I have been living a bit of a lie, and I am ready to admit to it. As much as a sci-fi nerd I cop to being, I always had to just smile and nod along whenever the subject of Doctor Who and Torchwood came up.  Nervous that my cover would be blown, I employed the usual tactics: smiling; ‘uh-huh-ing’; laughing when every one else did. Well no more, my friends. No more. How about a nice big HOORAY! for Netflix.

Yes, as usual, I am late to the party. People have been raving about Netflix for ages now. My old roommate used to have it and we watched all kinds of stuff because of their wonderful DVDs being delivered right into our hot little hands. But now. Now! I have Netflix with the streaming, instant play option, and I am so very, very happy.

Once I finish up with Doctor Who (I am speeding through season three as we speak), I will make my way over to Babylon 5. That is if I get the idea of a BSG rewatch outta my head.

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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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OK, I guess the TV seasons before most people had televisions were worse, but this season was for the birds, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The four major networks (that’d be CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox – sorry CW) lost an average of 16 percent of viewership in the coveted “demo” – adults 18-49. That includes DVR use.

Fox was on top, followed by CBS, ABC and NBC. But “on top” still includes a steep drop.

Why is this?

A whole mess of things.

First off, a lot of people are watching online – legally and illegally (Hulu an example of the former, BitTorrent an example of the latter). I know some folks who don’t have televisions, even, and only watch what they like online.

Second, a lot of people watch on DVR, but not within that 7-day window included in ratings. For example, my husband and I haven’t watched Season 2 of Damages yet. The entire season is sitting there on our DVR. We just finished up the entire first seasons of Dollhouse and Better off Ted in a few days in marathon viewing sessions. (I’ll be writing about BoT in a couple days). I still have episodes of Reaper, the season finale of Supernatural and Sunday’s episode of Breaking Bad on my DVR, waiting for me to have a chance to sit down and watch ‘em.

Then there’s the whole DVD experience, too. A few years ago, we caught up on the first two seasons of Alias by borrowing them from the library. I’ve been watching Season 1 of Torchwood on DVD, a Christmas present.

The ratings were as of Wednesday night, which marked the “official” end of the TV season. Did you even know that? Didn’t think so.

There is no such thing as a TV season anymore. We just were treated to a third season of Burn Notice this winter, and another one is coming this summer. Some shows never start until “midseason” (24, American Idol, Lost). Others bounce around the scheduling calendar (Battlestar Galactica, Kyle XY).

Yet the ratings system, other than adding the DVR and DVR+7 ratings into the mix, hasn’t changed in forever.

It’s time to change. We’ve lost too many good shows (Jericho, Kings) to the poor way ratings are measured. All the networks own multiple stations now; if the ratings for Kings are too low for NBC proper, why not send it on over to USA or even SyFy?

C’mon. The Nielsen ratings are so … 1980s.

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The episode was an interesting one; rather than focusing on Torchwood itself, the main character was a fan, a hanger-on, a wannabe.

But in spite of – or perhaps due to – that, we see more of that empathy that is becoming Gwen’s hallmark. I guess someone at Torchwood has to actually give a rat’s patootie about other people. It’s nice, though, because she’s sort of making Captain Jack halfway care about people again. He’s been around the block too many times and seen too much bad stuff to even consider that people are worthy of empathy.

I suppose I’d feel the same way, too, if I’d been around as long as he has (however long that may be).

We meet Eugene Jones as he’s discovering he’s dead, laying splat by the side of the road, bleeding from the head. The only benefit, it appears, is that he’s now actually getting to ride with the Torchwood guys, because he’s a ghost and they don’t know he’s in the car with them.

They call his mom, check out pics on his phone – just … random shoes.

Then we go on something of a “This is Your Life” trip with Eugene, going back to the moment where he became obsessed with aliens, 1992 when he was in the South Wales Interschool Maths Competition; he chokes and lets everyone down – including his father. A teacher gives him a ball that fell from the sky, and it looks like an eye.

Dun dun dun … an alien eye!!!

His father’s a jerk, his parents fight, his father leaves and never comes back.

From that moment on, Eugene is obsessed with aliens, and is convinced he has a genuine alien’s eye in his possession. And that alien will come back someday, looking for what’s his.

He starts buying all sorts of alien artifacts, which he keeps in a cabinet in his bedroom. But the eye he knows is special. He tries to tell Torchwood about it many times. When Torchwood folks visit his mum and check out his collection, they can tell immediately that most were fakes – one rock had Rice Krispies glued to it, Owen said. But something’s missing, Gwen notes.

