Live-blogging Torchwood Season One: "Ghost Machine"

So this is the episode I’ve been calling the Sapphire and Steel-style one. I don’t quite know why it reminds me so much of Sapphire and Steel, but there’s something about the eerie tone of the story that reminds me of David McCallum.

On a slightly related note, I’ve flown back from Sydney today, still with a fairly unpleasant cold that I’ve had for a week now, and I’ve been self-medicating with a rather nice riesling, so be prepared for a slightly surreal (and possibly rather delayed) live-blogging experience.

In the interim, I’m watching the end of Clone, which I intended to watch all the way through, but didn’t. Can’t say I feel at this stage as though I’ve missed much.

Okay, I tell a lie. I have giggled a couple of times in the last minute or so. Plus, I like the red telephone box. My parents have one of those: my dad keeps his tools in it. Now I think about it, I posted a photograph of it at the beginning of the year, here.

And apparently they’re starting up season two of Doctor Who again! On ABC2! Wow, that’s going to be a lot of live-blogging, folks.

But here we are with Torchwood and Captain Jack’s monologue.

And Gwen and Owen running frantically, getting advice on where to run from Tosh, back at Torchwood HQ. Jack’s in the car, coming from the other direction. Tosh is trying to get a visual, as Gwen comes up on the suspected alien, even sliding under a descending door, which traps Jack and Owen, leaving Gwen as the only one chasing the suspect.

Gwen grabs the suspect. The man shrugs out of his jacket and escapes, but Tosh says she has whatever was causing the alien readings. Gwen rummages through the jacket and comes up with what looks like a computer mouse. Of course, being Gwen, she clicks the buttons on it—and suddenly she’s in a green-tinged railway station, talking to small boy, carrying a suitcase and a teddy bear, and dressed in fashions from fifty or sixty years ago.

The boy says he wants to go home: he’s lost and no one knows him here—as he walks away, Gwen snaps back to the modern railway station in which she caught the original suspect.

Back at Torchwood HQ, Gwen says she could hear what the little boy was thinking and feeling, as though she herself felt lost. Gwen says the boy had a tag around his neck, reading “Tom Erasmus Flanagan.” Jack says the unusual name will help them track him down—no matter how long it takes, they’ll track the boy down—just before Owen finds him in the phone book.

So Gwen and Owen turn up at the address in the phone book, to find a seventy-odd-year-old man, telling the story about how he was forgotten at the Cardiff railway station in 1941, when he was evacuated to the Welsh countryside from the East End of London. He was found again and evacuated to the home of a lovely, childless couple, so Gwen isn’t sure what she’s seen. Is it, she thinks, just a bit of him, left behind?

But we’re interrupted by a nagging phone call from Rhys, who wants to know if Gwen’s in or out tonight, and gets stroppy when she says she can’t say.

Back at Torchwood, Tosh and Jack have found that the boy with the alien device in his pocket is a Sean Harris, with some minor theft convictions.

According to Jack—who is speaking with his mouth full: thank you, Jack. That’s revolting! Swallow, then talk, like Ianto does—the alien device is gorgeous, with nano-technology that makes NASA look like Toys ‘R’ Us.

They can’t find Sean Harris anywhere, so Jack says they’ll go back to the railway station, and try and replicate the original results as far as possible. Wow, Jack is in a hell of a mood today.

But before they can come to a decision, Owen sees the device lighting up as Gwen said it had in the railway station. He clicks it—and flips into a green-tinted version of the bridge they’re under in the present. There’s a girl, dressed in a pink party dress, crying to herself and saying her Mam was right, and her boyfriend is a “bad one.”

Owen tries to talk to her, but she can’t hear him.

And, sure enough, here comes the boyfriend, calling her “Lizzie” in a singsong tone—“Liz-zie”—and saying he can see her the way she really is. He kisses her, and when she pulls back, he slaps her across the face—an open-handed slap—and pulls a knife out, telling her he doesn’t want to hurt her.

It’s fairly clear what happens next, but thankfully we’re given a tight close-up on Owen’s horrified face.

It’s interesting to me that it’s Owen who witnesses this—but I hope there’s some realisation for him about the consequences of his own behaviour.

Back in Torchwood HQ, Tosh finds the newspaper reports that show Lizzie was raped and murdered under the bridge some forty-odd years ago. No one was ever convicted of the crime.

Tosh is explaining what the device does, while Owen is paying no attention: he’s flipping through the file, trying to find something. He’s obsessed with the idea that he knows who did it: Ed Morgan the “bad news” boyfriend. But it’s not enough to re-open the case, as Jack points out.

Also? I’ve skipped over some technobabble about what the device does, in favour of watching the gun-porn scene with Gwen and Jack.

Gwen’s stunned:

GWEN: I’m sorry: I don’t even kill spiders in the bath.
JACK: Neither do I—not with a gun.

