Live-blogging Torchwood Season Two: "Adrift"

Oh, no. I remember which episode this is!

What’s say we just skip the live-blogging for this week? What do you say to that?

. . .

No? Really? Oh, okay, then.

Let’s just get through this and then we can watch a documentary about Bon Jovi.

This one contains coarse language and violence. Torchwood is really not coming up to scratch with the sex, lately.

Opening monologue.

We open on a bridge. And a moon. A boy is walking across the bridge, which looks like many other bridges in the world. He gets a text message from his mum, telling him that he’s nine minutes late. He looks up, and can see her watching from the window of their house, just at the edge of the bridge. He texts back, “Chill.”

But then a high wind springs up, and lightning crackles around him, and we see his phone fall down the ground.

Credits.

Jonah Bevan was born in 1993, and disappeared, says Gwen’s friend Andy, seven months ago. He’s talking to Gwen because Jonah’s mum insists that there was no one around at the time when Jonah disappeared.

Gwen isn’t paying much attention, though: she wants to know where Andy was at the wedding. But Andy says he didn’t want to sit and watch her “pledge her stupid life” to Rhys, who, he says, could stand to lose a couple of pounds.

Apparently, they have some history, Gwen and Andy.

But Andy wants to talk about Jonah. He points out that there’s some odd kind of light in the last image the security cameras took of of Jonah—and, forty-five minutes later, there’s Jack turning up in the Torchwoodmobile.

Gwen asks Tosh about Rift activity (there was none), and asks Jack what he was doing there, but Jack says he can’t remember. He says there’s a cute little coffee shop out there, and it must just have been a coincidence.

He can’t stay, he says. He’s going weevil hunting with Ianto. I’m waiting for Gwen to say “Is that what you’re calling it these days?” but she disappoints me.

In a coffee shop with Andy, Gwen says there’s nothing she can do. But Andy accuses her of covering the whole thing up, and says that she’s hard now: the old Gwen would have been up talking to Mrs Bevan in a flash.

Of course, next thing we know, she’s knocking on Mrs Bevan’s door. And this whole sequence is horrible, because, of course, Mrs Bevan thinks that Jonah has run away. She spends most of her time watching videos of crowd footage—football matches, concerts, and so on—trying to pick him out of the crowd. And she sometimes sleeps in his room, because the pillow still smells like him—though, she says, the more she does it, the more it smells like her. And she sits in his room and imagines that she’s him—and keeps his diary for him.

It’s all so horribly sad.

And Gwen, when she gets home, is really not in the mood to talk about babies, as Rhys says they’ve been planning to do. But she is in the mood to practice.

Sadly, the post-practice cuddling the next morning is interrupted by a phone call from Tosh.

Tosh says she noticed what she calls a “negative Rift spike” at the time that Jonah disappeared: they’ve been thinking that these readings were irrelevant, but, since this coincided with Jonah’s disappearance, Tosh is wondering is maybe the Rift takes things rather than simply leaving things behind.

Gwen asks if they can keep this to themselves, and she heads out to the support-group meeting that Jonah’s mother has set up for people in her situation. (Andy tried to find her a support group, but there weren’t any, so she started one.) Andy’s there, too, but no one else—at least not at first, but people start pouring into the church hall that Nicky has hired, and neither Andy nor Gwen can cope.

Gwen says that she offered to help Andy look for one lad, but Gwen says she can’t cope with the forty or fifty other missing people whose families are in the church hall. Andy says that they’re not part of the investigation, but Gwen says that of course they are: find a pattern, and maybe they’ll find Jonah.

So she asks Tosh to cross-reference these missing people with negative Rift spikes, and see if there’s a pattern. Oh, and preferably some CCTV footage.

And, sure enough, there are negative Rift spikes for missing person after missing person—there’s a wall papered with Gwen’s paperwork on the missing people.

“Now we tell Jack,” Gwen says.

Gwen explains that Cardiff has an epidemic of missing people, far more than comparable cities. And it’s because of the Rift.

Hey, Owen! I forgot you were in this show.

Jack says that this is good work, but he doesn’t know what she wants him to do about it. Jack says there’s nothing they can do.

Gwen says that they can help the survivors, but Jack says that’s not what they do. He tells Gwen to shut it down, and storms out. Ianto goes after him, saying that he’ll have a word with Jack.

Owen says, “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

GWEN: Oh, bollocks to serenity.

We can see, as Gwen sits at the conference table, Ianto talking to Jack—we can’t hear what they’re saying, but Jack gestures emphatically and storms off, and Ianto turns to look apologetically at Gwen.

Then Gwen and Rhys have a fight in the park, about Gwen putting Torchwood above her work, before she heads back to the Hub.

ME: We do get a lot of shots of Gwen’s bottom in this show.
NICK: It is a very nice bottom.
ME: Yes. Yes, it is.

Gwen storms straight into Jack’s office, only to find him and Ianto embracing passionately. (Shirtless!)

JACK: Always room for one more. We could have used you an hour ago for naked Hide and Seek.
IANTO: He cheats. He always cheats.