See, she feels badly b/c Eugene was sweet on her. So Owen tells her to do the autopsy, so … she does. She has a sense that SOMEthing is going on. Perhaps because he’s able to communicate with her just a teensy bit. She goes to his regular lunch counter (where no one remembers him) and orders two eggs, ham and chips, right after he says that’s what he always ordered.

He says, “Call Gary,” and she’s fiddling around with his cell phone, finally settling on a name, “Gary.” She calls.

This is what starts leading her in the right direction. She finds out from this woman at work that Eugene had put something on eBay to help her go to Australia. “Don’t stay here and waste your life waiting for something that will never happen,” he urges her, as she’s sweet on her boss, who’s having an affair with her.

He tells her he’s going to sell it, his alien artifact. So, he obviously knows that only that one thing is an actual alien artifact. He puts it on, and after little to no movement, one day the bidding jumps to £3,000. Eventually, it goes all the way to £15,005.50. And then Eugene’s mom calls to interrupt their conversation and ask her to come to her house.

She tells her all about the maths competition and the alien eye and then Eugene’s brother explains how Eugene found out a couple weeks ago that their dad hadn’t moved to America like their mom had always said; instead, he works as a cashier and lives across town.

Gwen’s about to get out of the car and tell Eugene’s dad about it, but he says “No.” So she doesn’t. “I’m sorry,” she says. It’s as if she does know he’s there, which, on some level, she does.

She tells Jack the little she does know, after he chews her out for being incommunicado and working so hard on something that seems to have nothing to do with anything. From the little she describes to him, though, he immediately recognizes what the alien artifact must be – it’s a sixth eye, for the back of the head, to see where you’ve gone.

That’s why Eugene’s still around.

A little more nosing around and Gwen gets it all sorted out: Eugene’s so-called friends Gary and some other wanker started bidding up his eye on eBay. They arrange a meetup for the exchange, and Eugene’s totally convinced it’s his alien. But his friends meet him and confess what was up. But the one guy tries to steal the eye because some other guy actually did want to pay £15,000 for it (but he’s not an alien, they tell him, this guy’s a weirdo collector of “alien ephemera, Nazi memorabilia and … Beanie Babies). Eugene ends up swallowing the eye and running out of the place.

But he’s free, finally. Free of believing his dad is coming back (or that his dad left because he screwed up in the maths competition). Free of believing there’s an alien that wants its eye back. Free of even owning the eye. Just free, finally, to move forward with his life.

Then … boom. He’s hit by a car and we’re where we started off the hour.

After the funeral, Gwen’s pleased to see at Eugene’s house that his dad has come back. She’s so absorbed by watching that that she doesn’t notice a car bearing down on her. Eugene does and knocks her out of the way. Now everyone can see him.

Gwen kisses him for saving his life, he hands her the eye, which had dropped to the ground (she’d had it because she had the embalmer get it out of his digestive tract – have to wonder if Owen had done the autopsy, would they have found it earlier?). And now that he no longer has the eye, he is freed from all this, and begins to float up, away.

As he floats away, he tells us that life isn’t what might happen nor rehashing what has already gone by.

It’s all here, now. Life just whizzes by and then, all of a sudden, it’s …

Something we might all benefit from remembering now and again, no?

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It was only a matter of time before the Glove of Resurrection made its way back into the Torchwood storyline, and it makes perfect sense that it was with the resurrection of Suzie.

I’m glad we got to see more of her, though, and learn more of her motivations, as curious as they still may be.

We start off with the Torchwood group arriving at a crime scene, with the lead police detective (who I really like and hope shows up in future eps) telling them they need to see this, Torchwood definitely has a connection to this crime. (Side note: When Captain Jack acts all Captain Jack to her, she comments somethingn to the effect of, “Oh god, they weren’t kidding about you.” lol!)

She tells them, as they enter the bedroom where a couple’s been killed in a grisly homicide, “Somebody wants your attention.”

Camera pans to the wall above the bed. There, in blood, a word is written, “Torchwood.”

Captain Jack: “They’ve got it.”

But here’s the rub: There’s no record of any of the victims in the Torchwood database. A quick DNA test of hairs left at the scene by the murderer, however, shows something rather troubling: He’s taken retcon, Torchwood’s powerful amnesia drug. Only Torchwood has the formula, so far as they know, so it’s one of 2,008 people they’ve given it to. And, hopefully, only one.

