I both loved and hated the conceit behind this episode of Torchwood.

What’s become typical in science fiction of late is the idea that even if we can know the future, we are almost powerless to change it.

Think Lost, with Desmond trying to save Charlie. Sure, he could prevent a specific death, but eventually, the Grim Reaper was coming for Charlie and there was nothing Des could do about it.

Think Battlestar Galactica, with its “All this has happened before and all this will happen again” mantra. The best of intentions by the Cylons from Earth – Ellen, Saul, Tyrol, Anders and Tori – failed, and they could not get to the Colonies in time to prevent war. And even after they stopped that war, they could not prevent their children, the skinjob Cylons, from rebelling and restarting the war with the humans. And even after they managed to stop all that, the Cylons still had a civil war (just like they did on Earth).

But enough about BSG and Lost. We’re here to talk about Torchwood.

We start off simply enough, with an alien device that picks up “ghosts” of the past – when someone’s holding it in a spot where very strong emotions have been looking at the past.

We get a lost little boy at the Cardiff train station, and when Gwen and the crew track him down, it turns out it happened during the Blitz, when children from London were evacuated to the countryside all over Great Britain.

What the Torchwood folks can’t figure out, though, is why the guy they got this equipment from was running away from them.

After Owen witnesses the ghost of a woman being violently raped and murdered under a bridge and he seeks out the rapist lo these many years later, they finally catch up with the mysterious teen who’s really pretty much a pathetic excuse for a thief.

Turns out, he found the device in a container in a dead guy’s storage space or something like that. It was there along with some rocks and money that turn out to be alien.

And there happens to be a second piece to the device. Sean (the thief) was hiding it because he used it once and witnessed his future, in which he lay bleeding in the street outside his flat.

But when Gwen has it in her possession, she sees herself standing there on the street, holding a knife, her hands bloodied, saying something about how she couldn’t stop it, how Owen had the knife.

What she (and Captain Jack and Owen, for that matter) take from that vision is that Owen is going to kill the now-old rapist in retaliation for the rape/murder of the young woman he witnessed.

Turns out Gwen is the one who ends up killing him, albeit accidentally, when he goes to hug Gwen for getting the knife away from Owen.

So Sean doesn’t end up murdered (the rapist was going to kill him for trying to blackmail him over the incident, though it happened decades earlier). In that the idea of predestination is shown to be false; though we don’t know if that simply put off Sean’s death.

But the vision that Gwen saw of herself with bloodied hands, etc., well, everything she and Jack and Owen and everyone did to prevent it from happening actually caused it to happen.

So this episode differed from the typical “you can’t change the future” episode in that the future was changed at least once. But no matter what Gwen did, she couldn’t change the future she saw. And who knows, maybe Sean was supposed to see his own death to create the future that Gwen saw/experienced.

That idea rubs me the wrong way, because it implies we have no control over our lives. I refuse to accept that.

And speaking of rubbing the wrong way, I have no idea how Gwen managed to aim so accurately with the Captain all rubbing up on her like that. Very cute.

I thought that was an interesting scene, though, because unlike Doctor Who, Captain Jack relies on deadly force – guns. He makes Gwen learn how to use pretty much every kind there is. And she’s pretty good at it, too.

I’d like to know, though, what he means when he keeps saying, “The 21st Century is when it all changes.” But I suppose we’ll find out at some point, no?

One end note: Gwen was a bad girl and took the technology out of the Torchwood HQ. But you know what? I really enjoyed the scene where she was looking back on very fond moments with her boyfriend.

It was very sweet and brought her back to a more ordinary reality, the kind she used to have. Her boyfriend/fiance grounds her and I suspect that no matter what happens with Torchwood, their relationship will only get stronger. As much of a goofball as he is and as dimwitted as he may or may not be, he does truly love our girl Gwen, and she sure needs that right now.

Especially when she’s surrounded every day with “a million shadows of human emotion.”