Live-blogging Torchwood Season Two: "Meat"

See, here’s the thing: an old friend and colleague is heading off a fellowship on the other side of the globe, so . . . well, there’s no good way to put this.

Basically, I’ve been at the pub since 4 p.m.

Consider that an explanation for what is about to happen.

Oh, and also? I have ordered pizza. I think it’s compulsory when you’ve been at the pub for four hours. So there may be a brief hiatus when that turns up. And also when Nick comes home, which should be in about an hour.

But look what a dedicated blogger I am! I’m here, blogging, despite the urge to stay at the pub!

I have a feeling I’ll regret this particular live-blogging come tomorrow morning.

Ah, but here’s the opening monologue. Oooh, and the pterodactyl.

We open on Rhys in a car, singing along to the advertisement for his own company, and very responsibly pulling over to answer his phone. Apparently, there’s been an accident, and it involves one of his trucks.

Oh, dear: that doesn’t look good. The driver is dead, and the policeman asks Rhys for some personal details. Of course, the driver is married and just had a baby. We’re lucky he wasn’t two days away from retirement.

The policeman says that there’s something suspicious in the back of the truck—and, on cue, here’s Torchwood, with slow-motion Gwen looking fierce in her slim-cut jeans and leather jacket.

Credits.

Jack points out that there aren’t any bones, just dense meat. Owen says it isn’t like any meat that he’s ever seen, and I refrain from making the obvious joke. Jack says that since there haven’t been any giant cow sightings, they have to treat the meat as suspicious.

Back at the Hub, Owen points out that the firm knows it’s dodgy, since the official vet stamp—the one that marks the meat as fit for human consumption, and that’s so loaded, in a British context—is fake.

Gwen says there’s no way Rhys is in on it, because he’s the straightest man she knows.

So Tosh rings him, and pretends to be the police, finding out that Rhys has neither an address nor a contact phone number for the haulage company, with whom he’s only been working for two months.

Ianto locates the driver, just as Owen shouts that the scan shows it is definitely alien meat—and people have been eating it in pies, pasties, and so on for months.

Owen says it has no detectable diseases, and Gwen asks if he would eat it. Owen realises that he’s probably been eating it for months.

Gwen dashes home to “check on” Rhys, and he tells her about the accident—whereupon she proves herself to be not the most attentive of girlfriends.

This whole scene is filtered through the fact that Rhys knows Gwen was at the accident, but Gwen is still lying to him and pretending to be working for the police. So Rhys is pushing at her, quite gently, and Gwen is stalling without actually answering his questions.

She tells him to go and have a pint to calm down. Can you “calm down” from seeing the dead body of one of your football buddies by having a pint? That doesn’t seem likely.

Gwen meets up with Jack, who asks her to accompany him to the slaughterhouse.

GWEN: Have you ever eaten alien meat?
JACK: Yeah.
GWEN: What was it like?
JACK: Well, he seemed to enjoy it.

Occasionally, this is the filthiest show on television. And I mean that as a compliment.

Rhys is trailing Gwen: she trusts him—she’s told Jack that he knows nothing about it—but he doesn’t trust her, and, in fact, he shouldn’t.

The other Torchwood members are at the slaughterhouse, as well. But, when Rhys rings Gwen on her phone, she won’t answer. Still, Jack and Gwen see him, as he’s talking to one of the people involved in the scam. Of course, they assume that he’s in on it, prompting Jack to call off the raid—and to pin Gwen up against a wall, because Jack is nothing if not an opportunist.

Of course, Rhys doesn’t know anything, and he’s not exactly in the safest situation.

Inside the warehouse, we can hear something bellowing, as people walk through with slabs of meat, while someone else tells them that they should have waited for a ketamine injection before harvesting that.

Rhys tells the two men in charge that their driver is dead, and that he took all the meat off to be incinerated. He asks them if he can take up where the dead driver left off. And the men in charge ask what he knows, but when he reveals that he knows nothing, they just basically show him everything.

Oh, honestly: does no-one takes basic classes in super-villainy any more?

But it’s to our benefit, because they take him into the warehouse, where we see an enormous alien, just a giant slab of meat that, they say, just keeps growing no matter how much they cut it.

And it’s keening.

Rhys is nauseated by this, but one of the men in charge says that you get used to it.

Outside the warehouse, it looks to Gwen and Jack as though Rhys is deep into this.

So Gwen marches into her home, demanding to know what Rhys was doing at that warehouse, and Rhys turns on her, telling her that he’s sick of her lying to him. He asks, too, if she’s sleeping with Jack—and it’s a good thing that he didn’t ask about Owen, isn’t it?

Gwen does tell him that she’s been lying about the special ops. But Rhys is really hurting here: he refers to himself as a “big dumb animal,” so we know that it’s only partly his hurt and partly his empathetic pain about the animal he saw being tortured.

RHYS: So what do you do?
GWEN: I catch aliens.
RHYS: Piss off.
GWEN: No, you piss off.

Still, Gwen says that she’ll prove what she does to Rhys, and she takes him to the Hub, as I slide straight past another awkward and heart-breaking attempt on Tosh’s part to attract Owen’s interest.

Jack is waiting at the bottom of the lift to greet Rhys, and Gwen is just giddy with the delight of introducing Rhys to the work to which she is so committed. Rhys is impressed with the pterodactyl.