So what’s the best way to solve a murder, and fast? Why, bring the murder victims back to life and ask them? Of course, we must remember that didn’t work out so well last time, when Suzie has the Glove of Life and ended up killing people in order to bring them back to life. Add to the situation that the dead tend to be rather freaked out when they’re brought back to life and you don’t seem to get very far.

Also not so easy to get it together, seeing as last time ’round, Jack couldn’t make it go and Owen said it didn’t work for him last time. In fact, last time the only one who could make it work was … Suzie. So Gwen, seeing as she wasn’t part of Torchwood last time, gives it a go. Apparently, the glove needs to draw on empathy and compassion.

The first victim (from a murder before the couple that Torchwood’s called out to) just ends up screaming and wants to see his mum. And, then, he’s out.

Two more attempts to go.

The glove is very powerful, and Gwen describes the connection that brings the dead back to life as being “like a rope from my heart to the glove.” She brings the dead husband back to life. Captain Jack speaks very nicely to him, manages to draw out some information.

The murderer was “that man,” a “pilgrim.” Someone was always talking to him – Suzie.

Jaw dropper for the Torchwood folks. WTF does Suzie have to do with any of this? They find some flyers about Pilgrim, a religious support group/debating society, among the dead wife’s belongings. Owen says it’s impossible that Suzie belonged to this group, but Gwen counters by asking how well anyone actually knew Suzie and what she did with her time. They pretty much had no idea about her personal life, so now they have to go to some storage place to look through Suzie’s belongings.

Seems Torchwood not only gets to keep the body of all dead members, but also all their belongings. So if Gwen were to die, Reese wouldn’t get any of her stuff – Torchwood would come and take it all and box it up into some warehouse.

It’s a good thing, though, because in pawing through Suzie’s stuff, they find a Pilgrim flyer. Now they know they have to bring her back, to ask her what on earth is going on.

I’m not quite sure why the glove alone doesn’t bring Suzie back to life, but Gwen won’t stop trying. So Jack gets the Life Knife and stabs her in the chest at the same time that Gwen uses the glove. Wow, that works.

Suzie’s not at all pleased that Gwen’s taken her place. She doesn’t remember Jack coming back to life or killing herself. And, ewww, the back of her head is all brainzzzzzz. Zombie Suzie.

Turns out she gave this guy Max one amnesia pill a week every week for two years. She’d tell him all about Torchwood and her work because she wanted someone to talk to. The gang manages to trace this Max guy – he’s a pilgrim? He’s some big, burly tattooed, biker-looking guy. Love, though, how Jack puts the hurt on him, then Tasers him.

Long story short, Max freaks out every time Torchwood is uttered. It’s a trigger of some sort for him. Rest of the time, he’s reciting “I Wonder,” a poem by Emily Dickinson. Meanwhile, we find out that Suzie and Owen used to sleep together. And that Suzie’s father had cancer, she claims to have wanted to be able to bring him back to life if he’d died.

Now Gwen and Jack get really torqued at one another, about how each is or feels responsible for Suzie’s death and subsequent resurrection, which – oh, did I forget to mention? – seems somewhat permanent, brainzzzzz and all. What if she never “dies” again? Undying forever, Gwen says, just Jack and Suzie. We see how unhappy Captain Jack is to be immortal – “I’d sooner kill her.”

Soon he realizes, though, that he has to kill Suzie no matter what, in order to save Gwen. There’s still a link between the two women, not broken by taking the glove off, and Suzie’s getting stronger while Gwen’s getting weaker. Of course, Gwen has so much sympathy and empathy for Suzie that she breaks her out of Torchwood to see her dad in the hospital.

Of course, just as Captain Jack and Owen realize this, Torchwood locks down and there doesn’t seem to be any way to get it open quickly. And the only way to save Gwen is to get out quickly, because time’s running out.

So, they call the police detective and after she has a good laugh at Torchwood’s expense, she helps him out. She goes and buys a volume of Emily Dickenson’s poetry and gives them the next lines to the poem. Seems the portion of the poem Max was reciting is what triggered the lockdown.

But more of the poem doesn’t seem to be reversing this. Then Jack wonders – what’s the book’s ISBN number. Aha! This is why he’s the leader of Torchwood. It works, and they get out, and are tracing Gwen and Suzie. Somehow, some way, Suzie knew all this would happen and managed to plan and set all this up ahead of time so she could be brought back to life.

