Live-blogging Torchwood Season Two: "Fragments"

I’ve just noticed that I’ve labelled the last two episodes of Torchwood as season one rather than season two. I really should go back and correct those at some point, shouldn’t I?

Another important service announcement is that the most recent episode of Doctor Who—“The Waters of Mars”—is airing on the ABC this Sunday, and I will, of course, be live-blogging that. Even though my brother and his girlfriend are visiting us this weekend. See? Dedicated!

I’m also feeling a bit smug, because I sent an article draft to my co-writer. So prepare for smug live-blogging.

This episode contains violence. Dammit, Torchwood! Bring back the nudity and sexual references!

Monologue.

We open on what seems to be a banksia. Nick thinks it’s a thistle, which, I admit, seems more plausible. Torchwood—minus Gwen—drive up to a warehouse, where they’re identifying non-human lifesigns that they’ve never seen before. They split up and enter the warehouse on two different floors: Jack with Tosh, Ianto with Owen.

When Tosh identifies one creature at each end of the building, she and Jack split up. But the creatures aren’t creatures—they’re bombs, which go off just as each member of Torchwood (except perhaps Ianto) is standing directly over one. That’s a bit of a problem, I would think.

Gwen is woken by her mobile phone, which makes her realise that she’s horribly late for work.

But she’s about to find that being late for work is a good thing, as we cut to Jack lying unconscious in the rubble of the building.

Then we flashback to “1,392 deaths earlier,” as Jack (and his fancy muttonchops) comes back to life after being stabbed in the stomach with a broken bottle. As he comes uncomfortably to life and pulls the bottle out of his abdomen, he sees two neatly dressed Victorian ladies, one of whom beats the living daylights out of him and then shoves a rag in his mouth.

He comes back to consciousness (or life?) strapped to a chair, with the two women standing over him. They drench him with water and electrocute him but, when that doesn’t work, they shoot him.

He comes back to life, and they ask him who the Doctor is. He denies knowing the Doctor, but they’ve been transcribing his drunken conversations in pubs, as well as counting how many times he comes back to life.

They are, of course, Torchwood, and they’re still in the grip of Queen Victoria’s original plan for the institution.

They threaten to keep him where he is, and then they hire him, where he arrests one of those blowfish creatures whom he shot in the first episode of this season—this one has been drinking without paying, as well as joyriding in a horse and carriage.

Torchwood doesn’t have great long-term storage facilities, it seems, because one of the women shoots the blowfish, much to Jack’s horror.

NICK: These two just seem unnecessarily sadistic to me.

I tend to agree.

Jack tries to back out of his agreement with Torchwood, but he does need the money. He sits drinking in the pub when a little girl comes up and asks if she can read his cards—it’s the same young girl whom he approached in the episode after Owen died, when he was trying to find the second Resurrection Mitten. She tells Jack that he’ll have to wait a century for the Doctor to return, and he asks what he’s supposed to do in the meantime.

Montage! Of course, he keeps working for Torchwood, down through the ages, as we see neat handwritten documents replaced by typewritten files and, eventually, by computer printing. That’s a neat montage.

At least until he comes back to the Hub on New Year’s Eve 1999 and finds the entire crew dead. Well, nearly the entire crew: still alive is his boss, a man called Alex, who says that he’s the one who killed them. Jack pulls a gun on him, and Alex explains that this place is now Jack’s: Alex says that they thought they could control the equipment that they found, but they can’t. He’s clutching a locket and says that when he looked inside it, it showed him the future.

“The 21st century is coming,” Alex says. “And we’re not ready.”

And he shoots himself in the head.

Jack comes screaming back to life in the warehouse, much to Rhys’s horror. (Rhys had to give Gwen a lift.) And he asks where Tosh is.

Tosh is screaming herself, which is hardly surprising, since she’s trapped under what looks like half a wall.

We flash back five years, to where Tosh’s boss is telling her that she works too hard. This is a much dowdier Tosh: less make-up, ponytail, khaki trousers, high-necked T-shirt, and a cardigan. She tells her boss to have a good evening, in what is a barely polite dismissal, and he replies, “I doubt it.”

But as soon as he’s gone, Tosh checks the security cameras, to watch him out of the building. Then she runs down the stairs to a secure room. She punches in the security code, and rummages through the files stored in the room, taking one with her.

She walks out of Lodmoor Research Facility, flirting in passing with the elderly security guard (“When are you going to let me whisk you away from all this?” he asks, to which she replies, “As soon as you clear it with your wife and grandchildren”), and, once home, starts work on something based on the blueprints that she stole.

Then she’s running down a dark street, and breathlessly telling a man that she’s got it. He ushers her into a room littered with papers, and she demands to see her mother and know that she’s safe. The woman to whom she shows the “sonic modulator” gets the man to bring Tosh’s mother out, but they won’t release her, because Tosh did too good a job on the sonic modulator.

They demonstrate that they’re serious by using the sonic modulator against Tosh and her mother—and, when we see the blood on Tosh’s mother’s forehead, remember what she looked like when she appeared to Tosh in the hospital at the end of season one. She’s even wearing the same clothes.

But then UNIT burst in and cuff Tosh. Alone in a tiny cell (and a red jumpsuit), she’s told over an intercom that this is a secure UNIT facility, and that her rights as a citizen have been withdrawn. She asks about her mother, but the voice says it can’t provide that information.

Seriously, this cell is about a metre wide by six metres deep. No windows, no bed, not even, as far as we can see, a chamberpot.

Tosh gets a montage, too, but it’s not as fancy as Jack’s—it simply shows her moving into various positions on the bare floor of her cell.

