Live-blogging Torchwood Season Two: "Dead Man Walking"

We’ve just had the following conversation:

ME: Well, I’m quite hurt, and offering Tim Tams won’t change that.
NICK: Would other kinds of chocolate change that?
ME: How would you get other chocolate?
NICK: I could go get some.
ME: But I have to live blog and I don’t know how to turn the television on!

Seriously. You’d think I’d have learnt by now, but, somehow, living with a geek means you end up with a terribly complicated audio-visual system.

Then the conversation segued to this:

ME: Life never used to be this complicated!
NICK (in the living room): Mumble mumble mumble.
ME: I heard that!
NICK: I didn’t say anything you shouldn’t have heard!
ME: Oh.

So, sometimes that technique backfires. It’s still worth trying.

So, where were we? Oh, yes: Owen was dead.

Tonight’s episode contains violence, but still no sex or swearing. What’s up with you, Torchwood? Slacking off a bit, are we?

We open on Owen’s body, covered with an autopsy sheet, but only to the waist, so we can see the bullet wound over his heart. Martha is doing the autopsy. Oh, Owen is 27? Is it a sign of the approaching apocalypse that I’m older than even the protagonists of “adult” television?

Just as Martha is supposed to make the first incision, Jack leaps into the room and says that no-one is to touch Owen until he gets back. He goes to see a creepy child with Tarot cards, who says she’s been looking forward to seeing the Captain again.

He asks her if she knows where it is. She says she does. Jack asks if it’s in a church, and she says no: when people realised what it could do, they built the church on top of it.

She asks if Jack will reconsider, and he asks, in return, if she knows the answer to that. She says she does, and we see, in the foreground of the shot, that she’s holding the Death card.

The church is full of weevils, by the way, as Jack rummages through such various items as a flag-emblazoned guitar.

But when Jack returns to the Hub and the others ask what he has, we see he’s holding the pair to the Resurrection Mitten.

Gwen says he can’t use it, not after Suzie. But he says he’s using it. He’s bringing Owen back.

Credits.

Gwen says she thought the glove didn’t work for him, but Jack says it’s a different glove and different circumstances. It has to work, he says, so if they have anything to say to Owen, say it now.

Owen wakes, freaking. And Gwen is horrified, but less so than Martha, who has never seen this before. Owen, unlike the other victims, copes quite well with being brought back to life. Gwen goes to say goodbye, but Owen says that, no offense, he only has two minutes. Tosh tells him she loves him and always has. And Jack . . . Jack asks for the code to the alien morgue, because Owen is the only one who knows it.

Damn, Jack. That’s cold. Even for you.

He does tell Owen a little about what death is, but, this being Torchwood, it’s not comforting.

Owen dies again.

Tosh is weeping. Ianto looks shell-shocked. Jack looks devastated, and grips Owen’s hand, until Owen says, “I’m really going to need that hand, you know.”

Cue general disturbance.

Owen says maybe he wasn’t meant to die, but, in the foreground, we see the glove wiggling its fingers slightly.

Owen puts his pants back on, which, this being Owen, I imagine would do much to reconcile him to life, as Martha tells him that he can’t lead the investigation, because he’s the subject of the investigation and, also, he’s dead.

They determine that Owen is not, unlike Suzie, draining his energy from Jack. [Ambiguity! Suzie wasn’t draining her energy from Jack, of course, but you get the general idea.] Martha gives Owen a device to wear that will monitor the effects of the glove, which are spreading out through his body, changing its composition.

Martha asks Owen what death is like—after he’s asked why she’s stopped flirting with him, and wondered if it’s necrophilia if he’s conscious—and he first tells her he saw pearly gates, and then tells her he saw nothing. He says Suzie said something else, that there was something in the darkness.

Then he falls into a distorting darkness, where something is waiting for him. He screams for Martha, and when we come back, Martha is screaming his name and calling for Jack, saying that Owen collapsed.

In the Hub, Tosh tries to talk to Owen about what she said to him, and he tells her it’s fine: he knows it was just a grief reaction, and she didn’t mean it. She tries to tell him she did mean it, but he blows her off.

Then he slips back into the darkness, where he hears something that I suspect is supposed to be Latin. Or might actually be Latin. All I know is “mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”

But as he comes back, he’s speaking the same language, and his eyes are all black. Well, the irises and pupils are black. Nick tells me at this point that this is the same writer as “The Satan Pit.” Figures.

Owen disappears from the Hub, to general consternation.

Martha chews Jack out for not telling UNIT that he could bring people back from the dead. He says it’s still Owen, but Martha says that Owen’s only 50% human, and that 50% is dead.

Ah, video-clip montage.

When we come out of that, Owen is in a night club, being snogged by a girl wearing feathery wings and then trying to beat Jack up.

They’re both arrested, and when Owen tells them that he works for Torchwood—special ops—Jack says, “Special Ops? Special needs, more like it.”

They end up in the same cell, where Jack tells Owen not to kick things, because his ankle won’t heal.

Then there’s a sequence that I don’t think I’ll recap. I’m with Jack on it being the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen.

Though, as Nick points out, how can Owen talk, if he can’t metabolise things?

Never mind.

They discuss Proust. Owen asks if Jack’s read Proust, rather skeptically, and Jack says, “Yes. Well, no. We dated for a while. He was really immature.”

