The first-ever episode of the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood has all the obligatory, here’s who everyone is, here’s what they do, here’s the new team member exposition.
That’s OK, though. It also gave us a pretty good story to follow.
Someone is murdering people in Cardiff. Three have been murdered in recent days, each stabbed by an unknown assailant.
The cops are stumped. The three victims don’t seem connected.
But at each murder scene, the mysterious covert ops team, Torchwood, shows up to investigate.
The cops don’t know it, but the Torchwood team doesn’t care about who committed the murders; they just want to test out the nifty new alien technology they’ve come into ownership of – a metal glove that brings the dead back to life for two minutes.
We don’t realize it at first, but get a clue to it when all Capt. Jack seems to want to know from the dead guy is what it’s like to die. Doctor Who fans are well aware that the dashing captain can’t die or age. Hell, he hung on outside the Tardis as it traveled to the end of time and didn’t die. He is — at least — nearing 80, assuming he was about 18 or 19 when he was in the U.S. Army in the 1940s. Add 60 years to get to now, and that’s his minimum age.
Anyway, Police Constable Gwen Cooper is too nosy and finds a spot in a parking garage where she can see what’s going on with the Torchwood folk. My husband, by the way, immediately commented on the gap between Cooper’s two front teeth.
Captain Jack totally sees her seeing them, of course. She runs, blah blah blah. Cut to the police precinct, where they’re discussing how they’re more or less CSI: Cardiff, measuring the velocity of a kipper.
Kippers, for those who don’t know, are really smelly fish that folks in the U.K. like to eat. My father (a native EastEnder) doesn’t like many foods that have flavor, but he loves kippers. They make the house stink when you cook them. Honest.
What I wanted to know, though, was why Cooper was delivering coffee to everyone at the meeting where they were discussing the case. Was she just being nice or was that a clue that she was really not very important?
She responds to a bar fight, smacks her head against a wall, ends up in hospital. Sees Captain Jack running up the stairs and ends up at the top of the stairs, no one to be seen and the entire floor cordoned off.
No one knows why. She goes in. Now, I’m thinking her eyesight must have been pretty lame, because that was totally an alien she was walking toward and she kept acting as if all was normal.
OK, I know that she thought it was just a good disguise. But that was one NASTY looking alien. What I wanted to know was why Captain Jack and his cohorts waited until the Weevil actually killed that guy to get him under control? I mean, they leaped out the second the Weevil chomped down on the hospital worker. (Note to Weevil: Nice silk PJ’s.)
So Gwen plays detective (OK, she is a cop, so it’s not much of a stretch) and manages to find Torchwood’s HQ. I love how they actually ordered pizza under that name (though even before Captain Jack made it obvious he disapproved of that, you knew that there was no way he knew his team members were doing that).
The second they let Gwen down into the bowels of Torchwood to deliver the pizza, it’s obvious Captain Jack is on to her; there’s no way the regular pizza delivery guy gets to go down there. Plus, they’re Torchwood. Of course they know.
Introductions all around, we meet Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato, Suzie Costello and Ianto Jones (who I, personally, find the most … curious of the group, not counting the Captain, of course). You want to see the creature from the hospital? Here, Clarice, meet Hannibal Lecter. (You know you thought the same thing; even the same sort of cell, with the glass door with the airholes, etc.)
Hope you enjoyed the tour, we have all sorts of cool tech that we try to figure out how to use, we never ever take it off the base.
Except for the three team members who do – Harper, with the “cologne” that makes anyone immediately fall in love with him; Sato with the amazing book reader; and Costello with the reviver glove we saw earlier in the episode. Ooops.
Meanwhile, Captain Jack takes Gwen out to a bar, slips her an amnesia cocktail that makes her forget everything, but our Gwen is a smart lass, and she types up everything on her computer, though Jones manages to sneak through the tubes that make up the Interwebs and delete it all just … as … she’s … passing … out.
All the next day, she’s remembering things that she can’t quite remember. I mean, she knows there’s something to remember, but she doesn’t know what. Or why. But she managed to jot down “remember” on a pamphlet on her desk, and that pamphlet leads her to the area right outside the Curb of Misperception that’s the entrance to Torchwood.
Costello sees her and has to kill her, but not before monologuing as to why she’s been going around killing random folks.
Someone had to die if they were going to test out the metal glove’s resurrection powers. So she chose who, making sure they couldn’t see her when she did it, with a REALLY nasty metal thingy with three blades that obviously came from aliens and so therefore was ANOTHER piece of alien technology taken out of Torchwood HQ.
Like many villains before her, she may have started out with the best of intentions. The gloves’ power, if harnessed properly, could eventually last more than 2 minutes at a time. And then, no one would have to die.
Of course, whenever anyone tries to achieve immortality, everything tends to go to crap. Costello kills Captain Jack (or so Gwen thinks; we, the viewers, know he can’t die), but before she can kill Gwen, Captain Jack revives, thanks to Costello’s continued monologuing and Gwen’s tearful pleading not to die.
So Costello kills herself. No resurrection desired there.
Gwen fears she’ll be amnesiaed again, but, of course, Captain Jack offers her a position with Torchwood and she accepts without a second thought.
Just like we knew she would, from the first moment she found a way to spy on what the Torchwood team was doing, back in the rain at a murder scene.