Jack attacks Rhys about the fact that he blundered into the warehouse, and Rhys, bless him, refuses to back down.

TOSH: If we understood how it worked, we could feed the world.
IANTO: We could release a single.

Best line of the episode!

Oh, well, until Rhys stands up to Jack, and Jack says, “This is quite homoerotic.”

Jack agrees that Rhys can take them into the warehouse, but Gwen is not impressed. She doesn’t want Rhys involved, but she also doesn’t want him to go in without her.

TOSH: Then we put the creature out of its misery.
JACK: No. We save it.

Oh, Jack. Jack, you optimistic fool. Have you watched any of this season, so far? My money is not on the victim of the week, frankly.

Cut to more awkward flirting between Tosh and Owen: well, Tosh flirts, Owen doesn’t. She brings him sandwiches [pizza arrived! But I shall put off eating it, in order to finish this], and there is a gorgeous shot where it seems as though she puts her hand on his back, but, when the camera spins, we see that she’s still half a foot away from him.

Also? I tried to convince the pizza boy to watch Torchwood. I don’t know it I succeeded, but I admire his willingness to pretend to be interested in what the tipsy lady was saying, and I tipped him accordingly.

[This is me on Saturday morning, clarifying that statement: I didn’t invite the pizza boy in to watch Torchwood with me right then. I wasn’t that tipsy. I merely encouraged him to watch it on his own, when he had a chance.]

While all this is happening, the team are heading towards their planned raid on the warehouse. So, good timing on the pizza, really.

It occurs to me that I should at least put the pizza in the oven on a low heat, and I miss some of the details on how Rhys goes about getting everyone into the warehouse.

But here they are: Owen with his gun out, and Ianto looking suave in his wool trenchcoat—and Jack, Tosh, and Gwen coming in to the room where the alien is tied up and keening.

And then we see a man with a trolley walk into a hole carved into the creature’s side, and just—well, there’s no subtle way to describe it. He just hacks chunks off it with a cleaver, while its keening changes to high-pitched gasps of pain.

It sounds almost a like a whale, and they did describe it as a space manatee.

Jack speaks to it, and it responds with yet another sound, prompting Tosh to gasp, “It’s sentient”—and then we pan up from Jack standing in the hole carved into the creature’s side, almost but not quite touching the raw flesh, so we can see the whole scale of the creature.

At which point Owen tells us that the staff is armed, and Jack warns Gwen not to go after Rhys.

Rhys is trying to get his delivery away, but one of the managers tells him to wait while they load more meat, and they take both Rhys and Ianto (running to see if Rhys is safe) captive. Ianto tells them that he and Rhys are the only two in the building.

The managers bring Rhys and Ianto into the warehouse at gunpoint—they know there’s more than two people around, and when they threaten to kill Rhys unless the others show themselves, Gwen leaps out automatically.

She lies, and says that she’s the only other person there.

But another of the managers is up on the walkways, and he can see Jack and Tosh, who are drawn out by threats.

That only leaves Owen, but I admit he has been more bearable in this episode than normally.

Oooh, phone call. Sorry!

Okay, I’ll be honest: I totally cheated then and paused the episode (bless you, TiVo), so I could take a phone call from my friend who is heading off for three months.

And then Rhys got shot.

Bugger.

Also? The creature is breaking free, so they desperately need Owen to come up with a sedative. The others can’t move, because the creature will crush them. But the man who was babbling about ketamine before says a sedative will do nothing once the creature has broken free.

Oooh, action-hero Ianto, all “Pray they survive” and tasering people! I could get used to that kind of Ianto.

Owen injects the creature with something, but Jack says he’s making it worse.

And he is.

He killed it.

He calls it a mercy killing, and I don’t think he had a choice at this stage—especially not since he needs to head over to Rhys, who is bleeding to death.

But the whole time that we hear Owen giving sensible instructions to Gwen about keeping the creature alive, the creature is keening and dying—and Owen, leaving Gwen to staunch Rhys’s wounds, walks over to it, and says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He lets Tosh grasp his shoulder, even putting his hand over hers.

Back in the Hub, Rhys is fine, but the men will never be prosecuted—they’ve been given amnesia pills, so that they remember who they are but not what they did.

And the creature has been incinerated.

Vale, victim of the week. Your keening actually broke my heart, a little.

Jack says that Rhys needs to forget, too, and Gwen asks whether she can at least give him the pill at home. She slides it into her back pocket, which at least gives us a close-up on her bottom, for you Gwen fans at home.

Rhys, meanwhile, is insisting on eating ice-cream, and babbling about his secret knowledge of aliens.

Gwen fingers the amnesia pill as Rhys walks away, talking to a mate on the phone.

And then Gwen walks into the Hub, saying she will not drug Rhys. They tell her she has to—but she says none of them have any idea what she means, because none of them have anyone outside Torchwood. She won’t take Rhys’s bravery away from him, or his knowledge that he did what he did because he loved her. She says if she has to be ret-conned and sacked, that’s fine: she won’t drug him.

And Jack asks if she could go back to her old life before Torchwood. She says she wouldn’t know any different, but he says he would: he tells her to give Rhys his love, and he’ll see her tomorrow.

And we close on Jack’s face—not quite in tears, but not far off.

Next week: Adam.