Suzie and Gwen have already left the hospital, where Suzie’s killed her dad, because he was a right bastard, though we don’t know why, exactly (but there’s usually only one or two things that cause such a visceral reaction like this). She wants to send him to the darkness, where something’s coming …

Finally, Jack & Co. catch up to Suzie and Gwen on a pier, where Gwen’s dropped, bleeding head and all, and is all but dead. Jack shoots Suzie, point blank. She drops, and then … gets up. He shoots her again. Nope. The glove is keeping Gwen and Suzie connected, so Toshiko has to destroy it and … Suzie’s dead, Gwen comes back to life, sans the hole in her head.

But before Suzie fades away for good, she whispers to Jack.

Do you want to know a secret? There’s something moving in the dark, and it’s coming, Jack Harkness, it’s coming for you.

Death by Torchwood. That’s what her death certificate will say now.

The glove, we learned earlier in the episode, fell through the rift 40 years ago and lay at the bottom of the bay until it was dredged up by Torchwood (when, just in the past year?). But now it’s gone and the power of resurrection is gone with it.

Ianto makes a good point, though -

“That’s the thing about gloves, sir: They come in pairs.”

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I thought the most interesting aspect of this episode was that no matter how awesome I found Toshiko in “Citycide,” I found her almost unbearably annoying for most of this episode.

But I found her annoying much in the same way that Gwen and Owen did; I still liked her. Just found her to be a bit … needy.

Which was, I suppose, the point.

We start off in Cardiff in 1812, and for a few minutes, I though we were going to see some of Jack’s back story. No such luck.

A soldier goes into the woods with a prostitute and, as things are wont to do, it goes poorly, he slaps her, she runs off, he chases after to shoot her. But before he catches up with her, she’s posessed by an alien that had just been transported to Earth in shackles. (Though we don’t find that out until much later.)

The alien’s already killed her captor and now has slipped right into Mary’s body to blend in a little better. Not a bad idea when your true form is this:

Pretty cool looking, though, huh?

Anyhow fast-forward two centuries, more or less and you have Torchwood huddled over the skeletal remains of a body that appears to be of a woman killed by a gunshot wound to the chest. It’s definitely alien, they determine, because it has all sorts of alien elements, “even dark matter.” Nice touch.

And Toshiko can’t quite narrow down when the person died 196 years and 11 or 11 1/2 months – the site’s been disturbed, so she can’t determine it any more specifically than that.

One of the rubberneckers at the site is a woman who looks considerably like the prostitute we last saw in 1812.

This woman ends up “happening” into Toshiko in a bar, playing on her sisterhood to save a girl from a lecherous barfly. Until she lets slip that she knows Toshiko works with Torchwood.

She spouts off every freakin’ detail of Toshiko’s life, which freaks her out and claims to be part of some other group that has similar interests. Poor Toshiko has no friends and is sort of the odd man out at Torchwood right now – what with Captain Jack being so secretive, Gwen & Owen shagging and Ianto still in mourning over his Cybergirlfriend’s death.

So what does she do? She ends up getting trashed and blabbering on and on about Torchwood and how the aliens feel things and are so much like humans. It was a nice touch, though, her recalling a letter she’d translated that turned out to be a letter home from an alien to his children, saying he missed them.

That’s when Mary gives Toshiko a pendant that enables her to read minds. It’s been in her family for generations, she says, she wants to give it to Toshiko and knows she won’t give it to her colleagues at Torchwood, just won’t.

She doesn’t want it anymore, she tells Toshiko, because, “You hear too much. It changes how you see people.”

Of course, Tosh, when she goes to work in the morning, puts the pendant on to listen in on her colleagues. She’s going to show it to them, but is distracted by the fact that all Owen and Gwen can think about is when they’re going to be able to shag again. She feels very put off and uncared for.

Later, she realizes how much Ianto is hurting; his pain seems to bother her less than the fact that he’s not thinking about her, almost.

Back at home, she and Mary have somewhat of a tit for tat (sorry, no pun intended, actually) and it ends with them totally making out and then shagging. But meanwhile, we’ve learned that Toshiko actually has a thing for Owen (what is it about this boy? He’s not ugly, but he’s not Captain Jack good looking).

By this point, given the title of the episode, we’re all assuming that Mary is actually a Greek god. She tells Tosh she’s Philoctetes. Tosh, of course, has no idea who that is.

