Season 1 Episodes

Season 1 Overview - May contain Spoilers

Episode 1: Torchwood: Everything Changes 22nd October 2006
A brutal murder leads WPC Gwen Cooper to Torchwood, a journey that will change her life forever.

Episode 2: Torchwood: Day One 22nd October 2006
Torchwood must stop a sex addicted alien as it leaves a trail of gruesome deaths in its wake.

Episode 3: Torchwood: Ghost Machine 29nd October 2006

Episode 4: Torchwood: The Trouble with Lisa AKA Torchwood: Cyberwoman

Episode 5: Torchwood: Small Worlds

Episode 6: Torchwood: Countrycide

Episode 7: Torchwood: Greeks Bearing Gifts

Episode 8: Torchwood: They Keep Killing Suzie

Episode 9: Torchwood: Random Shoes

Episode 10: Torchwood: Out Of Time

Episode 11: Torchwood: Combat

Episode 12: Torchwood: Captain Jack Harkness

Episode 13: Torchwood: End Of Days

Torchwood Series 1 Review / Overview

Overview by Paul Mount

TORCHWOOD started to pick up noticeably after about episode six. When I last looked at the show for scifind.co.uk – ‘Ghost Machine’ and ‘Small Worlds’ – there were the first glimmerings of a series with some potential, albeit one with loads of conceptual problems. That potential started to show itself a few weeks later. Chris Chibnall’s ‘Countrycide’ is probably best put to one side – a cheesy, gory HILLS HAVE EYES rip-off made tolerable only by a moderately interesting twist – ‘Countrycide’ was startling in its lack of originality and its surfeit of truly cringeworthy dialogue. But the following week TORCHWOOD began its inexorable clamber towards quality, thereafter producing a string of interesting, generally well-executed stories which made it look as if TORCHWOOD might actually have something to offer its genre. ‘Greeks Bearing Gifts’ finally gave some desperately-needed screentime to Toshiko (Mori), in a story which saw the edgy Dr Sato seduced by a mind-reading pendant and a shapeshifting female alien. Clumsy, gratuitous sex scenes aside, ‘Greeks Bearing Gifts’ opened the lead characters up a bit and exposed a few dark secrets and a couple of neuroses. The best moments of the episode were those which hinted at Captain Jack’s own personal demons, demons which we’d become a bit more familiar with towards the end of the series. The following week’s ‘They Keep Killing Suzy’ was a grim and powerful sequel to series opener ‘Everything Changes’ and several loose ends were neatly tied-up as the show further explored one of its core themes, the idea that after death there is nothing; no Heaven, no limbo, no afterlife. Just nothing. Torchwood’s traitorous Suzy Costello (Indira Vermi), killed off at the end of episode one, realised this during the course of her experiments with the ‘resurrection glove’ and set up a convoluted and highly unlikely plan to try to secure herself eternal life should she one day be returned from death. Powerful, bloody and raw, this was TORCHWOOD at its gloomiest and yet also, to this point, its most powerful. The next two episodes saw the show veer off into entirely different directions and were a welcome change of pace from the frantic action scenarios of earlier instalments. ‘Random Shoes’ was very much TORCHWOOD’s take on last year’s outstanding DOCTOR WHO episode ‘Love and Monsters’, being a story told from the point-of-view of an outsider, in this case a nerdy Torchwood-obsessive named Eugene who had the misfortune of being dead and yet in love with Gwen. Touching, emotional and sometimes quite raw, this was another strong episode light on action but, Welsh stereotypes aside, an engrossing study of the outsider. Writer Cath Treganna’s first contribution to the series, ‘Out of Time’, was another slow-paced yarn, this time focussing on three timelost travellers who find themselves pitching up in 2006 when their aircraft is transported by the Rift from 1953. Again this is all about outsiders – people from half-a-century ago trying to fit into a modern world which might just as well be an alien one. The focus here is on Jack – another man out of time – and Owen who, after a string of one-night stands and a conveniently sidelined (and entirely unconvincing) fling with Gwen, finds love with feisty airwoman Diana who, at the end, flies off to find her own destiny, leaving Owen broken and disillusioned. The strongest image here, though, sees Jack assisting the suicide of one of the travellers who just can’t adapt to the new world; Jack sits solemnly inside a gas-filled car as his companion slips away; Jack can’t die but his face tells you how much he wishes he could. Superb stuff.

