Live-blogging Torchwood Season Two: "To the Last Man"

Oooh, apparently “time zones collide” in this episode, according to the ABC voiceover man. And I don’t see why he would lie to me. What would be in it for him?

Ah, opening monologue and pterodactyls and Jack standing on buildings, bless him.

Here we have a woman running down the stairs, telling “Gerald” to follow her, which he does. They run into a nurse, who says she thought they were ghosts. They ask if she’s seen any ghosts recently, and she says she’s seen three today—in the ward.

The ward is full of soldiers being patched up before being sent back to the front. The woman with the device says those are Field Marshall Haig’s orders: they must fight on to the last man. And we have episode title!

Then the woman’s machine starts beeping, and she says they’re right on top of it—but we see Tosh leaning over a man half in pajamas and half in uniform: Tommy. She says he’s the only one who can stop it, and he tells Gerald and the woman to take him: he says he’s back in the ward, and they need to take him, so he can be here with Tosh now.

They head back in, and when they greet Tommy, he asks who they are: they say they’re Torchwood.

Credits.

Cut to Tosh dolling herself up for work—and then, at Torchwood, they’re defrosting Tommy. (And let’s all groan every time we hear that name, shall we?) He’s got to be defrosted every year, just to check that everything works. After all, he’s been frozen for ninety years.

This year, as every year, Tommy wakes up fighting, and Tosh is the one who can calm him down. That explains her unusually extravagant (but lovely) make-up and the dress.

Tommy, eating a hearty breakfast, is reminiscing about 1968, when all the Torchwood staff were in mini-skirts, and he thought all his Christmases had come at once.

Tosh is running Tommy through his personal information, to make sure he remembers who he is. He was born in the late nineteenth century, and he remembers his mother’s death in 1900—and he’s been told about his father’s death in 1931. Poor sod.

Jack explains to Gwen that the hospital was at the centre of a time shift, and if it isn’t stopped when it happens again, the shifts will spread across the country.

Jack mentions that the Torchwood office of 1918 left sealed orders—Gwen tries desperately to open them, but it’s a temporal lock, tuned to Rift frequencies.

Tosh and Tommy head out to spend his one unfrozen day wandering around Cardiff. Tommy comes into Jack’s office to show off his 2008 clothing.

GWEN: Jack? Do you have any more of those pretty boys in the freezer?
JACK: Hands off, missy. Tosh saw him first.

Tosh and Tommy wander around Cardiff, and Tommy points out that every year, Tosh tells him she hasn’t been doing anything but working. Last year, she said she was going to learn the piano, but she never got around to it.

Back in the Hub, Gwen is looking at a photograph of the 1918 Torchwood team: Gerald and Harriet Derbyshire. There’s a bit of banter about how pretty the boss is, and then Ianto says that Harriet died the following year, aged twenty six. Gwen mentions how young he is, and Ianto says that they were all young—and that nothing changes.

I lose my Internet connection for a few moments—probably something that Nick did, whatever he says—and miss blogging about Tosh and Tommy flirting, and Gwen wandering around the hospital seeing the ghosts of dead soldiers.

Then I miss another couple of minutes, because Nick tries to have a conversation about the fact that the Internet access is back on. I explain pithily that I can’t live-blog with flaky Internet access and talk about the flaky Internet access at the same time.

Somewhere in there, I miss some key plot points about why the wounded soldiers are showing up at the hospital.

Back with the television, Tommy and Tosh are in the pub, while he explains that there are always wars, even though when they woke him up for the first time in 1919, they told him that they’d won the war to end all wars. Then he tells Tosh that he’d do anything for her, shortly before he starts developing headaches.

Back at the hospital, someone is smashing walls down, while Jack sees visions of wounded soldiers.

I’m distracted—again—by a tweet popping up from a friend who has just joined Twitter in order to write poetry on it.

Sorry about that: I’m easily distracted during this live-blogging, aren’t I?

This episode, I have to say, is terribly Sapphire and Steel—Jack and Gwen wander around a poorly lit hospital, seeing constant visions of wounded and damaged soldiers—ooh, but there’s a scary bit, as the nurse escorting the most recent soldier out stops, and looks back around the corner of the corridor.

She sees Gwen.

But as she’s screaming at Gwen to leave her alone, and that she shouldn’t be here, Gwen is thrown out of the past and back into the empty hospital of the present.

Still in the future, Tommy is chasing Tosh down the pier, and he kisses her, much to Tosh’s bemusement. She says “Thanks,” and he’s affronted by this. But she says she’s a bit older than him, to which he points out he was born in the 1890s. He asks her how he’s old enough to die for his country but not old enough to give her a kiss? So she kisses him back, and he says, “Thanks.”

They decide to head back to her place—he says his place only has room for one and its bloody freezing—but then Jack rings to tell her that the time shifts have started.

The demolition of the hospital is what triggers the time shifts.

Jack sends his crew out to gather information, but Tommy is not looking pleased, now that the time he’s been waiting for has come.

Owen, at the hospital with Tosh—and, in passing, Owen is much less of a twat in this season than the last one, isn’t he?—tells Tosh to be careful, since she has feelings for Tommy. Tosh says she’s only known Tommy for four days—spread out, of course, over four years—but Owen says he didn’t think she had some kind of fetish for defrosted men: he knows she cares for Tommy, and he doesn’t want her to be hurt if she has to say goodbye.