At Mary’s urging, she goes out with the pendant and manages to use the mind-reading ability to prevent a divorced dad from killing his ex-wife and child and then himself. Of course, he helped her by taking the opportunity to monologue about a chalet filled with spiders before pulling the trigger, so Tosh had the chance to catch up to him and knock him out with a golf club.

Back at Torchwood, we find out that the skeleton is not a woman (just a small, girly, man) and he died from blunt force trauma, not a gunshot wound. Owen can’t figure out the cause of death and is about to give up, but before he heads home, he checks some stuff out on the computer.

Nothing.

About to leave again, he tries something else.

Nothing.

About to leave again, he tries something else.

Hmm. Then he starts going back years and years in hospital records and he’s finding something he doesn’t like. We, however, have no idea what that is. He calls Captain Jack and tells him he has to see this.

By the by – Toshiko asks Captain Jack who Philoctetes was and finds out he was an archer who got into an argument on the way to the Trojan war and was marooned on the island of Lemnos for about 10 years. She also tries to read Captain Jack’s mind, but can’t, and lies to him about how she saved the ex-wife and child. Captain Jack knows there’s something wrong with her, but isn’t sure what.

Back at Tosh’s, she gets into a bit of a spat with Mary, saying she’s going to give up the pendant to Torchwood and Mary should come in, they can  help her. Mary uses The Voice (just like the Bene Gesserit in Dune) to stop her, then shows her her true form.

Her race hasn’t used oral communication for centuries. It’s disgusting. Then she smokes a cigarette. Very cute, writers, very cute.

Side note: Very funny that Tosh basically says her parents would be more disappointed in her sleeping with a woman than with an alien.

Tosh is a little taken aback, though, by Mary’s assessment of the human race, saying they would just want to dissect her and keep her imprisoned, not just try to help and understand her; the human race is very savage.

Tosh can’t really disagree, and doesn’t take her in.

Turns out Owen discovered bodies in Cardiff with their hearts ripped out going back years and years and years. Captain Jack finds this interesting.

Toshiko can’t take it anymore and takes Mary to Torchwood when no one’s there. She thinks. Mary needs her transporter (did I mention the Torchwood gang found some weird metal apparatus with the dead body?) and Tosh is going to help her get it back.

Jack’s there, and has Mary’s transporter.

The transporter was for two – a prisoner and a guard. Bet 10 quid which Mary is. Mary claims her feelings for Tosh are true, then threatens to kill her if she doesn’t get the transporter back. So Jack gives it to her. She’s transported away almost immediately.

But Jack somehow managed to reset the coordinates in the device to the middle of the sun.

It shouldn’t be hot; I mean, it’s night and everything.

Cute, Captain Jack. (Also cute when you tell Mary that of course you’re something different; one need only look at your teeth to tell you’re not a British man – lol!)

I liked the resolution, and found myself liking Toshiko a bit more again – she realized the power of the pendant and realized that people are often thinking things they don’t even realize. And she shouldn’t have been listening in anyhow.

Owen is pissed off anyhow; but Gwen, she understands, because she shouldn’t be with Owen, yet she is anyhow. Glass houses and all that.

Side note: I know it seems silly, but I really like the overviews of Cardiff. I’ve never been, but it seems rather attractive. It occurs to me that I’d like to visit the city.

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This episode totally creeped me out, in the best way possible.

I love a good horror film, and Citycide had all the classic elements:

An unknown evil creature (or person). An injured hero (Gwen). Romantic tension (Owen & Gwen). An unclear method of murder.

And we had something creepy moving in the shadows. A person who appears to be a captive of the evil, but she’s really in on it. Moments of heroic escape that, in the end, are thwarted. And one helluva rescue by, of course, Captain Jack.

And no real answer as to why all the carnage takes place.

But I get ahead of myself.

After the obligatory screaming victim before the opening credits, we get the Torchwood gang in their spiffy SUV out in the country. None of them is really comfortable there, except, maybe for Captain Jack and Gwen. And they’re going to camp for the night. Tee hee.

In the woods, Owen gets all in Gwen’s face over their kiss during the Cyberwoman episode and you can see that Gwen can’t actually tell him she doesn’t feel the same.

They see something moving, they find a dead body, skinned and pretty much all the meat off it. Weevils (remember the Weevils?) don’t finish off their victims like this.

