Live-blogging Torchwood Season One: "Combat"

Now, you all know the first rule about weevil fight club.

So that means I can’t actually live-blog this episode. Sorry about that! See you next week for “Captain Jack Harkness”!

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Oh, all right, then.

And here we are with the opening monologue. Oooh, I should have said that Heather is guest-watching with us again: let’s see if she can keep it PG this time.

We open with Jack chasing a weevil: he has “anti-weevil spray” and handcuffs. He is so Batman—except that the weevil manages to get a good hit in, which would never happen with Batman.

Rhys and Gwen are having dinner together, and Rhys flips out about the fact that she’s just absent all the time. Oddly enough, at that point, a weevil runs past, followed by Jack, whose shirt is torn open.

He grabs Gwen to help him grab the weevil, and Rhys tells her to “sit the fuck down.” I’m actually with Gwen when she tells him never to speak to her like that, though I am actually fond of Rhys.

Jack tells her to keep hold of her life. (In other words, stop shagging Owen.)

The weevil runs into a carpark.

HEATHER: Torchwood: we love carparks.
ME: Well, they’re cheap to film in.
HEATHER: Maybe Cardiff is just made up of carparks.

In other news, the weevil is grabbed by a carload of men with cattle prods.

Back at Torchwood, Jack wonders how other people know about weevils, and Ianto points out that there’s a higher incident of weevil attacks turning up in A&E these days.

Owen is not there, and his answering-machine message is typical for the kind of prat he is: “Leave a message. If you must.”

Gwen leaves an apologetic message for Rhys, and he deletes it.

HEATHER: Oh, great—here’s Owen!

He’s in a pub, drinking himself into a stupor and being chatted up by a barmaid, whose bar manager is the biggest prat in the world. Barmaids are always friendly with their customers: that’s how they make money.

Owen beats up the bar manager.

HEATHER: Oh, he is such a [redacted].
ME: I can’t put that on the blog.
HEATHER: Oh, that’s fair enough. He’s just such a [redacted].

Tosh reminds Gwen that Owen and Diane had a “thing,” and Gwen says, yes, she knew that.

She totally didn’t.

Down in the vault, a weevil is weeping. Jack says Owen decided they might have a low level of telepathic ability, so someone, somewhere is not only kidnapping weevils, but also causing them pain.

The people in question are causing the CC-TV cameras to go down as they do whatever is is they do with the weevils, which Jack says just makes him all the more eager to find out what they were doing.

I really don’t think that Noel Clarke can write for Captain Jack, actually.

Tosh and Jack head out to a warehouse, where they find a man lying dead on the floor.

TOSH: Is he alive?
JACK: Hello?

Yes, that is a highly scientific method of determining whether or not someone is alive.

Actually, he’s dead. And he has a terrible ringtone. But the main thing is that the people who were involved in his death ring Jack on the dead man’s phone, and tell him to back off.

Ah, they don’t know our Jack.

Owen is ordered into the Hub, and he determines that the man was killed by a weevil, but that he took a beating first, probably at the hands of a human, since weevils go for the kill.

Gwen is sent out to tell the family about the man’s death. (He was married with a child.) Owen—well, it’s best not to try and describe how he’s behaving in this scene, because I can’t really do it without swearing.

Nick comes up with a new nickname for Owen, but it’s obscene.

GWEN: Ignore him.
OWEN: Yes, just ignore me, Tosh. I can be such a wanker, apparently.
HEATHER: “Apparently”?

They send Owen into the weevil-kidnapping network undercover, because they already know about Jack and Tosh (at a minimum).

Owen is keen for the work, because he would think it would be fun to be someone else for a time.

NICK: Try being Mr Guppy! He was great.

I’m so proud of Nick for making a Charles Dickens reference.

He pretends to be an importer of jellied eels—or some kind of preserved eels, anyway—looking for warehouses on the docks; he bugs the offices of the real-estate agency that has on its books the warehouse where the dead man was found.

Wow, that back story they built for Owen is complicated—and where did they get all the people in white coats for the video? No, never mind.

HEATHER: Owen speaks wankenese.
Nick: Yes! Fluently!
HEATHER: That’s why he got the job: his fluent wankenese.

Gwen finally makes it home, and Rhys is dressed in his “pulling top”—that’s what he’s called it, ever since Gwen told him he looked sexy in it—and he’s off out to a stag night. (Well, a fake stage night, but it still involves a strip club.)

Gwen says she’s in tonight, but Rhys says he’s not, and he’s off out. Frankly, I’m on Rhys’s side in this one. Gwen is quite horrible to him.

Meanwhile, Jack and Ianto are interrogating the latest weevil victim to be admitted to A&E, and they’re not being overly gentle with him. But he says he can’t talk: they’d kill him. Jack asks who would kill him, and he says “everyone.”

So they release a weevil in the middle of Cardiff, with a tracking device in its boiler suit.