Then she’s told to prepare for inspection, and, as she slowly pulls herself up against the far wall of her cell, the door swings open, and it’s Jack. He tells her that her mother is fine, but has been ret-conned. And then he tells her that they’re making an example of her, for stealing official secrets in this climate.

He tells her that the plans for the sonic modulator were faulty, that’s why they were shelved. And, as the camera focuses on Tosh’s stunned face, we see that she has a swollen, bloody mouth and a vicious black eye.

Jack’s basically offering her a job, but he’s also taunting her at the same time, saying that she’s good, but it’s a shame she’ll be locked up for life.

He tells her it’ll be dangerous,. Can she stand a little danger? he asks. And we cut back to Tosh screaming under the pile of rubble, telling Gwen that she thinks her arm is broken. Gwen leaves Rhys with Tosh, and heads off to find the others.

But as we see Ianto trying to drag himself across the floor, it’s Jack who we hear calling his name.

We flashback to 12 months earlier, as Jack is tracking a weevil, which is menacing Ianto. Ianto thanks Jack for helping him, and Jack responds, “And you are?” (But in a flirty way, not a dismissive way.)

Ianto says it looked like a weevil to him, but Jack says he doesn’t know what Ianto’s talking about. He shoulders the weevil and walks away, as Ianto calls “Love the coat.”

The next morning, Ianto is waiting outside the Hub with a cup of coffee, asking Jack for a job. Jack knows who Ianto is—including the fact that Ianto was born in 1983, which makes me feel ancient, frankly—because Ianto used to work for Torchwood Canary Wharf. But Jack says he severed all ties with that institution, and he doesn’t want to see Ianto again.

By this point, Torchwood Cardiff is clearly largely in place, because Jack, in the Torchwoodmobile, is calling to Tosh, Owen, and Suzie. But he has to stop when he sees Ianto standing in the road. He tells Ianto to get out of Cardiff, to go back to London, and to find a new life. But Ianto asks Jack if he wouldn’t like to help Ianto catch this pterodactyl.

And, of course, Jack would. And the pterodactyl, like the rest of us, finds Jack appealing.

IANTO: Must be the aftershave.
JACK: I never wear any.
IANTO: You smell like that naturally?
JACK: 51st-century pheremones. You people have no idea.

There’s a rather complicated sequence there involving Jack being carried around a warehouse by a a pterodactyl, and then Jack and Ianto lying on top of each other.

NICK: Oh, Jack. You’ll hire anyone who lands on top of you.

Ianto walks away, and Jack tells him to report to work first thing tomorrow. As Ianto walks away, Jack calls, “Like the suit, by the way,” and Ianto’s expression—I don’t know what to make of it. It looks more like a grimace of pain than a smile.

In the present, Jack puts Ianto’s dislocated bone back into place, and they head off to find Owen, who is lying flat on his back with a precarious broken window dropping slowly towards him.

We flashback four years, to Owen and his fiancee Katy planning the seating chart for their wedding. Katy asks if Owen wants tea, but, as she stands in the kitchen, we see she can’t remember how to make a cup of tea: he prompts her to put water in the cup, then reminds her that it should be from the kettle, and then prompts her to add milk. She snaps at him to stop nagging, that she doesn’t want—but she can’t remember the word “milk,” and she breaks down.

As she stands in the garden, Owen talks to her doctor, who reminds him that all the signs are that Katy has early onset Alzheimer’s—the youngest patient on record, Owen recites wearily—but Owen says he’s marrying her anyway.

As they sit and wait in a hospital corridor, Katy tells Owen that it’s like being lost in a place that you know really well: you try and find your bearings, and sometimes you do, but sometimes you don’t.

When they meet with Katy’s doctor, he says Owen was right to ask for another scan, because there’s a clear and present tumour in her brain, which they need to remove immediately. Owen asks Katy if she understands, and she says that she can’t remember his name.

As Owen waits outside the operating theatre, he’s accosted by Jack, who says that he’s sorry, and that he tried to warn them. He and Owen walk into the theatre, and everyone’s dead, including Katy, who also has a tentacle poking out of her brain. Jack says that the creature in her brain is an alien lifeform, and, when it is threatened, it emits a gas toxic to humans.

Owen freaks out, and Jack drugs him.

When Owen wakes up, no one knows anything about Jack or the accident in the theatre. The man he speaks to—an administrator at the hospital—tells him that Katy’s brain tumour was inoperable, and that the surgeon died in a car accident. And, sure enough, when Owen checks the security footage, Jack is nowhere in sight.

But he is in sight in the cemetery, where Owen goes to check out Katy’s carefully stage-managed grave. Owen hares across the cemetery and punches Jack repeatedly in the face, telling Jack with every punch that Jack could have saved Katy. But Jack says that he really couldn’t, and then offers Owen a job.

Owen is reluctant, because he says that there are no such things as aliens. “D’you think?” asks Jack, and we cut to Owen opening his eyes in the Hub, which is, admittedly, quite empty of aliens at that time. Still, Owen seems convinced.

We cut back to Owen lying on the rubble in the warehouse, watching the window fall towards him in jerks. Gwen is there, and she tells Owen she’s going to pull him out as quickly as possible. She needs to, because the glass shatters just as she pulls him away.

They reconnect outside, and ask who did this—just as Jack’s bracelet flashes into life, as we see a hologram of Captain John from the first episode, who asks what they all thought of his little gift.

Then he tells Jack to say hello to his brother, and a hologram of a shackled man flashes up next to him.

“It can’t be,” Jack exclaims.

John says he’s going to tear the world apart, starting now. Maybe then, he says, Jack will want to spend some time with him.

And he disappears.

Wow. That’s what I call a cliffhanger.