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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