So what we have here is a dead man talking to an immortal man. Owen is cherishing every last minute, even the feeling of the bricks under his fingers, because he doesn’t know when his body will give up for good, while Jack says that when you live forever, you don’t even notice the feel of the bricks.

Jack says he’s had enough, and gives the police his Torchwood authorisation code.

Gwen says that Jack has found Owen, and Tosh asks if he’s himself again. When Gwen asks what she means, Tosh says she’s been watching CCTV footage of Owen, which Gwen, rightly, points out is a little like stalking. But she shuts up when she sees the creepy eyes/Latin combo.

Meanwhile, Jack and Owen are surrounded by weevils. Jack tells Owen to leave, because they’re after him for stealing the glove from them. But Owen doesn’t.

Heather! Carpark!

Wow, that’s a lot of weevils. All in their complimentary weevil boiler suits. Jack and Owen end up on the top story of a carpark, but, as Jack tells Owen to get behind him and pulls his gun, the weevils all kneel and, seemingly, pray.

And Owen has the creepy eyes and Latin happening again.

Tosh uses her secret translation device on Owen’s weird Latin ranting, and they hear him saying, “I shall walk the earth, and my hunger shall know no bounds.”

When Jack returns to the Hub with Owen, Gwen shows them early woodcuts of Death, who is associated with Death. The legends come from five-hundred years back in Cardiff’s history, when a little girl died of the plague and, when she was brought back, brought Death with her. Death killed twelve people, needing thirteen souls to cross over permanently.

They decide that Owen is becoming a gateway: that’s what the changes to his body are doing. So he tells them that they need to embalm him. They need to inject formaldehyde into his veins, to shut his brain down.

OWEN: It’s the only way to be sure.
ME: No. You could always nuke the planet from orbit.

Gwen asks Owen if he’s sure, and I offer my “nuking the planet from orbit” option again. But Owen says yes, he’s sure: he can’t sleep, drink, or shag, and those are three of his favourite things. He’s ready to pass over.

So they dress him, oddly, in white scrubs, and he walks through the Hub, past Ianto. Gwen walks with him. Martha, Tosh, and Jack are prepping the medical room.

And as Jack asks if Owen is ready for the first injection, the Resurrection Mitten goes nuts, leaping straight for Martha’s throat. Martha screams, which is not something I associate with Martha, but then it is a sentient gauntlet. That would throw anyone.

The next scene, in which they spread out looking for the glove, Nick says is an Alien reference, but it reminds me of nothing so much as the last time a huntsman spider got into the house.

Well, until the gauntlet leaps out and hugs Martha’s face. That’s definitely an Alien reference.

Then Owen shoots it—well, not, obviously, while it’s still on Martha’s face—despite Tosh’s warnings that this might be the end of Owen.

Then we hear Gwen gently saying Martha’s name, and we see that she looks about eighty.

NICK: Oh, the Doctor’s going to be so pissed at you, Jack.

Jack says that the glove did this to Martha, while we see the shadowy figure of Death, as a cloud of smoke, leave Owen’s body and kill Jack. But not temporarily.

They take Martha to the hospital, where the doctor says it’s very lovely of them to look in on their elderly neighbour and collect her pension, but that she’s got to be, what, eighty? So they need to accept that she’s going to die.

Jack tries to send Owen back to the Hub, saying he’s not safe. But it’s too late: Death is at the hospital with them. They can tell, because there are weevils everywhere outside. And, sure enough, people are starting to die.

They evacuate the hospital, but there are multiple Code 4s (heart attacks) in intensive care, and there’s at least one boy who has his headphones on, so he hasn’t heard the evacuation code.

Death seems to have killed eight people, leaving five to go. Of course, the Torchwood staff number five. If you count Martha but not Owen.

IANTO: I’ve searched on the term “I shall walk the earth and my hunger shall know no bounds,” but I keep getting directed to Weightwatchers.

Low blow, Torchwood.

This is all reminding me less of Alien or Aliens at the moment, and more of that episode of Buffy where she had the flu. That might be because a small boy is being stalked through the hospital by Death. Tosh and Owen grab the boy and run.

Gwen says that Death now has twelve victims. Which twelve? There were only eight before, and the hospital had been evacuated. So where did the other four come from, if they aren’t the Torchwood staff?

Never mind.

Turns out that the answer is a puzzle. They knew that the priest stopped Death at twelve souls through “faith.” And it seems now that the little girl who died of the plague, the one who started the whole process, was Faith.

Owen realises that she had nothing to lose, because she was already dead.

And he pushes Jamie—the little boy—out of the room, after a pep talk about how he can survive the cancer, and pushes Tosh out, too, despite her protests.

Tosh screams and and beats on the door as Owen taunts Death, asking him how long he can survive in here alone with only twelve souls. “No one here but us dead men,” he says. “Owen Harper’s soul has left the building.”

And he grabs Death, and holds him by the wrists until he fades.

But Owen is still walking.

Ianto, left out of the excitement, asks plaintively over the comms, “Jack? Jack? Anyone?” He’s less than thrilled when the “anyone” turns out to be the newly young Martha, who grabs his shoulder.

Back at the Hub, Martha says he’s absorbed an intense amount of energy, and she doesn’t know how long it will take to dissipate. Until it does, he’s a walking dead man.

He asks Jack if he can keep working, to make up for the fact that people died because Jack brought him back to life.

Jack says they’ll see.

Now that’s an uncommon approach to the death of a primary character, you have to admit.