Live-blogging Torchwood Season Two: "Sleeper"

Oh, I am so not psychologically prepared for this episode.

In fact, I’m struggling to even spell “psychologically,” but I strongly suspect that that’s an entirely different problem.

I warned you about this season, and we’re about to see more of what Torchwood is becoming. Last week’s episode wasn’t representative, but this one is.

Opening monologue! Jack standing on buildings! Me being unable to type “Jack” correctly!

And here’s a woman, waking up in bed to hear strange noises. She asks her partner if he hears them, and he pulls a cricket bat from under the bed as she rings the police. But the husband is thrown back into the room by two men in balaclavas, who then hear the police talking through the phone, which she dropped under the bed.

And we see a lamp lying on the floor and hear begging and screaming.

Credits.

Then Torchwood tear up un the Torchwoodmobile, because two people have been thrown out of a window.

I take a brief pause from live-blogging to argue with a sixteen-year-old girl about whether or not Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is a bit rubbish or not. That’s an exercise is futility, right there.

The policeman thinks that the husband did it, and that he was looking for trouble, or why else would he keep sports equipment in the bedroom? Jack says that the policeman should come round to his house for a game of hockey.

At the hospital, Owen says he thinks it’s the wife, because it’s always the one you least expect. Jack tells them to stay at the hospital, but Owen lies and says Gwen should stay on her own.

Then things start going odd about the hospital, like lights flashing.

But when one of the burglars wakes up (before promptly dying), he tells Gwen that the woman did it, and to keep her away from him—and so, next thing she knows, she’s in Torchwood with a sack over her head, and Jack reminding her of the details about Torchwood being outside the government and the police.

And then the lights go out again, which reminds Gwen of the hospital.

Gwen sends Jack out of the room, so she can use her lovely Welsh vowels to seduce Beth into making a confession.

Meanwhile, Ianto and Jack are flirting adorably about Jack’s dodgy interrogation techniques. Tosh tells Jack that there was a technobabble build-up around Beth, and Owen mentions the hospital.

Beth is taken for tests, and though she’s terrified, she’s also kind of blown away by the sheer scale and the steam-punk aesthetic of the Hub.

Owen goes to take some medical tests, but both needles and then a scalpel snap as Owen tries to pierce her skin. Jack asks her what planet she is from, and then shouts, “Stop wasting our time! We know you’re an alien!”

Ianto’s right: his interrogation techniques suck.

So Jack takes her down to introduce her to Janet the weevil.

But then Janet the weevil starts keening and backing away from Beth, and both she and Jack are slightly freaked out by this—not to mention Janet the weevil’s freaking out.

Beth asks how she can prove she’s not an alien.

So Jack gets out a mind probe, though Ianto reminds him what happened last time they used that. Jack says that’s not a problem: that species had unusually high blood pressure. So, as Ianto suggests, apparently their heads were supposed to explode like that.

Beth asks if it will hurt, and Jack says yes, it will.

BETH: Your bedside manner is dreadful.
GWEN: You should see his manners in bed. They’re atrocious. Or so I’ve heard.
IANTO: Oh, yes.

Most unprofessional outfit ever.

Sure enough, it looks as though it hurts like hell—Beth is screaming, and they’re not getting any readings that show her as not human, despite Jack telling them to go deeper—until the lights start flashing, and Beth stops convulsing and goes limp.

And then her forearm opens up.

I don’t know how else to describe it: apparently, it’s a buried compartment in her brain. Beth couldn’t have been aware of it.

Jack asks her who she is, and we get the same response to every question—I’m betting that’s name, rank, and serial number.

When they switch the probe off, she goes back to being Beth, and the strange mark on her arm disappears. She asks if they found anything, and no one answers.

Jack, in the conference room, tells his staff that Beth is a sleeper agent for a species that doesn’t leave any survivors. He says if they’re lucky, she’s the only one: an advance guard. But by the time her species attacks, they’ll know everything about the planet.

The point is that Beth doesn’t know she’s not human. Her false personality and false memories are dominant.

But Jack says they need to tell her, and they show her the video.

Gwen can’t cope with this, and tells Beth that her fake life with Mike, her fake memories, are real: she asks what makes her human, her mind or her body? But Beth says she wanted children and an ordinary life, and feeling human isn’t enough for that.

She asks them to make her human, but Jack says they can’t: one day she’ll activate, and then the invasion will begin.

Beth wonders if they’ll kill her, but Gwen says they only kill aliens as a last resort, when it’s kill or be killed.

Jack says they can’t let her go, because she’s too dangerous. Tosh recommends that they freeze her instead, using their alien cryostasis technology. (I think I spelt “cryostasis” wrong there.) But as they’re taking Beth to freeze her, her real memories of the attack on the burglars start coming back.