Gwen says she’ll make Jonah her special project, but Jack says absolutely not. He calls Ianto back into his office—“More work to do!”—and Ianto goes, telling Gwen in passing that there’s a package on her desk.

The package, as Andy tells Gwen in the coffeeshop, is a GPS system, pointing them to an island in the middle of the Bristol Channel. He says, if she’ll let him come with her, they can find out what the GPS co-ordinates mean.

She agrees, but ditches him at the pier the next morning, after asking him to go and buy them a couple of teas. (It’s slightly more complicated than that, but I’m running behind.)

On the island, Gwen finds a lighthouse, and, from the top, she can see two women in scrubs leading a hooded figure across the island’s surface to a series of concrete bunkers—and they’re being followed by Jack.

Gwen, of course, goes haring down the stairs and across the island, where she heads down into the bunkers with the aid of her trusty flashlight. She finds an entrance buzzer, and hits it: when someone answers, she gives her Torchwood access code and says she’s with Jack Harkness.

WOMAN: He’s supposed to warn us.
GWEN: Law unto himself, isn’t he?
WOMAN: He knows we’ll always forgive him.

The woman lets Gwen in. Inside, the bunker is like a hospital or an asylum—but rather like a hospital or asylum from one of the cities abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster would look now, all peeling paint and forty-year-old furnishings.

The bunker resounds with screams and weeping.

Gwen realises, as she passes the rooms with the names chalked outside them, that these are the people they’ve been tracking, the people taken by the Rift. And Jack steps in at this point, to say he’ll take it from here.

She asks Jack if the people have been here all this time, and demands to see Jonah. Jack tries to explain, but Gwen screams at him to open the door.

He does.

But when we see Jonah, Gwen assumes that she’s in the wrong room. Because this Jonah is not fifteen. This Jonah is badly damaged, and can’t breathe without rasping.

Gwen asks what happened to him. And he says that there was a bright light, and when he opened his eyes, the planet was on fire. A man pulled him from the flames and into a building, and tried to work on the burns. He barely noticed, he said, when the building started shaking, and that’s when he realised that it wasn’t a building: it was a ship, the last rescue craft from the planet.

Gwen is crying.

Jonah asks if he is really home, and Gwen says that he is. He says that he tried so hard to get home. And Gwen says that his mother is still looking for him. Jonah asks if she can bring his mother to see him.

Gwen, sitting out on the cliffs, listens to Jack explain that he set this up, because he found two survivors of the Rift in the cells when he took over. Now there are seventeen, all badly damaged.

Gwen says she needs to bring Jonah’s mother to see him. But Jack protests: he says Gwen will need to explain about the Rift and Torchwood, and Gwen says that she will.

She does, but Nicky doesn’t entirely trust Gwen’s explanation. That’s fair enough. Gwen rings Andy, who is rightly furious, though when he challenges her on the fact that she’d never recommend him to Torchwood, both Nick and I try to convince him that he’d never want to work for Torchwood anyway.

Andy, nevertheless, convinces Nicky to trust Gwen, and Gwen takes her out to the island.

She talks to Nicky again before she opens Jonah’s door, but Nicky isn’t really listening. She just needs to see Jonah.

Nicky, though, when she sees Jonah, disavows any sense that this is Jonah. She screams at Gwen that she’s sick, that this is not her son.

Jonah starts talking about his broken wardrobe door, about the fact that she used to let him steal sips of her beer, that she always worried about money, and, at first, Nicky won’t look at him. But the more he talks, the more convinced she becomes, until she embraces him, as he says he tried so hard to come home, that she won’t believe the sights that he’s seen.

He apologises for coming home late that night.

But the nurse comes in and says that Nicky needs to leave. Jonah is starting the “down swing.” They’ve seen Jonah in the “good phase,” which becomes briefer every day. But that phase is ending.

Nicky says that she wants to take care of Jonah herself: she’ll tell people that he’s her father.

But the nurse says they need to leave.

And he starts screaming. And screaming. And screaming.

Gwen tells us, in voiceover, that the scream lasts twenty hours a day. Before he was returned, Jonah looked into the heart of a dark star, and what he saw drove him mad.

One week later, Gwen visits Nicky to say that she can visit Jonah any time she likes, when he’s in a good phase. But Nicky says that she hopes Gwen never does this to anyone else. Gwen says that she thought Nicky wanted to know, but Nicky says she was better not knowing. She says that before Gwen, she had hope.

And Gwen strips all her missing-person information from the walls as Nicky, on the other side of town, strips Jonah’s bedroom, and smells his jumper, and sits down on the edge of his bed to weep.

Jack watches Gwen as she files all the information away, but doesn’t let her know he’s there and doesn’t speak to her.

Back at the flat, Gwen is lighting candles on the dinner table, and telling Rhys that tonight they talk about whatever he wants, but he asks if she’s all right, and she’s weeping before he even manages to get his arms around her.

And they sit down on the sofa, and Rhys tells Gwen to tell him everything, from the beginning.

And Gwen does: “There’s this woman, Nicky. She had a son, Jonah. He went missing, seven months ago . . .”

End credits.

Sniffle.