Live-blogging Torchwood Season One: "Cyberwoman"

I’ll be honest at the beginning of this post: I seriously hated this episode last time I saw it. I thought it was frankly ridiculous.

Plus, I’m exhausted. My neighbours, for reasons best known only to themselves, have taken to standing out in their front garden—directly under our bedroom windows—at 3 a.m., taking flash photographs of themselves, and laughing loudly about them.

And by “have taken to,” I mean last night wasn’t the first time they did this.

Though, apparently, today is Silence Day, so if they do it again tonight, I’m definitely going to lean out of the window and deliver myself of a brief discourse on the followers of Meher Baba.

Also? Everyone should be watching Being Human. That’s my public-service announcement for the day.

Tonight’s episode of Torchwood contains violence. Just for a change.

We open on Ianto, walking down into the Hub—where there’s a great deal of screaming, as everyone plays a friendly game of basketball while the pterodactyl wheels above.

As everyone else leaves for drinks, Ianto orders two pizzas and a tub of coleslaw—as a mysterious gentleman wanders into the Hub. Ianto greets him cheerfully, and takes him deep into the complex. He unlocks a mysterious door, while telling the man that “I did all I could. I really did.”

In the mysterious room, we see reams of medical equipment, all attached to a woman who—as her bed is slowly raised—we see is partway converted to a Cyberman.

Ianto kisses the woman, and—as the mysterious man says, “My god, it’s impossible! One of them survived!”—says, “This is Lisa.”

I’m pleased to see that the Cybermen were protective enough of her modesty to put her in that fetching silver bikini, even though they never finished the conversion.

The man is delighted: he never thought he’d have a chance to work with “something like this.”

“Someone,” says Ianto firmly.

He says Lisa was working for Torchwood London and that at the end of the Battle of Canary Wharf, the Cybermen, desperate for new soldiers, starting converting whole bodies, instead of just transplanting brains. Lisa was halfway through the process when the machine shut down and Ianto dragged her out of there.

The man—Dr Miyazaki, an expert in cybernetics—asks Ianto how he knew to convert the Cybermen technology to keep Lisa alive, and Lisa wakes up to tell him that she told Ianto how to do it.

So she’s awake and sentient, but in constant pain.

Ianto wants Dr Miyazaki to make Lisa human again, but he has to wean her from the Cyberman technology, starting with the respirator. Ianto is terrified that Lisa is too weak to make it through the process.

But no: she starts breathing on her own. That Cyber-brassiere is distinctly distracting from that camera angle.

At this point, Ianto sees the team members coming back to the Hub. He has to hide Lisa and the doctor, but Lisa is still quite weak, though she’s delighted to be free of the machinery.

The Doctor and Lisa clank through the centre of the Hub as the others head down through the main entrance. Ianto dashes back up as staff are settling down to work, and straightens his tie in an effort to seems normal.

Lisa, meanwhile, is strangling Dr Miyazaki. Guess she’s not so weak, after all.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

Now Dr Miyazaki is attached to the former Cybertechnology—Lisa, her voice all Cybermanny, tells him that she can make him strong, and starts the conversion.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

The conversion drains a heavy amount of power, but Ianto dashes in before Jack can order a diagnostic. He says they’ve been having cabling problems all night, and promises to check on it himself.

He’s in time to see Dr Miyazaki on the floor, dead and mangled.

IANTO: What happened?
LISA: His upgrade failed.
IANTO: Was it an accident?

Ianto, you moron. But he’s heartbroken—all the work they put in to keep her alive, and now she’s ruined it all.

IANTO: This can’t happen again, Lisa.

So she gets one free dead body? Or has she done this before?

Ianto needs to hide the body (and, dear me, that’s revolting), but he’s also breaking down at the thought that he caused this problem.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

The staff are back at work, talking to aliens, but this sub-plot isn’t either very interesting nor very important.

Meanwhile, there’s another power drain. Jack asks Ianto to check into it (“Ianto, I need to hear those beautiful Welsh vowels”) but Ianto’s too busy dragging a dead body through the corridors to hear. Jack assumes they’re under attack—that the Hub has been breached. He says they’re going to battle mode, and assumes Ianto has been the first casualty.

Ianto’s too busy apologising to the corpse of Dr Miyazaki to pay too much attention to the comms.

Gwen and Owen are down at the store-room where Lisa is—in Futurama terms—jacking on. (In a more delicate phrasing, she’s abusing electricity.) Jack and Tosh, meanwhile, can see the security footage of Ianto letting Dr Miyazaki into the Hub.

Owen tries to see through the door grill, but he can’t see well enough, and unlocks the door. He and Gwen kick the door open, and see the Cybertechnology—there’s no sign of Lisa. Owen recognises it, and is horrified. He tells Gwen about the fall of Torchwood One and about what the machinery is.