This is serious gun-porn—though the porn is more about Jack than it is about the gun. Well, it’s a little about the gun. There’s nothing subtle about the treatment of guns as phallic symbols in this scene.

I love it. Mostly because I love Jack and Gwen.

I also like the fact that the focus on guns here draws a sharp line between old-school (and also new-school) Doctor Who and Torchwood.

We also get the revelation here that Jack actually lives at the Torchwood Institute, and apparently can’t sleep any more than he can die.

Back home, Gwen listens to an answering-machine message from Rhys, who is at a mate’s house, and reveals that she snuck the alien device home. (Owen, home alone, is haunted by memories of Lizzie’s death.) Gwen, clicking the flashing device, sees memories of herself and Rhys when they first moved in, and then of Rhys in a suit with a broken zip, heading out to Gwen’s Mam’s sixtieth birthday. She’s feeling nostalgic just as Rhys comes home, and they make up.

Owen, meanwhile, has laid all the material relating to Lizzie’s death out on the floor of his apartment, and is working himself up into a serious state with the help of a bottle of whiskey.

The next morning, he heads over to a derelict house, whose address he has tracked down through the phone book, and finds a “Mr Morgan”—Owen is masquerading as a gas inspector. He induces Morgan to go into the living room, where he asks him about Lizzie Lewis, and watches Morgan’s hands start twitching.

He tells Morgan that he knows what happened that night—and Owen’s monologue is intercut with scenes of the attack on Lizzie. Morgan snaps, and Owen is so furious about the whole incident that he seems to have missed Morgan shouting “I told you before, you’ll get nothing from me!”

But he doesn’t miss Sean Harris, sitting on a park bench near Morgan’s house. He chases Sean, who is only nineteen, but doesn’t seem to be in as good shape as Owen is.

The advantage of a nice long chase sequence is that it gives me time to catch up with the narrative.

Sean says he and a mate were using a lock-up that used to belong to an old man who was a bit soft in the head. They’d thrown most of it out, but Sean thought that was maybe worth something—he took it home, and it started flashing. He could see real people, doing terrible things.

Because all the people are local, he’s been recognising them and blackmailing them with their secrets.

The Torchwood personnel start walking away, but Sean asks them whether they want the other half. (The box it was in was also full of alien coins and alien rocks.)

Sean says he’s scared of the other half—he used it once, and it showed him dead, not an old man, but young as he is now, and he wants to know if he’ll die soon.

Gwen chases Jack out to the car, to ask him about Sean, but she accidentally clicks the other half of the machine, and see herself clutching a knife, with her hands covered in blood—her future self says she “couldn’t stop it” and that “Owen had the knife.”

Back at Torchwood HQ, Jacks says it was only one future of many possible futures.

Tosh and Owen are sitting in a pub: Tosh says she found Ed Morgan by running a trace, and Owen admits he paid him a visit that morning and “put the fear of God into him.” He asks Tosh what she found, and she says she found the medical records: Morgan is paranoid, claustrophobic, and has barely left the house in years. And in this discussion, Owen reveals he heard what Morgan said about “I’ve told you, you won’t get any money from me.”

At the same time, Jack is remembering what Sean said about having seen Morgan’s attack on Lizzie.

Gwen has gone to see Sean. Meanwhile, Owen has admitted what he did to Morgan, to Jack. Jack’s thinking Morgan thought that Owen was part of the same blackmailing outfit as Sean.

Morgan, meanwhile, is walking towards Sean’s house. Sean has seen him and headed out—to the same road in which he saw himself dead in his earlier vision. Gwen dashes down, but Morgan is armed with a knife and raving about the fact that people knew his guilt. Jack and Owen are there, as well.

They disarm Morgan, but it’s Owen who disarms him. And Owen’s gone a little mad with the fact that he’s so close to the man whom he saw raping and killing a girl forty-odd years ago.

But Gwen takes the knife off Owen, and as she’s saying delightedly to Jack that no-one died this time, Morgan says, “I knew you’d come for me!” and throws himself onto the knife.

Frankly, I’m not thrilled about that. There’s some argument in Torchwood HQ about who is to blame, but I’m not recapping that because the scene seems a little implausible. Morgan looks as though he was trying to embrace Gwen, but how could he not have seen the knife? We could argue about his self-loathing misogyny, his conviction that people were out to get him, and his sense that women would destroy him, but the scene is still rather implausible.

It’s a shame—it’s a strong episode, otherwise.

Also, Jack and Gwen were talking at the end there, but I became distracted.

Oh, lord—I’ve just remembered what next week’s episode is about. Oh, I didn’t want to watch that one again. But see you next week! And before that, see you on Monday at 9:30, as we pick up our season two Doctor Who live-blogging where we left off, with “The Impossible Planet.”