Live-blogging Torchwood Season One: "Small Worlds"

Now, the first time we watched this, this was the first episode that I genuinely thought showed what the programme could do.

Actually, does that syntax make any sense? It’s been a long, odd, and confusing day—sometimes sessional academia involves being able to sleep in quite late on a weekday, but other times, it all goes completely haywire in the blink of an eye.

Hmm. I hope the episode starts soon. I have a feeling I’m making no sense. I need the taut script-writing abilities of Sapphire and Steel creator and primary script-writer P. J. Hammond to give my writing some structure.

Of course, nothing’s due to start for another four minutes, so I think I’ll stop rambling now.

And here we are, with the opening monologue.

Yes, yes: outside the government, beyond the police. Or maybe the other way around. Who knows?

We start in the woods, with a woman claiming to be returning to “the same spot.” “I do hope they’re here,” she says. She’s moving carefully, so as not to frighten “them.”

We hear a fluttering, and she says “they’re here.” We see fluttering shapes—Victorian-style fairies, bird sized, fluttering around a stone circle. The woman takes some photographs, but as she turns away, there’s a discordant noise, and the fairies appear as sinister, human-sized figures.

Cut to shirtless Captain Jack, asleep, and having nightmares about a time when he was a soldier, seeing his comrades lolling dead with rose petals falling out of their mouths.

Jack wakes, and finds a rose petal on his desk. And Ianto’s there, catching up on some paperwork.

Jack asks what Ianto has, and Ianto says “funny sort of weather patterns.”

Children are leaving a school, and a young girl with pigtails seems to have attracted the attention of a man in a silver car. The girl’s looking for someone—and we see a man saying he didn’t see the time, because he was on the phone. He gets into his car, as the woman with him frets and says she should call the school.

But Jasmine leaves to walk home, and the man in the car—who is being watched from afar—pulls up and says Jasmine’s mum told him to fetch her. Jasmine, not being daft, tries to walk past, and as the man grabs her, he’s thrown around by some kind of force that’s whispering “Come away, human child.”

Jasmine, totally unfazed, skips away.

Meanwhile, I spill an entire glass of wine all over myself and my rug, but not on my computer. I am cold and smell of alcohol.

On screen, Jack and Gwen are wandering up to see an old friend of his, who is talking about what shy, friendly creatures fairies are, but Jack says she always gets it wrong. Apparently, she and Jack have always disagreed about fairies.

This is the woman who was photographing fairies in the woods.

The man who tried to abduct Jasmine is walking along a street, with muttering voices around him, mopping at his bloody nose. He starts running from the noises, knocking into bystanders. And then he’s choking, and starts vomiting up rose petals.

I always though that fairy tale about the girl who was polite and so roses and diamonds fell from her lips when she talked was uncomfortable at best and fairly revolting at worst. This scene is definitely revolting.

He tries to climb into a police car, and is arrested.

Jasmine is brought home by her stepfather—“You’re not my father,” she says, when he chastises her—and her mother tells her never to walk home alone. But Jasmine says no-one can hurt her.

Meanwhile, Jack and Gwen are at his old friend’s house—where Gwen finds a photograph of Jack. But Jack says that, no: that’s his dad, and he and Estelle used to be inseparable, until the war parted them.

Estelle doesn’t know anything about Jack’s father these days, but Jack says to ring them if she ever sees fairies again, night or day. Jack doesn’t call them “fairies,” though: he says they’re something from the dawn of time, and you can’t put a name to them. He says they’re not aliens: they’re part of us, but we can’t put a name to them, can’t even see them. They’re part of the spirit world, like something we can only see out of the corner of our eyes.

Jasmine is sneaking out of her garden, into a wilder part of the country. Her stepfather says there’s something not right about her, as we see her skipping away, and hear the fluttering noises. Again, the voices are saying, “Come away, human child.”

Back in The Hub, we’re now looking at photographs of the Cottingsley fairy photographs—Owen points out that Conan Doyle believed in them (I have his monograph on the fairies, somewhere on my shelves), but Gwen says the women admitted that the photographs were faked, when they were old.

The man who attacked Jasmine is admitting his attraction to young girls and begging to be locked up somewhere safe.

Gwen and Jack are out in the woods, and Gwen’s pushing on the subject of Estelle, again. Owen natters about the mystical elements of the wood and its unsavoury reputation, as we hear more fluttering.

And in the police cell, a winged creature darts down on the man who tried to attack Jasmine, who screams.

Jasmine’s mother sneaks up the stairs to see what her daughter is up to: we can hear her talking and laughing, but when the mother opens the door, she’s on her own, in bed. She’s distant and withdrawn.

Now Gwen and Jack are in the police station, talking about the man who attacked Jasmine—who is dead, of oxygen deficiency, says Tosh, looking at the symptoms. But why isn’t Owen dealing with this? Why is he a folklore expert and Tosh suddenly has the medical degree?

Regardless, Tosh pulls a rose petal out of the man’s throat—and then another, and another.

Jack says he’s seen something like this before.

