Live-blogging Torchwood, Season Three: "Children of Earth" Day Two

Now I did warn you that I wouldn’t do this live-blogging sober. I was tipsy last week. I’m a little more tipsy this week: Michelle wasn’t drinking last week, and it’s always more depressing drinking on your own, isn’t it?

On that note, Michelle and Heather are joining us again this week. After all, I did swear that I wouldn’t live-blog this on my own.

We’re in ads at the moment, but I’m sure it will start at any moment. Honestly, it will.

This episode contains violence.

HEATHER: Violence!? Is that because Jack blew up in the last episode? Is that the violence you mean?

We get a recap of the last episode, at which point Michelle realises that she misunderstood the last episode: she read Ianto heading up on the elevator as Jack being blown up through the roof.

We come back to Gwen coming to in the aftermath of the explosion—I was distracted briefly by the offer of Wagon Wheels, which turned into a slightly odd offer, in which Michelle offered to hold the Wagon Wheel while I took bites out of it [Note: I think I made this sound weirder than it needed to sound] and when I pay attention again, Gwen is being attacked in an ambulance by two seeming paramedics, who said they were told there should be no survivors. She fights them off, and legs it.

Inato, meanwhile, is pulling himself out of the wreckage of the Hub, and legging it through the streets while being shot at.

NICK: Man, he’s really lucky they can’t shoot straight.
HEATHER: Yeah, you’re not weaving enough, Ianto. Be lighter in your loafers. Lighter!

Frobisher gets a phone call from the woman in black: he tells his wife that their daughters are safe now, but the woman in black tells him that “targets two and three” escaped, and then Decker from MI-something shows up on his doorstep.

Deckers says the transmissions from the 456 are instructions for something that they want built. Frobisher asks why they would attack the children, and Decker says, “Because they can.”

Michelle thinks that’s unsatisfactory from a plot perspective.

Gwen ends up in the ambulance again, and shoots bit of the surviving assassin until he tells her that he doesn’t work for the NHS as he previously claimed, but for the government.

The police seal off the Hub, and Andy objects to the woman in black’s claim that Gwen is dangerous. Sadly, this attracts the woman’s attention to Andy, and she says, “You must know where she lives.”

Gwen bursts into the flat and tells Rhys they need to get out of there.

And the woman in black and her men head across the city, sirens blaring—much to Michelle’s disapproval—on their way to Gwen’s flat. Andy is uncomfortable but unwilling to go against the people with guns.

As they leave the flat, Ianto rings, but he knows the phone is bugged, so they can’t set up a place to meet.

And the woman in black and her men arrive, but Gwen shoots their tires out and she and Rhys escape.

Andy thinks this proves that Gwen isn’t a terrorist, but the woman says she’s just a clever terrorist.

And the next place they look is at Ianto’s sister’s house, where there’s a slightly disconcerted response in my living room to the fact that Ianto’s brother-in-law is naked when they burst into his bedroom.

Ianto, meanwhile, walks through the Cardiff streets and ducks into corridors [Note: or even alleyways] as vans pass.

The next morning, Frobisher tells his daughters to keep their phones on during the day, though they point out that the phones will be confiscated if they ring during class. He says he wants to speak to them, and they say, “Since when?” But they’re not too freaked out, because they say “Dad?” and then start intoning, “We want a pony. We want a pony. We want a pony.” “See?” he says. “Nothing to worry about.” But he looks terrified.

Clem wanders the street, and pulls out a newspaper. And Alice’s son asks whether Uncle Jack doesn’t work in the area of Cardiff that blew up, but Alice says that Cardiff is a big place.

Lois comes to work, and checks out the order to kill list, with Jack’s name on it.

Frobisher, meeting the Prime Minister, asks if the 456 have contacted any other countries. He says that’s what everyone is asking, but the Prime Minister says there’s no chatter on the wire. Frobisher thanks the Prime Minister for trusting him, but the PM says all he’s done is put Frobisher on the front line: “That’s what the front line is for,” he says. “The first to fall.”

The rescue team find Jack’s arm in the rubble of the Hub.

We have a brief but scintillating discussion about which of these characters are queer. Apparently, Alice is, but Lois is not—though some people in my living room wish she were. The discussion on Bridget is more divisive.

Lois tells Frobisher about the meeting with Jack, but Frobisher says that Jack is dead, killed in the explosion.

We know that’s questionable, since they’ve pulled Jack’s arm, shoulder, and “part of a head” out of the rubble, and loaded it into a private ambulance that attracts Heather’s scorn: “They’re Black Ops!” she says. “Do you think Black Ops would spray paint ‘Private Ambulance’ on their vans?”

Ianto gets a message to his sister, reading, “Where Dad broke my leg, at noon. Bring laptop.” Ianto’s sister is uncertain about this, but her husband says that she’s the only family Ianto has.

Rhys tries to get money from an ATM, but his account has been frozen. (And I missed the adorable scene where Rhys tried to take the bag off her, Gwen got offended, and Rhys said, ‘You want your trigger finger free, don’t you?’)

Gwen says they need to go to London.

In the secret Black Ops headquarters, the body bag containing the arm, shoulder, and part of a head now contains a skinless body. The woman in black rings Frobisher to tell him that Jack’s “Lazarus qualities” remain undiminished, as Frobisher heads off with Bridget and Lois to check out the structure being built at the 456’s orders.