Thanks to a car advertisement, and the notes from earlier Torchwood teams, Owen tells Gwen that the time is now, not years in the future.

And then the sealed instructions from Torchwood, on Jack’s desk, open.

Jack explains that in twelve hours, there’ll be a moment when the two times coincide, when Tommy can step through and close the time shift before it spreads across the country.

1918 will remain where it should, and Tommy will be kept back there with it, once they give him the necessary technology to close the Rift.

Jack takes Tosh aside, and tells her that three weeks after they send him back, he’s killed—shot by a firing squad. He was in the hospital suffering from shellshock, and he recovers enough to be sent back to the Front—but once there he breaks down again, and he’s shot by the British Army for cowardice, one of three hundred men so treated.

Damn.

Tosh says she can’t do that to him, but Jack says she has no choice: Torchwood 1918 saw Tosh in the hospital with Tommy, telling him what to do, so she’s definitely strong enough to do this.

Tommy doesn’t know what will happen to him, and Tosh wants to know what she says if he asks her?

Tommy wonders what there’re to do the night before he leaves, and explains that the night before they went over the top, they’d play cards, write letters, and drink, if anyone had any alcohol. Owen says they can do that, and Ianto heads off to find the Torchwood regulation playing cards and whisky.

But Tommy says no: they aren’t going over the top with him.

So Gwen asks what he’s going to do, and Tosh walks in to say that he’s coming home with her, unless Jack has any objections.

Of course Jack doesn’t have any objections.

Let’s skip over the events in Tosh’s flat, shall we? Because it’s all a bit devastating.

In the Hub, Ianto asks Jack if he’d go back to his own time if he could. Jack asks if Ianto would miss him, and Ianto says “Yes” before Jack has even finished the question. But Jack says no: he left home a long time ago, and has loved many people since whom he would never have loved if he’d stayed.

Then they snog.

At Tosh’s place, Tommy asks what Jack said, what Tosh knows about what happens to him. And Tosh tells him that they send him back to France, from which Tommy assumes that he is killed.

And now it’s time for him to head back to 1918.

Torchwood gear up and head to the hospital, with Tommy in the gear that Torchwood have stored for him for the past ninety years. Tommy can hear voices—especially the voices of Torchwood 1918, Gerald and Harriet—and he freaks out and runs.

Is this his shellshock coming back, now he’s heading back to his own time, I wonder? Jack said that the time travel suppressed that damage, but that it would return when he went back to 1918. So is it starting to come back now, now that he’s back in the hospital where he was being treated?

Jack fails to convince Tommy of his duty, so Tosh asks that they be left alone—in what we see, as the camera pans back, is the same room in which Torchwood 1918 first saw them. And they’re in the same position as they were when we first saw them in the teaser, so the time in running down to the time when Tommy has to return.

Sure enough, as Tommy says he wants to stay with Tosh rather than be a hero and save all of humanity, we hear a tearing sound, and there are Gerald and Harriet.

Tommy shakes and hesitates, but Tosh convinces him to tell Gerald and Harriet what we saw him tell them in the teaser: that they need to take him, so that he can be in 2008 to tell them to take him from 1918.

But Tommy still needs to return to his own time.

Tosh tells him he needs to get back into bed, as though he’s never been away, and then to use the Rift key that Torchwood gave him.

So when the next Rift opens up, he steps back through into 1918, but finds himself in a supply closet, from which a nurse chases him.

Our Torchwood leg it through the hospital as fast as they can.

In 1918, Original Tommy is taken from bed by Torchwood—and Gerald looks over his shoulder to see Our Tommy (which really hammers that metaphor home) being walked through the hospital by the nurse who found him in the supply cupboard.

Back at the Hub, Jack notes that the time shift hasn’t stopped, but is instead spreading out from the hospital.

Tommy hasn’t used the Rift key, yet—perhaps, as Tosh says, because he’s been sent back ninety years in the past, and perhaps because he’s now shellshocked again.

So one of the Torchwood staff has to go into Tommy’s head as a psychic projection—oh, just technobabble, okay?

Of course, Tosh asks to go. And she’s seemingly seated on Tommy’s bed, as the hospital shakes around them, and Tommy tries to offer her the Rift key. But she tells him that it’s his, and he has to use it.

Tommy says he’s scared: he says that’s why he’s here in the hospital, because he’s a coward.

Okay, I admit it: I’m crying a little at this point.

But Tosh convinces him to use the key, just before she vanishes—but she’s done it. She’s convinced him to close the Rift.

In 2008, Tosh folds the clothes that Tommy wore, and stores them away in boxes. Like everything in Torchwood, nothing is ever thrown away—not bodies, not the contents of the dead staff members’ houses, and not the clothes that a dead soldier wore for a day on the town.

Jack thanks Tosh, but she just walks away from him.

She stands looking over the bay, and Owen comes up to her to tell her that everything is still here because of her.

No, says Tosh: because of Tommy. And she hopes we’re worth it.

And then she walks off into a Massive Attack film clip.