Estelle, meanwhile, is sitting with a variety of semi-precious stones and candelabras, saying, “Oh, let me find them again.” And sure enough, we hear fluttering noises, just before her kitchen window smashes in.

Jack’s talking about the torments dished out by these “creatures,” in protection of the “chosen ones”—generally children.

And then the phone rings, and it’s Estelle. She says they’ve come to her, and she’s clearly terrified. Jack says they’re on their way, and she’s to stay where she is. But she wanders back through the house, to where she has the candles, and she hears her cat wailing, as though scared or tormented. She calls to him through a crack in the back door, but when he doesn’t respond, she heads out into the garden. We can hear the fluttering and then the door slams shut. And it starts to rain. Hard.

Estelle is driven from her feet by the weight of the rain, which is just on her location—her cat, a short distance away, is unaffected.

Torchwood pull up outside Estelle’s house, but there’s no response—when they dash around the house, she’s lying dead in the back garden, drowned. (Though this time it is Owen who confirms the death.)

Jack just embraces Estelle. And Gwen whispers to her that she knows it was him who was in love with Estelle, not his father. He says that they vowed that they’d be with each until they died. (Which raises questions about Jack’s continuity, though I have a theory about that.)

Jack, over a large drink, tells Gwen about how he and Estelle met.

And Gwen asks how he knew about the petals in the mouth, and was that during the war? But he says no: it was long before that. And he goes on to narrate the events—he says he and troops (on a troop train, long before the war) were too noisy, too happy. They hit a tunnel, and could hear the fluttering. But then came the silence, and when they came out of the tunnel, everyone was dead but Jack. All dead, with petals falling from between their lips.

Gwen asks why they were killed, and Jack says about a week earlier some of them, drunk, had driven a truck through a village, and struck and killed a child. The child, he says, was a chosen one.

And we cut to Jasmine, still looking withdrawn. Jasmine’s mother, still locking up the house, hears the fluttering noises, but locks the back door.

And Gwen, coming home, finds her apartment trashed, with rose petals layered over everything.

Jasmine, heading to school, isn’t excited about her forthcoming party: she says she’d rather play down the bottom of the garden. Her stepfather says he’ll put an end to it, and taunts her about her lack of friends and about her father leaving when she was a baby.

But back at Gwen’s apartment, Jack is strolling around while Gwen frets about her lack of safety in her own home. She wants to know about the “chosen ones”—Jack says all of the fairies were children once, from different moments in time, going back millennia. He says they’re here because they want what’s theirs: the next chosen one.

Now we’re back with Jasmine, who is being tormented by two other girls, while roaring winds develop in the playground—to the tune of “Lord of the Dance,” which one of my favourites.

Jack hears about this from Tosh, and dashes out.

The children are freaking out, and the teacher’s not much happier—but Jasmine is just grinning and grinning as the teacher shields the two children who tormented Jasmine with her own body.

But now it seems the creatures have another purpose, as Jasmine’s stepfather starts nailing up the gap in the fence through which she passes to get to the woods.

Jack and Gwen are at the school, and Gwen flees as she hears the fluttering. The teacher mentions how odd it was that Jasmine was untouched.

Meanwhile, here we are at Jasmine’s house, where the party is building up. Her mother is trying to talk to her about her “friends” from this morning, but she can’t really follow what Jasmine is saying.

The stepfather BBQs, while the mother suggests that Jasmine could have invited her friends to the party. The discussion becomes more and more disturbing for the mother.

Jasmine, wandering outside, sees the fence boarded up—when her stepfather grabs her, she kicks him. But he slaps her—he’s screened behind the shrubbery, so no one sees. But we hear the bad weather building up, and Torchwood are on their way.

The stepfather starts making a speech about Jasmine’s mother and their desire to have their own children—when Jasmine steps out from behind the bushes and the fairies, no longer invisible or benign, leap into the garden. The stepfather, standing out in the garden, is vulnerable, and one creature shoves his hand right down his throat and, seemingly, crushes his heart, while Jasmine watches, smiles, and leaves through the hole that one of the creatures smashed in the new fence.

The stepfather’s mouth is full of rose petals.

Torchwood were too late to save the stepfather, but they follow Jasmine—she says they’re walking in a forest, an old forest, in which she wants to stay forever.

Jack says the child isn’t sure, and that they should find another chosen one, but Jasmine says she is sure, and the fairies say she is the chosen one, and that she lives forever.

Jack asks what happens if they make the child stay, but Jasmine says they’ve promised to kill many, many other people. If she doesn’t go, she says, the whole world will die.

Gwen wants them to save Jasmine, but Jack says no: he tells the fairies to take her, and Jasmine says, “thank you” as she skips off into vapour. Gwen is distraught, but Jack says they have no choice.

That’s not a great deal of comfort for Jasmine’s mother, and the rest of the Torchwood team look pretty shattered, too.

This is what happens when your leader is aligned Chaotic Good, guys.

Back at The Hub, Gwen takes a closer look at the Cottingley fairy photographs, and sees that one of the fairies has Jasmine’s face.

And that’s it for this week.

Beware of next week—and don’t watch it in the dark.