Live-blogging Torchwood Season Two: "A Day in the Death"

Oh, lord: I’ve just realised there are six episodes of this season left. I’m not sure I can manage another six episodes! The nihilism! The angst! Oh, but wait—I’ve just remembered some stuff that’s still to come. Okay, I can wait for that.

In other news, Hyperdrive has just included the line “There was a time when men said that climbing Ben Nevis was impossible,” which made me laugh and laugh.

And in other, other news, I walked into a door earlier and severely whacked my elbow. There’s nothing particularly unusual about that, though I hope it doesn’t prevent me from doing my Wii Boxing tomorrow morning.

I do so love Wii Boxing.

I repeat the Ben Nevis joke to Nick, and he asks, “Is that another football reference?”, which leads to the following conversation:

ME: Why don’t you know anything, Nicholas?
NICK: I know lots about lots of stuff, just nothing about anything you find remotely interesting.

That’s not quite true: I always ask Nick if I want to know who produced an episode of Doctor Who from the ’70s or ’80s.

Never fear: we’re up to the actual episode. This one contains adult themes as well as violence. Still no sex and nudity, though.

Monologue.

Owen is standing in the middle of a pedestrian mall, saying that he is Dr Owen Harper, and this is his life, a life full of violence and—oh, my brother just rang, and even though I’m not talking to him, I miss the rest of that monologue. When I come back, he says he comes to work and everyone is doing the same things, but he’s not. [Edited to add: Owen says that, not my brother. My brother, for the record, is not currently a zombie.]

OWEN: Three days ago I died. And they think I’m fine. But they’re wrong.

And we cut away from a shot of Owen screaming underwater, unable to drown, as he sits on the edge of a rooftop and asks the woman next to him, “So, are you ready to jump?”

Credits.

We come back to the woman on the rooftop, and Owen trying to talk her out of jumping by saying helpful, Owen-type things like, “What, your man dump you or something?”

When she tells him to sod off, he shows her the gaping bullet hole in his chest.

She is completely and utterly freaked out to find out that he’s a zombie. I agree with her on this stance, I have to say.

WOMAN: You’re obviously dead, and that’s shit and all.

She asks him what she has to look forward to, and he says nothing: darkness. I say again: most nihilistic show on television. And then she asks why he’s here, on the rooftop, if he’s dead, since he obviously can’t jump and die again.

And we flash back to Jack relieving Owen of duty—taking his security pass and his gun—while Martha takes his position (temporarily? Isn’t she seconded to UNIT?) while they run tests to make sure he’s safe.

OWEN: And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?
JACK: Well, we always need someone to make coffee.

Ianto, in the background, looks horrified. But we cut to Ianto showing Owen how to make the perfect cup of coffee. Owen can’t make the machine work, and he goes a little nuts, while Jack watches, disturbed.

OWEN: It’s like you finally won.
IANTO: I didn’t realise we were in competition.
OWEN: Oh, come on: even Tosh had more of a life than you. And now you’re out on missions all the time, you’re shagging Jack, and I’m making the coffee.
IANTO: It’s not like that: me and Jack.

Martha’s tests show that Owen is 100% human, that as long as he exercises every day he won’t atrophy, and that there’s no sign of rigor mortis.

But then Martha is called to the conference room, where they all sit looking at pictures of Richard Briers—sorry, Henry Parker, from when he was in The Good Life—sorry, a young man.

Owen wanders around serving coffee, and breaking Ianto’s heart by claiming that Tintin was shagging his dog, Snowy.

No, seriously.

Henry Parker is a reclusive collector of alien artefacts, by the way. Let’s just keep the plot running along, shall we?

Back on the rooftop, Owen is telling the woman how many people worldwide commit suicide, and she asks, “What are you? Some kind of suicide junkie?”

Back at the Hub, Owen is complaining to Martha that he’s making the coffee. She tells him she’s not after his job, but he says he’s fine: he’s human, he says.

She points out that he’s cut his hand open on the scalpel he’s been throwing around, and never even noticed. It won’t heal, so he’ll have to stitch it up again every week.

Back on the rooftop, the woman asks why he pushed Martha away when she was offering to help. And he says he’s sorry: he doesn’t follow social niceties now he has a hole in his chest.

She asks if he did before, which makes me think she’s met him before.

Owen asks if her cheery personality is why her man dumped her, and she says no: he died. He says he’s sorry, and she says he’s not:he doesn’t give a damn about her or anyone else.

He says she doesn’t know the half of it, and we cut to Owen begging for something to do. Jack says he knows he can’t be given any work, and that Owen should go home. Owen does, but only after a last slap at Jack, about Jack getting to live forever while Owen gets to die forever.

In his flat, Owen cleans out the fridge, but he really doesn’t have anything to do after that.

Then the doorbell rings, and it’s Tosh. She asks Owen if he minds if she eats, because she’s starving. Owen says no, but asks Tosh if Jack sent her get Owen to open up about his problems.

But no: Tosh starts talking about how bad her day was, and Owen tunes her out.

On the rooftop, the woman says that they sound like an old married couple, and that Brian used to tell her that she talked too much. She says it’s her wedding anniversary—the anniversary of her perfect day.

They’d been married an hour, and she was still picking the confetti out of her hair, when the car crashed and her husband was killed.

Owen asks why she waited for her wedding anniversary to kill herself, and she says because she believed people when they said it would get better.

WOMAN: So what do you think, Doctor? Is it going to get better?

We cut silently back to Owen’s flat, where Tosh’s mouth moves silently as Owen blocks her conversation out entirely.

And then he demolishes her. He just strips away every single illusion she might have, or he might think she has, about herself and about their possible future.