And it would be really weird if the Weevils managed to make it all the way out to the countryside like this. That would mean the rift in Cardiff was spreading, dumping aliens and general ickyness much further out than ever before.

So now something takes the Torchwood SUV (sweet ride), runs over their tent and drives away. Doesn’t go too far, though, and leads the gang to a village of sorts. It’s really just a row of a few houses and a pub. Another skinned body is inside the pub.

It’s all dark, obviously abandoned, but hasn’t been for long. It’s not all dirty and dusty. Someone’s watching from the second floor of one of the buildings, but we don’t know who or what.

I have to admit, when Owen stayed behind in the pub to examine the victims’ remains, I totally thought he was going to be captured. I mean, in a horror movie, you never go/stay anywhere alone in a creepy abandoned pub.

Of course, Captain Jack and Gwen find another dead body. She’s still dry-heaving, though. I do marvel, though, at how quickly she’s managed to become comfortable with a gun.

The next house they go into, she’s shot. A young man who may be the sole survivor in the village shot her, thinking she was one of the bad guys. Jack gets the kid to drop his gun, gets Gwen to Owen, and she’s actually happy to see him for a change, as Owen deftly observes.

Torchwood’s good for him, it turns out, because he loves being a doctor, but dealing with people? Not so much.

Meanwhile, Toshiko and Ianto went to the other row of houses, near where the signal from the Torchwood SUV was coming from, and end up being captured. They’re in some sort of underground torture-chamber-looking spot. Ianto’s totally freaked out. He’s kind of a wuss – he has more of a desk job, it seems like. And he drives.

Toshiko is totally badass, though — “I haven’t met a cell yet I couldn’t get out of.” She may have a desk job (computer whiz), but she does lots of field work, I guess.

I loved how they didn’t even show what was in the fridge when Toshiko first opens it. It’s obvious what’s in there – the stuff that’s missing from the dead bodies. It’s almost more frightening that way.

Ianto has to see what’s in there, though, and pushes past her.

The people of the village are being harvested for food.

In the pub, Captain Jack, Gwen, Owen and the young guy are surrounded. They’ve barricaded the door, but the lights are shut off. Jack shoots whatever’s trying to come in through the basement. The kid ends up being captured.

Gwen and Owen insist on going out to see if they can find him while Captain Jack tries to see how the bad guys got into the basement.

My favorite exchange of the episode is now, when Captain Jack tries to get Gwen to stay:

Jack to Gwen: “You are wounded”

Gwen to Jack: “Do you think that’s gonna stop me?”

Pause.

Jack to Gwen: “Be careful.”

For a moment, I thought the cellar of the pub might be the one that Toshiko and Ianto are imprisoned in, but not so simple.

Turns out, the torture chamber is in the Village Hall or whatever this building is that the cop tries to stop them from going to.

An older woman comes down into the basement where Toshiko and Ianto are, pointing a shotgun at them. She’s all scared, tells them that every 10 years, these creatures harvest the village; they’re forcing her to bring them.

Toshiko tries to tell her they can help, but she’s having nothing of it.

Then we find out why – she’s one of the creatures. She and her husband harvest visitors to village every 10 years. Anyone who’s passing through, not from the village.

Ianto head-butts the bad guy so Toshiko can escape, but the bad guy ends up catching up with her. Meanwhile, Ianto’s been all “tenderized.” Gwen and Owen are captured when they try to rescue Toshiko.

Ianto’s about to be killed, when, WHAMMO! Captain Jack drives into the side of the building with some weird car/tractor/truck thingy that was outside the original pub we saw. He jumps out with a shotgun, a pistol, I don’t even know all the weapons he started firing.

And he manages to kill just the bad guys, no good guys.

He’d just gone all Jack Bauer on some random guy in the basement of the pub, who I guess lived in the village, so he knew what was up? Or had he escaped?

And were these evil people human and just really, really sick, or were they some sort of aliens? Didn’t really get an answer to that when Gwen was interrogating the old man:

“Because it made me happy.” That’s what he whispers to her.

Sick, sick, sick. Though, I suppose, there are too many people for whom doing bad things is a reward unto itself.

And now, after the really horrible things she’s seen, she can only turn to Owen. She can’t share it with her boyfriend. So she’s cheating on her boyfriend with Owen. I can only think she hasn’t broken up with her boyfriend, though, because she desperately needs to have something outside of Torchwood.

It’s sweet and sad at the same time.