HEATHER: Yeah, see, I’ve always wondered about that. Do weevils have their own boilers suits, or do they need to be provided for them?
NICK: Yes. Yes!
HEATHER: Because when they captured that one in the first episode, he already had a boiler suit.
NICK: Maybe they’re genetically engineered to grow boiler suits.
HEATHER: Maybe they had a slogan: free boiler suit with every weevil.

Meanwhile, Owen is back in the same night club where he had the fight in the beginning, but this time he is seriously attempting to kill the bar manager.

Elsewhere, Tosh and Jack track the weevil, which is kidnapped. Tosh is furious: she says that they would never treat a human like that, but, apparently, weevils are free game.

Owen has headed back to the real-estate agent’s house, because the real-estate agent was impressed with Owen’s bar-manager beating skills.

Heather is quite insistent that the rest of this episode could be evaded if these two just had a shag. Try rewatching that scene between the two of them in view of that sentiment. It’s a lot funnier, if you watch it that way.

Back at Gwen’s place, she’s admitting her affair to Rhys, and then telling him that she’s ret-conned him. She wants to admit what she’s been doing and get his forgiveness, and then have him forget everything.

I’m even more on Rhys’s side than ever.

And, frankly, I’m quite pleased that Rhys falls asleep before he can do as Gwen is begging him to do, and forgive her.

We have a scintillating hypothetical conversation about whether it’s better to admit an affair or to pretend it never happened. Our conclusions are not relevant to the discussion.

In an upstairs room in real-estate boy’s house, we have a weevil chained to the wall, bloody and unhappy, and what looks like an entire S&M room. Apparently, this real-estate agent, who is a bigger prat than Owen, keeps the poor bugger around so he can punch it stupid.

He says we all need a punching bag, so I suppose we—though not the weevil—should be grateful he’s not married.

Real-estate boy knows that Owen is attached to Jack and Tosh, though he doesn’t know who those two are. And he challenges Owen to find out the truth about what’s going on, provided that Owen disarms himself.

HEATHER: Fine, I’ll just take my penis and leave it here.

Gwen turns up in the Hub with pizza, but no one is there, either. So much for balancing life and work, eh?

The rest of Torchwood are still tracking the weevil, but they find, instead, part of a boiler suit in a parking lot. So they’re stymied.

And Owen and real-estate boy sit in a parked car and watch a series of bored, entitled, self-involved, white-collar men trail into an abandoned building, though we don’t know what their intentions are, just yet.

Gwen sits and cries into her pizza. Aw, I feel so sorry for her when she cries. I know (and Heather has just reminded me) that that’s what she wants me to feel, but I can’t help it. She’s so cute.

But as she sits there, she hears a phone go off. She thinks it’s hers, but it’s not—it’s the corpse’s.

HEATHER: So, they managed to delete all his phone records, but they forgot to take him off the text list?

Sure enough, they did. So he’s been sent the address for the latest meeting. She tells Jack, and he tells her they’ll pick her up on the way.

Back at fight-club headquarters, real-estate boy explains that it’s all about reclaiming certainty in an uncertain world.

REAL-ESTATE BOY: All the certainties our fathers knew are gone.
ME: You entitled, white-collar, middle-class, public-school dickhead!

So, here we are at weevil fight club. Real-estate boy explains that it’s all about too much disposable income and not enough meaning.

Basically, you pay a grand to go into the cage with a weevil, and whoever lasts the longest is the winner.

I seriously, seriously, seriously hate everyone in this episode. Every single one. Except Rhys. Well, maybe him, too—in the beginning.

Real-estate boy demands that Owen gets into the cage (NICK: Is that a euphemism?), and pulls a gun out. (Which really just reinforces the euphemism aspect.)

Owen isn’t keen on doing this under duress, but he is keen on heading into the cage.

NICK: This episode defies description!

Well, thank you for telling me that towards the end of my live-blogging experience, honey.

Anyway, Owen is in the cage, looking a weevil in the eye and grinning—and I really have no vested interest in recapping this section of the episode.

NICK: It’s all chin acting in this episode!
HEATHER: I can . . . make it . . . come out of my face more!

Owen is quite horribly mauled, just as the Torchwood staff come haring in, complete with guns, and drag him out of the cage. But as Jack tells them that it’s all over, and the weevils have to be released, real-estate boy heads into the cage, and allows himself to be torn to shreds by a weevil while Jack watches.

Owen, in hospital, attacks Jack for “blundering in” while he was busy being “at peace with the world” in the cage with a weevil. He asks Jack whether Jack always knows best.

Jack simply orders Owen to head back to work.

But when Owen does, he gets Ianto to let him in to the room where the weevils are being kept.

NICK: I want a moment alone with my weevil.
HEATHER: Clarice . . .

And Owen shows his dominance over all weevil kind. Or something like that.

Next week: “Captain Jack Harkness.” Whatever you do, do not miss that one. When I say it’s sublime, I’m not lying. Though I may be mad. Who can say?