And, as she waits on the table for the procedure, Beth asks Gwen to promise that if they can’t find a way to make her human again, not to wake her up at all, but just to turn off the machine. Gwen says she can’t promise that, so Beth asks Jack—and Jack promises.

Tosh knocks out the transceiver, and Owen starts to knock Beth out.

But the transceiver is still transmitting—and now the other sleeper agents on the planet are waking up, including a white-collar worker who breaks his wife’s neck, an EMT guy who walks away from the man he’s performing CPR on, and a young mother who lets her baby carriage roll out into traffic.

As we watch the back of the young woman as she walks away, we hear the screaming of brakes and a dull thump.

Back at the Hub, Beth is vaulted in number 7 vault—in which she quickly wakes up.

I guess cryogenics don’t work on her planet.

The first thing Torchwood knows, the lights go out and Beth is gone. And, of course, she has all that information about Torchwood saved in the transceiver in her arm.

Owen says that perhaps Beth can disguise all her vital signs, so that she can looks as though she’s frozen, when really the opposite is happening.

Jack wonders why they aren’t all dead, but he assumes that Beth has some other agenda—and, sure enough, she’s in the hospital talking to her husband, telling him that she has to go away and stay away, or she might end up hurting him.

But even as they hug, they weapon embedded in her arm activates, and she stabs him through the abdomen. Wow, that’s a lot of blood.

Fortunately, Torchwood are there to take Beth back into custody.

Meanwhile, a man calls Patrick Grainger answers his door and is stabbed through the abdomen by the white-collar worker from a previous scene. And the EMT worker bombs a petrol tanker that takes out an underground fuel line used by the military in emergencies. Ianto realises that Patrick Grainger was the man on the council who had all the emergency protocols.

Jack realises that Beth is part of a cell and that they’ve activated.

Gwen asks how Beth got out of Torchwood, and Beth says that the technology is part of her, and she can turn it on and off. Gwen asks if she can track her cell mates, and, after some demurring, she agrees to: she says that there is one member of the cell left—the white-collar worker. (Both the EMT worker and the young mother turned out to be suicide bombers.)

But the white-collar worker is heading for an abandoned farm on the outskirts of the city, though they can’t work out why he would do that. Apparently, it used to be a coal mine—and, sure enough, Tosh says that the military is using the mine shaft to store heavy weapons.

Specifically, nuclear warheads.

Specifically, ten nuclear warheads.

Well, that’s just brilliant.

Naturally, everyone starts despairing. Well, everyone except Jack.

JACK: With a dashing hero like me on the trail, how can we fail?
IANTO: He is dashing, You have to admit that.

Ianto is much happier and cheekier this season, isn’t he? It’s amazing what the love of a good man will do for you.

Back at the Hub, the rest of Torchwood is less sanguine about the outcome.

OWEN (to Tosh and Ianto): Let’s all have sex.
IANTO: And I thought the end of the world couldn’t get any worse.

That transcription of dialogue brought to you by an extended shoot-out at the army’s secret nuclear-weapons facility.

Jack runs over the last sleeper agent, but he fails to reverse over him, which is what I would have done. So, as Jack questions him, he stabs Jack. Gwen manages to turn off the transceiver and forcefield, but the alien fortuitously provided himself with a bomb, and he blows himself up after telling Jack that the others aren’t coming—they’re already here.

Back at the Hub, Gwen tells Beth that they’ve refigured the casket, so that the cryogenics will work around the implant.

Beth asks what they’ll do when she activates. Gwen says they’ll work around it, but Beth says they won’t: she’s too dangerous, and they both know it.

The human side of Beth is paramount here, but she knows that the human side isn’t the only side, and she worries what will happen when she reactivates.

She’s right to worry, because she (seemingly) reactivates right now, and she takes Gwen hostage, holding her knife to Gwen’s throat. Every other member of Torchwood is armed here, all pointing their guns at Beth.

And Beth hasn’t reactivated, or not fully. But she knows that if she threatens Gwen, they’ll shoot her.

And they do.

Suicide by Torchwood.

Gwen attacks Owen for not realising that Beth was bluffing. But Owen says she must have known what they’d do, and Jack says she did—she just wanted to make it easier for them.

And we slowly pan up from Beth’s dead body to a satellite view of Cardiff’s brightly lit highways—which, from this angle, look remarkably like the neural pathways that we saw light up in Beth’s brain when Torchwood forced her to activate.

Gwen wanders into Jack’s office, and he asks about her wedding plans but, as she’s halfway through a spirited imitation of her mother, he cuts her off and tells her to go home and be human.

Well, that was a little rude.

But at least it was a change from the generally depressing tone of the episode.

Next week: frozen soldier.