Owen’s apartment, by the way, is FABulous.

One question: If they had skinned Captain Jack, would he have regenerated? Gross, I know, but I’m curious how immortal he is.

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A thought occurs to me as this episode opens:

It just can’t be a good idea to take flash photos of aliens/faeries/unknown creatures at night in a woods.

Just sayin’.

Of course, it’s easy to say that as the viewer of a sci-fi show where the main characters battle the bad alien of the week; I guess not so much when you’re some old lady who believes in faeries.

Oh, and by the way, I know this woman’s old and all, but doesn’t she have a digital camera???

The most interesting aspect to this episode, I thought, was that we begin to learn more about Captain Jack.

In fact, at that first flashback, I immediately said to myself, “That looks like World War I!” The doughboy uniforms from WWI have a very particular look; WWII uniforms were, somehow, less formal-looking, if that makes any sense.

I, of course, assumed I was wrong later in the episode, when Gwen finds the photo of Jack’s “father” on Estelle’s mantel. They were in love before the war, were separated because of it and never saw one another again. Jack just happened to look her up a few years back, once he could safely pretend he was his son.

Then, later, when he confesses to Gwen that he first experienced these “faeries” back during World War I, I remembered something: Didn’t he get thrown way back in time at some point? (Yes, he did.) So he’s really old, and we really don’t have any clue. Is he from WWII? Is he from the future? Why is he immortal?

Makes me realize, though, that Captain Jack and The Doctor have a lot in common – The Doctor is immortal, so is Jack, albeit reluctantly so. They can’t stand to see their loved ones age and die. So after the war, Jack never got in touch with Estelle again, because he couldn’t bear to see her fade away (plus, it would kind of blow his cover for him to never get a day older) – but he does truly love her, because all these years later, he’s tracked her down and helps take care of her.

It’s no wonder Captain Jack doesn’t sleep much, though (which he mentioned to Gwen in the second or third ep of the series) – he’s experienced so many things, that he’s gotta find it hard not to have it all race through his brain at sleep time.

And so, this nightmare, with the rose petals. And then a petal on his desk. And then the pedophile guy puking up petals.

I have to admit, at very first, I thought the little girl standing outside the school was Estelle’s granddaughter, and Estelle wasn’t picking her up because she was dead. But it just turns out her stepfather’s kind of a jerk and forgot to pick her up.

But no worries, because the faeries will protect her from the evil pedophile man. When he stopped Jasmine, though, I did think out loud, what child isn’t aware they shouldn’t get in a car with a stranger? Especially when the stranger gets the facts wrong about who was supposed to pick her up?

Now, we meet Estelle for real, and she’s lecturing about faeries. She believes they’re beautiful and wonderful and happy and friendly and loving. Jack doesn’t think so.

This being Torchwood, Jack’s right. But, still, the faeries are going after this bad guy, so it doesn’t seem all bad, no?

Jasmine is utterly creepy throughout the whole episode, though. She’s been convinced by the faeries that she needs to be with them. She is a chose one.

No one can hurt me.

Did shivers run down your spine right now?

Now we learn the woods behind Jasmine’s house have somehow managed to stay undeveloped, for the most part, since, well, forever. Even the Romans steered clear.

It does always bother me, though, on shows like this when a character has seen so many weird things and yet still, AGAIN, doubts the supernatural/alienness of what he or she is seeing. And thus Gwen thinks a circle of stones is perfectly natural and normal and couldn’t be supernatural?

I have to admit, though, this is where things got weird to me – why did the faeries go after Estelle? Because she took their photos? I never got a clear answer to that. She believes they’re good and loving. Wouldn’t leaving her alone help perpetuate that belief and cover their tracks?

But, no, they have to go after the old lady’s kittycat, and she has to protect Moses. (By the way, when Gwen first met Moses earlier in the episode, I just knew that cat would some how be a harbinger of some sort of doom.)

And, then, even though her kitty was making weird growly noises, WHY DID ESTELLE GO OUTSIDE? Of course, it doesn’t seem as if it would have made any difference, can’t these faeries get in anywhere they want, anyhow? Was her mystical New Age-y stuff keeping them out?

Then the faeries smash up Gwen’s apartment and leave a mini-stone circle in the middle of her floor, just in case she wasn’t sure who trashed the place.

