Saturday, November 04, 2006

 

Cora's Comments on Torchwood:

The Ghost Machine, the third episode of the BBC's new SF show Torchwood, is a quieter tale than its two predecessors. Nonetheless, it's a highly effective story, one whose impact grows on repeat viewing.

Even though The Ghost Machine is a quieter story than either Everything Changes or Day One, it still starts out with an action scene, as Gwen and Owen chase a bit of alien technology through the streets of Cardiff, with Toshiko providing support back at the Hub. The bit of alien technology turns out to be in the possession of an ordinary teenaged thug. Owen and Jack (who is still en route to the scene) are foiled by a sliding gate, but Gwen manages to catch up with the fleeing boy, only to have him slip out of her grip. The frustrated Gwen is left with the boy's jacket, just as Toshiko congratulates her with "You've got it". And indeed Gwen finds something which looks very much like a TV remote control in a pocket of the jacket. When Gwen holds the device in her hand, it lights up. Gwen - rather foolishly - presses a button on the device, and all of a sudden the bustling train station is eerily empty. An instant later, a little boy in old-fashioned clothing wanders into the station, wailing that he's lost and that no one know who he is. Gwen tries to talk to him, but the child doesn't respond.

An instant later, everything returns to normal, as Jack and Owen burst in to find a very distraught Gwen still holding the alien artifact, now inert. Back at the Hub, the Torchwood team try to reconstruct what happened to Gwen, especially as the security camera shows nothing out of the ordinary. Gwen believes she saw a ghost, Owen believes Gwen was either hallucinating or is suffering from the symptoms of dementia (and is inconsiderate enough to say it out aloud), Jack isn't sure what to believe but wants to find out.

As an initial scan of the alien artifact only reveals that it is "so advanced it makes NASA looks like Toy R Us" ("Well, that narrows it down", Owen says), the Torchwood team decide to track down the kid who owned it. The instant face recognition database actually does its job this time around (big surprise) and spits out a name: Bernie Harris, small-time criminal. However, tracking down Bernie is a lot more difficult than it looks, for though Bernie seems to have stolen from everyone he knows and everybody hates him ("I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire", a girl says), nobody actually knows where he is. Finally, the Torchwood team give up, much to the annoyance of Jack. They have a bit more luck in identifying the "ghost" Gwen saw, as the "ghost kid" was considerate enough to wear a name tag on his jacket. Toshiko is just about to run a search of that name in all available databases, when Owen finds him in the phonebook. The "ghost", it turns out, is very much alive and in his 70s (played by the nasty Capitalist from the Fifth Doctor's swan song Caves of Androzani). Gwen and Owen pay him a visit, and after having sent Owen off to the kitchen with the old man's daughter, the old man tells Gwen that what she saw was a real incident that happened when he was evacuated to Wales in WWII and accidentally forgotten at the train station. It's a nice moment and hopefully, this will take care of the obligatory WWII references for this whole season of Torchwood (though apparently, there is a WWII time travel story towards the end of the series - oh joy!). Though it doesn't really make sense for the old man to tell Gwen just what she needs to know on a whim. Plus, Cardiff doesn't seem like an ideal spot for evacuating endangered kids, as judging by the many post-1945 buildings on view, it seems to have been heavily bombed (a lack of pre-war buildings is usually a good indicator for heavy bombing). Finally, why has every WWII survivor seen in Doctor Who and/or Torchwood inevitably lost family members due to bombing raids? Statistically, this isn't all that likely. I know plenty of WWII survivors who lived in heavily bombed cities (including inhabitants of Dresden) and I don't think I know a single person who lost a family member to bombing. Not sure why this is so, though I suspect that since families tend to cluster together, bombing raids would often take out entire families at once, leaving no survivors. But apparently, British TV can't get by without the obligatory "Weren't we bombed horribly and aren't we brave that we survived?" reference. Still, it is a minor annoyance (unlike The Empty Child which was a mayor annoyance) in an otherwise excellent story.