Gwen and Rhys head into a truck full of potatoes, sneaking in under the canvas to hitchhike their way to London.

Ianto’s brother-in-law head out to the car watching his house with a group of young men and boys, claiming that they obviously have “a couple of paedos” on the estate, and they begin rocking the car as Ianto’s sister escapes to meet her brother.

Jack, in Black Ops headquarters, comes to and starts screaming. And screaming. And screaming.

Gwen, riding on top of the potatoes, feels ill. Rhys asks if she’s travel sick, but she asks when he’s ever known her to be travel sick.

GWEN: You know those announcements that you rehearse in your head?
RHYS: Yes?
GWEN: Well, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

Rhys gets her point fairly quickly, but then he freaks about the car chases and the gun fights.

RHYS: How could I let you do that in your condition?
GWEN: You carried my bag.

I love, love, love Rhys in this storyline.

Ianto meets up with his sister, who is horrified by his bloody, dishevelled condition, and asks what kind of civil servant he is.

IANTO: An under-appreciated one.

Then they see that all the children have frozen again. But now they’re chanting, “We are coming. Tomorrow. We are coming. Tomorrow.”

And Clem, standing in a pub, is chanting too.

Ianto realises that this is why they tried to blow up the Hub, as Clem, coming to in the pub, asks the barmaid, “Oh, can you smell that?” He runs out into the street, shouting, “They are coming tomorrow. I can smell them!”

Ianto nicks his sister’s laptop and car, and leaves.

Frobisher is largely concerned with his daughters, and, second to that, the Prime Minister.

We take a brief break while I look up the Home Secretary on Wikipedia so we can all be sure exactly what he does in the running of the U.K.

Gwen, ringing the Home Secretary’s office, is lucky enough to get through to Lois. She wants to meet with Frobisher, and she and Rhys wait in a cafe for him. Rhys asks if they can trust Frobisher, and Gwen says that he’s their man in government: if they can’t trust him, they really are in trouble.

And, of course, they can’t trust him. But they can trust Lois! Hopefully, because she turns up at the cafe, telling Gwen that Frobisher gave the order to kill Jack Harkness, along with four others, killed the same day.

LOIS: I didn’t sign the Official Secrets Act to cover up murder. But I didn’t take the job to commit treason on my second day.

Rhys talks Lois out of enough money to buy them dinner—they’ve come all the way from Cardiff on an empty stomach, after all. (Gwen says she’ll have a steak pie, chips, and a cup of tea, and winks at Rhys. I can’t express how adorable that is.) Gwen asks about Ianto and Jack, and learns that Ianto is missing, and Jack is apparently dead.

Jack is not dead, but he might wish he is, because they’re filling his jail cell with what we want to call cement, but Michelle says, “Didn’t you watch Bones the other day? It’s not cement, it’s wet concrete.”

Ianto watches them do this.

In the meantime, Lois gives Rhys and Gwen a way to intercept the undertaker who has been sent to collect the doctor’s body, the doctor who betrayed Jack. His body is being held in the same complex as Jack.

Frobisher heads back up to the top of Thames House (home of MI5) in the company of the PM, where a cage is being built for the 456.

Rhys and Gwen, in dark clothing, head into the compound, still claiming to be there to pick up the doctor’s body. Rhys is terrified, insisting that they aren’t going to get away with this, but Gwen is confident.

Gwen, heading through the building, is being chatted up by a soldier, who wishes that more undertakers looked like her. Rhys thinks he’s blown their cover, but in fact the soldier is just distressed to find out that they’re married.

Apparently, the soldier is called “Corporal Camarra,” which confuses me because I thought they said “Cobra Commander.”

Gwen, meanwhile, takes him down and takes the cameras out with the magic pen that she used when talking to Clem. But it’s not much help, because there are Black Ops troops at either side of the corridor, and Gwen has just found that Jack is encased in concrete.

[Note: I originally spelt that “Black Ops troupes,” which I would love to leave for the comedy value alone. But it’s just too silly.]

But at the point, Ianto, in a bulldozer, pulls Jack’s entire cell out of the wall as a single concrete block, and Gwen and Rhys leap out after it and onto the bulldozer.

Rhys and Gwen manage to block pursuit by setting fire to a petrol tanker, while Ianto drives his bulldozer to a quarry. Ianto tells Gwen to get the car started, while he raises the concrete block high, high, high over the quarry floor, and then drops it.

HEATHER: Please, lord, let gravity work.

And it does work.

HEATHER: I think he’d be broken a little bit.
ME: Doesn’t matter.
HEATHER: I know. But, you know, ow.

Nevertheless, Jack is alive—and naked, but he’s never cared about that. And, in fact, when Gwen hands him a jacket, he slings it over his shoulder and walks off to the car, otherwise naked.

Heather has some concerns about the effect on the car’s upholstery, while Michelle wonders if deaf kids sign the 456’s message.

At the top of Thames House, the tank is filled with gases that I have no chance of reproducing, given the speed with which Decker lists them.

So the tank is ready, the whole room is laid out according to 456 instructions—“Something of an ambassadorial suite,” says Decker. “Or a throne room. Or a slaughterhouse.”

Bridger wonders why the 456 seem to be coming for Britain, and Decker says, “Exactly. Why is that, Mr Frobisher?”

Frobisher doesn’t answer: he and Bridget leave the room, and we close with Decker heading up to the tank, and breathing out heavily, fogging the glass with his breath.