OK, I got a little lost here, too, where the faeries are children going back eons, “from the lost lands.” Of course, it’s terribly obvious Jasmine is the next chosen one. Is it because she’s an outcast? I’d suppose the creatures seek out the children who are a bit off, a bit outcast, a bit out of the mainstream, because it’s bound to be easier to convince them to join the ranks of the faeries.

And now Jasmine can see the old-growth forest, and because the chosen ones, the faeries, can move backward and forward in time at will, we discover at the very end, with Gwen, that Jasmine has indeed moved back in time.

In a photo of a young girl with faeries that was supposedly legitimate, but debunked by the girl later in life as having been posed and fake, is one particular fairy, Gwen notices. She enlarges the section of photo. And again. And again.

It’s Jasmine.

By the way: Roy, you don’t put frozen meat patties on the barbecue grill. You thaw them first. You’re welcome. Oh, wait, you’re dead. Nevermind.

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Given the name of the episode, we knew the mortal (well, you know what I mean) enemies of the Doctor – of all mankind, in fact – the Cybermen, would be making some sort of appearance.

And the Cybermen are always utterly creepy, so we were in for a ride.

They did, in the personage of Lisa, a former member of the Torchwood London team, the lady love of Ianto Jones. However, she was only half converted into a cyborg, we learn, which explains why she’s basically in some weird bikini bondage version of the Cybermen robot garb.

Because the Cybermen’s sole goal in life is to “upgrade” all mankind, as soon as you see that Ianto has been keeping Lisa secret from Captain Jack and the rest of the Torchwood Cardiff crew, you just know things can’t end well.

For those who can’t remember, the Cybermen managed to come to Earth ever-so-briefly at the end of Series 2 of the new Doctor Who. Torchwood London was messing with the rift between the Earth we know and the Earth from Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel from earlier in the season.

In the season-ending two-parter Army of Ghosts and Doomsday, we got the great Dalek v Cybermen showdown and lost Rose to the alternate Earth where her father was still alive and Mickey had decided to take up residence.

But before we got to that point, the Cybermen managed to partially make it through the rift and, pressed for time, started just converting the bodies of anyone they could get their metal mitts on rather than transferring their consciousness into brand-new Cybermen bodies.

Lisa was a victim of that conversion, but the Cybermen hadn’t managed to finish the job and Ianto carted her off and, apparently, has been keeping her in some sub-sub-sub basement of Torchwood Cardiff ever since.

He finally found some weird guy, Dr. Tanizaki, who’s an expert in cyborgs to see if he could make her all human again. He’s totally creepy, feeling Lisa up, Ianto has to restrain himself from punching him out, it looks like.

Lisa’s breathing and hearing are cybernetic already, and Tanizaki estimates that she’s 55 percent, 60 percent cybernetic at this point. Jones is really pathetic, telling Tanizaki how much they love one another and how he has to save her. She wakes up, there’s tears, blah blah blah.

She gets off the Cybertable and ends up putting Tanizaki on it, trying to upgrade him. Doesn’t end well. Ianto finds out and hides the body. He loves Lisa too much, and you can see that her love for Ianto is still strong enough that she won’t try to upgrade him, even though the Cyberwoman part of her wants only to do that.

Long story short, Captain Jack finally finds out what’s up, he almost kills Ianto for lying and for putting not just Torchwood, but all of Earth at risk for a Cybermen invasion just because he loved Lisa.

Though it was obvious that Gwen would be rescued, it was still totally creepy to see all those mechanical arms come down to do their cutting and pasting just before all the power was shut down. I mean, let’s face it – as cheesy as the Cybermen are, they are CREEPY.

In the end, the pterodactyl does lots of damage to Lisa, and then, somehow the pizza girl ends up going into the basement and Lisa transfers her brain into this poor woman.

But seeing as at least a couple of her senses already were cybernetic, does that mean that even in this new body, she would have still been slightly cybernetic? Do Captain Jack & co kill her because of that risk? I have to admit, I was kind of confused on that.

But it was also kind of sad that just one episode after Captain Jack teaches Gwen how to fire a weapon, she has to use it to kill someone who was just moments earlier, a completely innocent pizza girl.

In the end, Ianto faces his “are you with us or against us” moment and has to pick a side. He put everything at risk, and that just can’t happen. Torchwood’s mission and the safety of the planet must come first.

One side note: I love how in each episode, they have Captain Jack early on saying something about how Torchwood’s a secret organization dealing in alien technology. You can tell it was a new series at this point, because they wanna keep reminding the viewers what the show’s about.

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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.”

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