It was only a matter of time before we had another weevil-centric episode.

We still don’t know much more about what weevils actually are, but we know a bit more about them now in this Fight Club-ish episode, where they’re used as punching (and kicking and biting and whatever else) bags.

That’s how we find out the weevils have a low-grade telepathy that allows them to communicate with one another. Janet, Torchwood’s weevil (“Barbara didn’t sound right,” Capt. Jack explains), is in pain because of this. They take her (him?) to the spot where other weevils have been kidnapped and track her to find out what’s going on.

Owen’s been working on getting on the inside in other ways and ends up in the fight cage with Janet.

Since his lady love left, however, Owen’s been having a hard time finding a reason to go on with his life. So he almost lays down his life, refusing to fight the weevil. And we know weevils are kind of violent creatures by nature. Or, at least, they seem that way.

I was reading on one Torchwood fan site, Torchwood Guide, that this episode really showed how the members of Torchwood aren’t really a team; they’re a bunch of individuals who happen to work together, but I don’t really agree with that.

While there was a bit of truth to the observation that all the members of Torchwood are rather alone, they do work very well together as a team. Given what they do, it’s probably almost healthier that they don’t spend their free time together, because they’d never get any sort of break at all. Unfortunately, because of the level of secrecy they must observe, that does mean they have a hard time letting anyone in to their lives.

I think that part of Owen’s feelings toward his lady pilot was that he didn’t have to pretend to be something else. She already knew what he did, who he was, and so he could be himself. How can you not love someone who is the only person you can be yourself with?

Gwen is actually rather remarkable, because no matter what’s happened, she still does love Rhys. She forgives him for telling her to sit the f*@& down because she understands that he’s frustrated and she can’t tell him what’s really going on.

I felt really awful when she was telling Rhys the truth about her affair with Owen and then almost even worse when she revealed she’d drugged him with that memory-eraser drug so he wouldn’t even remember.

She wants to be honest with Rhys and now she’s resorted to being honest by drugging him?

Yet Jack really does want Gwen to hold onto this part of her pre-Torchwood life, because in a way that’s what makes her so valuable to the group — her ability to still have a connection to the real world, to turn off Torchwood when she’s not there.

The question is, how long will she be able to continue to do that?

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This was one of those rather introspective episodes of Torchwood, where we really spent some time with various team members seeing a side of them you don’t see when they’re running after aliens and ghosts and the like.

Basically, the rift opens and three people tumble through from the 1950s: a female pilot in the vein of Amelia Earhart, a young woman on the verge of adulthood and a middle-aged family man.

Gwen ends up with Emma, the young woman who, perhaps because she’s so young, is most able to adapt to the new time. She chafes under the watchful eye of fellow “time immigrant” John Ellis, who acts as if it’s still 1953 and she’s his daughter.

Gwen takes Emma in, telling Rhys she’s a cousin and convincing him to let Emma sleep on the sofa. In the end, Gwen basically grows up, gets a job in London and moves. Her family is long gone, even if anyone were still around, they wouldn’t believe her if she told them who she was. Why stay in Cardiff when she’s a young woman able to go to the big city in an era where a young woman can actually achieve anything?

Owen falls truly, madly, deeply in love with Diane, the pilot. She’d had lovers before and her most recent was a married man. She didn’t want a full-time commitment, because in her time period, that meant she’d have to give up her dreams and aspirations.

Owen does everything he can to help her fly again, but the hoops she’s going to have to jump through are too much, and she’s ready to jump ship, so to speak. She tells Owen she loves him, too, then leaves the next morning because the weather conditions are the same as the day she fell through the rift the first time.

It’s time to go, she tells Owen, to a new adventure. He wants her to stay, but Diane’s made a life of not staying for anyone.

It’s John Ellis who, in the end, is the most sympathetic character, and he has Captain Jack Harkness himself looking after him.

He finds his son, who has dementia and is confined to a nursing home in his old age. His old home is a boarded up vacant building. His entire life is gone, and he’s too old, he feels, to start over.

Captain Jack is the only one who can relate to this. He’s fallen through time before. He died once, and it’s all black. How he came back to life, we still don’t know.

But he did and he ended up way back in time, fighting in World War I, in World War II and somehow he keeps going on every day. Of course, he can’t die. If he had his druthers, he’d already be dead, or at least that’s how he feels way deep down and we realize that when he allows John to die, peacefully.

Captain Jack wishes he could do the same.

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