Totally Frakked: "Torchwood" And The Wayback Machine
Torchwood
Title: "Ghost Machine"
First Aired (US): 09/22/07
If there's something you can count on in science fiction, it's that seeing the future a) will mess with your mind, b) will invariably be misleading, c) won't help anyway. It's pretty much a constant of scifi, and "Torchwood" isn't one to buck the tradition. Keep this in mind, sports fans - trying to see the future will only end in ruin.
Of course first, we get to see the past. After nabbing a weird scifi doohickey off of a fleeing suspect, Gwen moronically pushes the blinking red button and gets treated to a weird vision of a lost little boy from WWII. Note to Gwen: Stop pushing blinking red buttons. Back at the Bat Cave, the doohickey is no longer flashy, but the team uses their ridiculously powerful video surveillance to find and identify the fleeing suspect, who turns out to be a petty thief with the unfortunate nickname, "Burnie."
Using clever detective work (like looking up the name that was pinned to the lost little boy's shirt), Gwen and co. find the boy, now an old man. They show up on some fishy story about looking for eyewitnesses to a crime and he relates his entire life story to Gwen. Apparently he's just really friendly. According to the story he was lost in the location Gwen saw the vision, when he was sent to Cardiff during the war. So, the doohickey appears to just pick up powerful memories, like ghosts.
Trying to track down Burnie is a wash, but during the search Owen comes across an area that makes the doohickey light up again. So of course he pushes the button. Note to Owen: See previous note to Gwen re: not pushing buttons. Owen is treated to the terrifying vision of a girl in the 60s being raped and murdered by a man named Ed Morgan. At about this point I'm beginning to wonder why anyone would ever build a device like this. Owen, who could feel the emotions the girl was feeling, is understandably shook up about the whole thing.
Because they've gotten this far without anything sexy happening, the show indulges in a brief and totally pointless interlude where Jack teaches Gwen how to shoot (ridiculously), which involves a lot of holding her hips and snuggling up close. It feels a little bit like the writers had five minutes they needed to fill.
Back to the actual plot. Owen hunts Morgan, harassing the creepy old man for a few minutes and then fleeing. On his way out, he spots Burnie who leads him a merry chase over hill and over dale before Owen finally tires him out. After the big chase scene, Owen and the team take Burnie out for a beer and ask him a few questions. It's got to seem a little anticlimactic, even to Burnie. Burnie explains that he found the device, and that it has another half, which he hands over to the team. He advises them to stay away from it, since the one time he used both pieces together he saw a vision of his own death. After it's been reconnected, Gwen goes for stupid button pushing round two and sees a vision of her own future. Her hands are covered in blood and she's incoherently going on about how Owen had a knife and she couldn't stop him.
Later, Owen tells Toshiko about his interaction with Morgan and realizes that the fact that the old guy says, "I told you before you'll get no money from me" might be significant. Clever boy, Owen. He puts together the fact that Burnie was blackmailing the bad guy and they rush back to Burnie's house to warn him that he might be in danger. Gwen's already there, however, trying to explain to Burnie about how time is mutable and the future isn't set, but this is a bit over his head.
It all comes to a head as Morgan arrives on the scene, disoriented and babbling and Owen does indeed threaten him with a knife. He pussies out and hands the knife to Gwen, who is still holding it as the crazy old man impales himself on it. You just can't trust crazed rapists these days. Of course, this brings about Gwen's babbling about a knife and how she couldn't stop him, though the him she's referring to is now clearly Morgan. Oh cruel vision of the future irony! Looks like Gwen's second day at work was even worse than her first.
This episode was pleasantly creepy and refreshingly sex-monster free, but bits of the plot seemed a little forced, and the B plot with Gwen's boyfriend being upset about her working so much felt so tacked on that I haven't even mentioned it till now. Owen is shaping up nicely as a character, and his little flip-out at Morgan was nicely played, but I wish Toshiko would be given more character development than "Asian" and "good with computers." Oh well, there's always next week.
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