He says he’s broken, and maybe that’s what she wants, someone as broken as her. Then he snaps his finger, to show how broken he is.

He leaves the apartment and he runs, runs, runs through the city until he throws himself in the harbour. But he can’t drown himself, because he doesn’t need to breathe. When he pulls himself out of the harbour, Jack is there with his stopwatch (!), saying he’s been underwater for over half an hour.

OWEN: You were watching?
JACK: Guy in tight jeans runs into water? I was taking pictures.

Back at the Hub, Ianto hasn’t quite managed to work out what’s causing the energy spikes they have been observing at Henry Parker’s place, but they can’t get in, because he has a security system that detects body heat.

Owen to the rescue!

Owen, to give him credit, does seem to try and apologise to Tosh, but she just tells him that she turned his telly off and hands his keys back.

The woman on the rooftop tells Owen that she doesn’t care about him or alien artefacts or anything: she just wants to jump. So he pulls her to the edge of the building and then taunts her for being scared.

Owen, she said she wanted to jump. She didn’t say she wanted to be chucked off a building by a chronically depressed zombie.

At Parker’s house, Martha reminds Owen that any injuries he receives will not heal. He says he knows: he’s made of glass.

He heads towards the building while Gwen fakes a phone call to tell the security guard that his wife was in an accident. This gets Owen through the gate and past some greenhouses that my brother and father would kill for.

As he reaches the generator, he’s grabbed by a security guard, but the security guard is slightly freaked out when Owen reaches into the generator (protecting his hand with a Tintin T-shirt that Jack had given him) and turns the power off by electrocuting himself.

Sadly, Parker’s personal generator hasn’t been affected, which Tosh says means they’ve had some work done. But it’s true that Owen’s not setting off the heat sensors: he says he’s “literally too cool for school.”

He’s confronted as he walks up the stairs by a security guard, as we hear the music we heard last week when Owen was grasping Death by the forearms, holding him back by sheer strength of will, but Owen says that the guard won’t shoot him. He delivers a short monologue about what a bullet does to the human body—it’s not like a knife through butter, he says, because the bullet rotates—and then he knocks the guard out with his own gun.

And he walks through the house as the music swells louder—I love this piece of music, just causally—to find Parker in an enormous bedroom.

Parker is actually Richard “Sugar-Flavoured Snob” Briers—and if you don’t recognise that quotation, you need to watch the episode of The Young Ones where Vyvyan rants, “I hate it, it’s so bloody nice. They’re nothing but a couple of reactionary stereotypes confirming the myth that everyone in England is a loveable middle-class eccentric”—and he recognises Owen as Torchwood.

OWEN: I’m a doctor.
PARKER: You’re a very violent doctor.

Parker says they should have sent Tosh—“that Japanese girl”—because she has pretty legs, and he explains he should be dead, but he has this alien artefact, which he calls the Pulse.

The Pulse is what’s sending out the energy signals, but Owen says it’s not what’s keeping Parker alive. Its energy isn’t going into Parker.

Parker asks what is keeping him alive, and Owen says it’s hope.

Parker, not surprisingly, is furious at this, saying that Owen knows nothing about life or death, and that he, Parker, is better off dead. He hands the Pulse to Owen, and says he’s alone, alone in the dark.

He wants to hear about Torchwood, about the aliens. He says he needs to know there’s more out there than just this. He asks Owen to come back and tell him everything, once he’s dropped the Pulse off. Owen says maybe—but then Parker goes into cardiac arrest.

This is where Owen not breathing would be a disadvantage, I would think.

Nick becomes quite furiously angry at this point, saying that as long as Owen can breathe in and out, he can perform artificial respiration. I make a mild-mannered suggestion that it might have to do with oxygen exchange, but Nick mocks me.

As Owen is (in the present) explaining to the woman on the rooftop how many people he’s killed and (in the past) leaning over Parker’s body, Tosh says that the Pulse’s energy signals are off the scale. It’s going to explode.

Owen says he’ll absorb the energies, but Tosh says he can’t survive.

He’s not worried about this, and he send messages to each of the members of Torchwood, telling Jack never to try and bring him back and Tosh that he’s sorry.

Tosh says she loves him, and he leans over the device as the energy brightens.

(In passing, the Pulse looks like nothing so much as a fluorescent bicycle helmet.)

Back on the rooftop, the woman asks Owen what happened. And he says we all expect life to be shit, but it’s not, necessarily. He pulls the Pulse out of his bag, and she asks what it is.

He says it’s a reply to all the messages they sent out to alien civilisations unknown in the 1970s—not that they know who it’s from. She asks what it did, and he said it sang to him.

Back outside the Hub, Martha is packing her bags and leaving, as Owen is restored to his position in Torchwood. She says goodbye to everyone, and snogs Jack, who looks a bit shocked.

MARTHA: Well, everybody else has had a go!

In the blue-lit Hub, Tosh asks Owen to promise not to tough it out any more, but to tell her when it’s hard for him.

He says he’s scared: he’s scared he’ll close his eyes and get stuck. She says she’s there for him, and tucks her hands through his arm. After a brief pause, he pats her hand.

And walking away from the Hub, he sees a photograph flutter to the ground at his feet, looks up, and sees the woman on the rooftop. And we’re back at the present.

The woman says she thought he came up here to jump, and he says no: he came up here to help.

He asks her name (she says Maggie) and he says if she still sees no glimmer of hope in the darkness—as he holds the Pulse out, and it send ribbons of light out over Cardiff—then she should jump.

She doesn’t.

Though this being Torchwood, I was pretty sure she would.