DOCTOR WHO’s ‘tin dog’ Noel Clarke (aka Mickey the Idiot) turns scriptwriter in ‘Combat’, a powerful, brutal masculine episode which is part FIGHT CLUB part ANGEL’s season one episode ‘The Ring’. This is tough and uncompromising, as the show’s resident aliens the Weevils are used as canon fodder in an illegal fighting club where desperate men take on Weevils in a fight to the death. Once again Burn Gorman excels as Owen, a man with nothing to live for now he’s lost Diana (in ‘Out of Time’) and who, at the end of the episode, seems to have develop an unearthly empathy with the weevils.

The two-part season finale ‘Captain Jack Harkness’ and ‘End of Days’ is typically-epic stuff. In the former Jack and Toshiko find themselves trapped in a 1940s dancehall. Here we discover more about Jack himself – especially the fact that the name Jack Harkness is a name he stole from a dead airman – whom he meets in the dancehall and falls in love with. Yes, it’s time for Jack to get a bit of TORCHWOOD’s obligatory bi-sexual action. But it’s a brief fling, sensitively handled, and it’s short-lived; Jack knows the real Jack Harkness is doomed and, thanks to some unwise Rift-tampering by Owen, he and Tosh are dragged back to the 21st century. Chris Chibnall ends the series with his best effort to date. ‘End of Days’ is Russell T Davies’ style apocalyptic stuff as the fractured Rift disgorges all manner of aliens and temporal anomalies all over the world. There’s also a mysterious timejumping trouble-maker called Bilis to add to the mix and, when Gwen’s long-suffering boyfriend Rhys is murdered, it seems that the only way to save the world is to tamper with the Rift yet again. But Jack’s not too sure that’s a good idea…and he gets a bullet in the brain from Owen for trying to intervene.

But of course Jack can’t die. A huge horned beast called Abbidon emerges from the Rift and proceeds to flatten large parts of Cardiff, sucking up the lifeforce of the city’s population as it goes. So how will it cope with Jack’s inexhaustible lifeforce?

TORCHWOOD ends up as more of an ANGEL season finale than a thoughtful, creepy SF drama. And that’s fine. The very last moments of the episode are the stuff of tingling spines, certainly for DOCTOR WHO fans – as Jack Harkness disappears into thin air shortly after a most peculiar wheezing, groaning sounds fills the air…

So that’s TORCHWOOD for you. A show of extremes, a show that was clearly never quite sure what it wanted to be, what it needed to be, what it could be. Populated by a cast of largely-unlikable characters and led by a man who’d had most of the charm and humour which had made him so popular in DOCTOR WHO stolen away by his own circumstances, the show ultimately clicked because some of its later episodes told good stories, albeit ones which were appropriated from other sources. But by the time we reached the last episodes, some of the characters had turned a corner and become a bit more interesting, if not necessarily the sort of people you want to spend a lot of time with. Special credit to Eve Myles, whose Gwen Cooper may have been a bit of a bitch, but who turned in some superbly-naturalistic performances with some distinctly-unnatural material. She showed some nice comic timing in ‘Out of Time’ and her grief at discovering Rhy’s blood-drenched body was almost a physical thing. Burn Gorman, at first hugely unpleasant and arrogant as Dr Owen Harper, finally became a sympathetic – if not pathetic – figure; a crushed man who collapses into the arms of Jack when he’s forgiven for his more recent mistakes. Plenty of room for development though for both Toshiko and Ianto, the latter of whom who had virtually nothing to do throughout the series and whose transformation from a man heartbroken by the death of his long-time girlfriend in ‘Cyberwoman’ (sorry to mention that one again) to…er…Jack’s casual bit on the side a few episodes later was not only completely unbelievable but frankly entirely unnecessary.

Despite its own built-in limitations, TORCHWOOD finally found its feet and started to run. Next year, with hopefully a bit more time spent on the scripts, we can see a more confident slew of episodes, hopefully a cast of characters who actually like each other a bit and don’t mind working together and, please, less swearing and sleazy sex. There are plenty of other adult shows around – SPOOKS springs to mind, especially since its executive producer Jane Featherstone recently spoke proudly of the fact that characters in her show resort to fairly mild swearing only in the direst of situations and rarely get their tops off just for the sake of it – which are far more adult than this with far more subtlety. One of the main problems has been that the world of DOCTOR WHO (and its other charming spin-off, THE SARAH JANE ADVENTURES), despite its grisly aliens and huge mortality rate, is an inherently clean and life-affirming place. There’s not much true nastiness and nothing grubby – and yet the very best episodes of new DOCTOR WHO have dealt with adult themes and adult situations with far more aplomb and sensitivity than the sometimes sniggering, adolescent nudge-nudge mentality of much of TORCHWOOD. Plenty of retooling to do for season two but I’m genuinely pleased there’s going to be a season two and that the show has done well enough to earn promotion to the more high profile BBC2 for its first-run new episodes. I hope the best is yet to come…