Torchwood: S2E10 - S2E13

Oooh, a lack of blogging of late means that I have four episodes of Torchwood to review in one go... here goes. Probably spoilers in here, so tread carefully.

Episode 10: From out of the rain

Hmmm. A genuinely creepy episode. Or rather, the characters and concepts were really creepy, but the actual plot was a bit dull. I wish the character of 'Pearl' had been fleshed out a bit more, what actually did she do at the circus? What exactly was her affinity with water? And Jack was in there somewhere, but we never really found out why. Argh, so many questions, so few answers. A strange mix of interesting and disappointing.

Episode 11: Adrift

It seems that Ruth Jones is in every BBC Wales/BBC Three production at the moment. She's in Gavin & Stacey, was in Little Britain, Nighty Night, Saxondale and now here she is in Torchwood. Playing a character she isn't yet old enough to play (actually, I just checked, she's 42, so I guess she is actually old enough to play the parent of a 17 year old boy, must be me getting old...). She did a good job too.

Quite a moving episode, lots of what passes for emotion in sci-fi and a bit of a moral grey area dilemma, which is always good. Jean Luc Picard would probably have violated the prime directive here too. Everything was good up to the point when we saw part of Jonah's 20 hours a day torment, which was when it went silly. Nevermind, good effort.

Episode 12: Fragments

Four explosions (how did Capt John know that they'd split up and Gwen wouldn't be there?) result in four members of the team having life-flashing-before-their-eyes moments. Except only those bits of their life when they joined Torchwood. So finally we get the story of how Jack joined Torchwood. Good. And I suppose learning how the others joined was vaguely interesting too. But the Ianto story was just silly and is rewriting history, because he didn't have an interesting character in Series 1, so how come he had an interesting character before Series 1?

Episode 13: Exit wounds

And so it ends. In most end of season sci-fi episodes you need explosions, plot twists, the return of characters from earlier in the series and the unexpected writing out of a recurring character. Usually the entire world is in danger, or possibly just Cardiff if your budget doesn't stretch to the world. So nothing greatly unexpected here. I've been waiting for them to finally kill off Owen since he became undead about 5 episodes ago, so they finally did it. Good. It would have just got too annoying if they hadn't.

And now the yo-yo character of Captain John. He's good, he's bad, he kills Jack, he loves Jack, oh I don't care anymore. Please don't bring him back for Series 3, if there is a Series 3.

Now let me get this straight, Jack was buried about 6 or 10 feet down in the soil for 2000 years. During that time presumably he died quite a lot of times. But how come he couldn't manage to dig himself up even just an inch each time? Surely in 2000 years he'd have managed to get out? Didn't quite ring true... for a given sci-fi value of true, that is.

And finally the bad guy. 'Gray' is such a bad name for a character. How did they come up with that one? And I just didn't buy it. Sorry, but the explosions and mayhem were good, Gwen being a hero was good, the deaths of major characters were good, the Toshiko from beyond the grave bit was good, but the basic underlying plot was pretty rubbish. I suppose on balance that comes out as better than average, but it still disappointed.

Doctor Who next though...