their possession. Toshiko has something that appears to be little more than a scanner, but a cool alien scanner, Owen has some Lynx (couldn’t he just get that at the store) and Suzie has the glove.

Back in the bar, Jack is outlining the history of Torchwood. Torchwood One was destroyed in the battle at Canary Wharf, Torchwood Two is just one man in Glasgow and Torchwood Four is missing. This means Torchwood One had around 4000 employees and the others have four, total. Aaaaannnyway, Jack says he wanted Cardiff because of the space-time rift. He says all sorts of aliens, including the Weevils, get washed up in Cardiff, and we all know he’s actually waiting for the Doctor to come back.

Gwen makes quite a good suggestion that she could be Torchwood’s police liaison on the serial killer case and Jack sets her straight quick smart. Torchwood’s interested in technology, not in solving crime and they couldn’t give a damn who non-Blackpool John’s murderer was. They were just testing the glove.

Gwen says she has a duty to report everything because the glove could be a big help in solving crime and Jack says she won’t remember anything because he spiked her drink with an amnesia pill an a mild sedative as well. Then he says, oh God this is painful, that she will then forget Torchwood and “worse, you’ll have forgotten me”. Man I hate this Jack. He’s creepy. Bring back my old Jack.

Once again, Gwen runs away, back home where she desperately tries to send herself a message by…typing it on to a computer. That’s connected to the internet. This girl’s so thick she deserves everything she gets.

In a bar somewhere, Owen is testing out his ‘Lynx effect’, picking up some girl and then picking up her boyfriend as well. I can only assume that ménage highjinks ensue and once again, eww. Why do TV writers insist on thinking that rape is funny. Can you imagine if they had this scene in a drama? "Officer drugs person and forces them to have sex with them,". Makes. Me. So. Mad.

Gwen is typing, Toshiko is scanning books like anything (you know, honey, a flat bed scanner doesn’t cost that much) and Suzie is using the glove. Gwen is typing and falling asleep and Ianto is remotely wiping her computer. Oh no! Lucky she didn’t write herself an actual note or Jack’s very-clever amnesia drug that knows exactly which memories he wants it to wipe, would have been useless.

Next morning and Jack is standing on some building for no reason I can see. Gwen is slumped over her computer and nice boyfriend brings her coffee. She says she must have gone and got drunk last night but seems a bit confused about everything. Back at work and Gina follows Gwen into the building and asks her whether she’s had any luck with Captain Jack. Jack’s very special amnesia drug has done its work, however, and she has no memory of him. Gina’s a bit snitty that Gwen’s apparently wasted her time with something not very important. Man, I wouldn’t want to put Gina offside. She looks like someone who actually IS a good police officer.

Finally, finally, we’re rolling on home and this episode is nearly over. Gwen is doing some filing in the police room of exposition and sees a drawing of a knife on the board devoted to the three-unrelated stabbing murders. It’s the murder weapon and, as its very distinctive, this evidence finally and officially counts as connecting these murders. Gwen looks at it and says she doesn’t recognise it but for some reason it stirs something. She can’t stop thinking about it and keeps having obscure memory flashbacks all through the ensuing montage, while she’s ignoring Constable Cutie on a break, ignoring nice boyfriend who has once again cooked her dinner and doesn’t seem to mind she no longer realises he exists, and in bed that night as she tosses and turns with a memory tugging at her. She’s doodling the knife on an envelope in her study and starts having memories of seeing the knife. Except, and I looked very very closely. She has never seen this knife. Not ever. Not once.

She sees a note written on a folder in her study that says ‘remember’ and is drawn to Roald Dahl Plass. As she walks around, she sees someone in the distance and once again has a memory of seeing the knife that she really never saw. The person in the distance comes into view and it’s Suzie. This would be less of a shock if we had ever seen this knife but anyway.

Suzie says she has been liaising with the police and so she saw the report about the knife and knew it might twig Gwen’s memory. She says something like that can overcome the very special amnesia pill “if the person’s clever” and that Jack had said that Gwen was good. What is it with shows that show you one thing and then think if they tell you another you’ll believe it? We already know Gwen’s only police asset is her curiousity. Telling us she’s good isn’t going to overcome the evidence of our own eyes.

Anyway, Suzie pulls out the knife and Gwen says Suzie is under arrest but is temporarily confused because she doesn’t remember how they know each other. Then Suzie pulls a gun on Gwen and launches into her “I’m really crazy, didn’t you know?” speech about how Gwen is the only one who can make the link, except Torchwood who will know by morning. I’m too tired now to hook into that speech so we’ll skip right along as Suzie crazifies that she loves this job, loves this job; it gets inside you. She killed to test the glove as it only works on people who died violent deaths.

As Suzie’s explaining everything to Gwen before she kills her, in the great tradition of all crazy serial killers, Jack begins to appear on the ‘invisible lift’ presumably behind the perception filter. Then Suzie says something along the lines of “and that’s why the perception filter won’t work on me” and. Shoots. Jack. Straight. In. The. Head. That’s fantastic. I mean, really. His head doesn’t explode or anything, unfortunately, but this was really cool. And, if you’re like me and didn’t see seven hundred ads telling you this was “the man that can never die” this would have come as a genuine surprise.

As she prepares to finally kill her, Gwen justifies every nasty thing I’ve ever said about her by crying, sobbing and begging. Writers, I know this is how you and I would behave if someone was about to kill us, but Gwen is supposed to be a trained police officer. This is not how she would behave. Her training would kick in and she’d play it by the book right to the end. Gripe over.

Suddenly, Jack jump up behind Suzie, unharmed and undead, and says it’s all over and Suzie shoots herself. Gwen says “I remember”.

Inside Torchwood, the team is handing back all the alien stuff they took and Ianto is locking it up into boxes. Suzie is being put on ice.

Dawn the next day (do you think the sun is rising on a day when everything has changed? Yeah? Really?)

Gwen and Jack are standing in a really beautiful morning light. This scene is lit beautifully actually. It really looks like the morning after the night before. I also like the dialogue in this scene and I get the feeling Russell probably wrote this first and then built the episode around it.

Gwen brings up the subject of Jack being shot in the head and notes that the rest of Torchwood doesn’t know. Jack explains that he can’t die. He says he once died somewhere, a long story and far away. He says he was brought back to life and now he can’t die. He says that one day he might find a “the right sort of Doctor” who’ll explain it but until then he’ll keep it under wraps because it freaks people out. Whovians will know this episode references “The Parting of the Ways” and I kind of like this idea of Jack not being able to die after Rose revived him. It was a very unnatural thing and it makes sense that it changed him that much. Anyway, the episode floats to its conclusion as Jack offers Gwen a job with Torchwood. She accepts and we pan back and it’s the end.

Next week, an alien that feeds on orgasms. Oh, spare me.