The comms come back on, and Owen (who sounds seriously spooked) tells Jack about the powered-up Cyber conversion unit, just as Lisa appears behind them.

Gwen tells Jack what’s happening, and Jack dashes down to help, leaving Tosh as the last line of defense, to stop the Cyberman getting to the outside world.

Lisa grabs Gwen and throws her into the conversion uni, which she powers up.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

Ianto appears and tackles Jack, who shouts, “You’re attacking the wrong man!” With the Cyber conversion unit powering up, the only way to save Gwen is to shut down all power in the base (“No! Shut down all the garbage compacters on the detention level!”), which puts the Hub into lockdown. Since Lisa has escaped, this now means that they have a Cyberman on the loose and can’t themselves get into the outside world.

With Jack carrying an unconscious Owen over his shoulder, they start back to the Hub. When Ianto is relieved to see Lisa alive, Jack draws his gun on Ianto.

Back in the Hub, Ianto is on his knees with his hands on his hand. But when Jack challenges him, Ianto explodes. “Why would you care? I clean up your shit, and that’s how you like it. But when was the last time you asked me about my life?”

Ianto still thinks that Lisa can be cured, but Jack says no: that Cybermen (and those like them) spread by exploiting human weakness.

Ianto says he can’t give up on Lisa, that he loves her.

JACK: You need to figure out whose side you’re on. Because if you don’t know, you’re not going to get out of here.

Lisa appears in the Hub.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

Lisa claims to be “Human.2,” so Jack asks, “Why do you still look like Human.1?” Seeing herself in a reflective surface for the first time, Lisa realises that her upgrade is incomplete. Ianto’s still trying to talk to her, but she declares that they’re not compatible, and throws him to one side.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

In the conference room, Jack sends Tosh out to reception (CYBER BIKINI!) to (technobabble). Owen and Gwen are to find weapons. Jack is “buying them some time,” largely by taunting Lisa.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

Taunting doesn’t work out so well, and Lisa electrocutes Jack, just as Tosh manages to get the gate open with alien technology. Jack comes back to life and is electrocuted again. Lisa goes after Tosh, but she’s managed to lock the door behind her—though that doesn’t stop Lisa slamming her fist through it.

With Jack down and Tosh gone, that leaves Gwen and Owen (CYBER BIKINI!) who hide—on top of each other—in the medical centre.

NICK: Oh, lord. Cyber high heels, as well.

Then everything kind of goes snoggy for a while there: Owen and Gwen are snogging in their hiding place, and Jack is snogging Ianto for a reason that may have escaped me while I was typing.

And then Gwen’s mobile phone goes off: it’s Rhys, asking her to video Wife Swap.

Owen manages to—he thinks—kill Lisa (before he and Gwen have a frustrating snogging-related conversation that I’m not going to transcribe here), but Lisa’s not that easy to kill. Ianto still wants Jack to save Lisa, but instead Jack drenches her in “a kind of barbeque sauce that helps it identify its food.”

Helps what, you ask?

Well, that would be the pterodactyl.

Yes, we now have Ianto being forced (until the lift starts working) to watch his partially converted girlfriend being eaten by a pterodactyl. No, I am not making this up. I promise.

Ianto punches Jack in the face. And I can’t say I blame him.

Oh, but Tosh points out that the power is coming back on—just in time for the pizza delivery girl to turn up. Turns out, Cyberwoman aren’t so easy to kill.

Ianto’s dashing back down with a gun to save Lisa, but he’s not really prepared to kill anyone, and Jack easily disarms him. He demands that if Ianto wants to go back in, he has to execute Lisa if she’s still alive. He gives Ianto a gun and ten minutes, and says they’re all coming in after that time.

Ianto heads in, and sees the blood everywhere before he notices that the power is being drained again. But Lisa’s dead on the floor of the Cyber conversion chamber, covered in blood. Ianto’s keening over her body when the pizza delivery girl steps out from behind a door, with a cut straight across her forehead, insisting that she’s Lisa. She says she’s human again—that Ianto fought so hard for her, that she had to fight for him, so she took the pizza girl’s body and transplanted her own brain into it.

Ianto looks like he doesn’t know whether to cry or to vomit, so he’s sort of doing both at the same time. Lisa asks him to hold her, and he does—but then draws his gun on her.

Lisa says he wouldn’t shoot her, that she did this for him. And, in fact, Ianto can’t do it. He walks away, as Lisa says they can be upgraded together—just as the remaining members of the team turn up and shoot her.

Ianto sinks to the ground between both of Lisa’s corpses.

No one’s terribly pleased to see him when he comes to work the next day. He seems to still have a job, though—he’s picking up the rubbish from the previous day’s activities. (Which is to say, his ex-girlfriend’s brutal death.)

Well, that was bloody depressing. Next week: the P. J. Hammond episode, “Small Worlds.”