One of the things I really like about Torchwood so far is how it tends to send up the conventions of CSI type cop shows. For Torchwood is very much patterned on the CSI franchise, both in visuals (aerial cityscape shots as scene breaks) and team set-up (different functions which overlap when the scriptwriter wishes, 3:2 gender ratio, token minority member). I recently watched CSI: New York and was struck by the stylistic similarities. Except that no CSI team has a Ianto to keep them supplied with food and coffee. The CSIs are entertaining enough, but one thing that always bugs me is the utter implausibility of what many consider to be realistic shows. Crappy security camera footage can always be enhanced to give an accurate portrait of a suspect, fingerprints and/or DNA samples can always be found in some database or other, witnesses/suspects can always be made to talk and usually tell the truth (if they don't, they're the killer), the dirt found under a murder victim's shoe is always some kind of incredibly rare sand from Hawaii which is to be only found in a single place in a 100 kilometer radius (the Hawaiian sand bit actually was in an episode of CSI: Miami I think it was). In Torchwood, which is billed as an SF show after all, a face recognition software comes up with 119 matches, fingerprints are not in any databases, potential witnesses are unresponsive or downright abusive, a witness/suspect is actually in the phonebook and tracking down a 19-year-old petty criminal can be more difficult than dealing with alien technology.

Though The Ghost Machine is less CSI: Wherever than it is Torchwood's take on Cold Case/Waking the Dead, i.e. the solving old crimes genre. For when Owen ends up with the ghost machine, he has a paranormal experience. But while Gwen saw a lost child, Owen witnesses the rape and murder of a young woman, a murder that was never solved. And as if that wasn't enough, he gets to feel what the victim felt, too.

The viewer sees only the build-up to the event, not the rape and murder itself. This relative restraint is a good thing in this case. We don't need to see the actual rape and murder - in fact, it isn't even spelled out what happened until later - because it's all there on Owen's face (great acting from Burn Gorman - and I'm very sorry that I had to look up the actor's name, because I didn't remember). And it is doubly significant that it is Owen who has this experience rather than Jack or Gwen or Toshiko, because Owen has been portrayed pretty much as an insensitive jerk up to this point. Having a male character and an insensitive jerk at that suddenly thrust into experiencing the feelings of a female rape victim is interesting enough, but the fact that Owen's ideas about sexual consent are somewhat flexible (see episode one) makes it even more interesting. It makes me wonder whether there wasn't something to all those date rape accusations with regards to the alien sex spray scene in Everything Changes after all (though personally I don't see it as date rape). It would be too much of a coincidence to be otherwise, especially as what happens to Lizzie Lewis is also a date rape gone horribly wrong.

So while the viewer finally gets to see a hint that Owen Harper may be a decent human being after all, Owen's teammates ironically seem to be utterly unaware of how badly the incident has affected Owen. After a simple "Are you alright, Owen?", everybody quickly goes back to figuring out what exactly the ghost machine does (i.e. record intense emotions), totally ignoring the obviously rattled Owen. At which point I was all but yelling at the screen: "Hello! I know he's an asshole, but your colleague is having some problems there. So would someone please try to help him." Though of course, the fact that pretty much everyone ignores Owen's problems is the very thing which causes the tragedy to come.

Owen responds to his experience by devoting himself to bringing the killer to justice. Luckily enough, the girl addressed her murderer by name in the flashback, so he at least knows where to start (slight niggle: How likely is it that all three "ghosts" somehow managed to announce their names?). Unfortunately though, the guy's name is rather common. And - since Torchwood is not Cold Case, where the police have nothing better to do than solve decades old murders - convincing anyone to listen will prove to be more than difficult. There's a great scene where Jack tries to make it clear to Owen that he can't get the case reopened without new evidence, and anyway, solving crimes is not Torchwood's job. "But I saw it happen", Owen says, "I can testify." "And what will you tell them?", Jack counters, "That you saw a 40-year-old murder via an alien artefact?" The exchange ends with Jack telling Owen to go home. Which he promptly does, only to continue brooding over the murder files with a bottle of Jack Daniels to keep him company. One doesn't need to be a psychologist to see that this is a recipe for disaster.

If we include Suzie (though we saw too little of her in the actual episode to judge whether the fact that she was insane should have been obvious), Ghost Machine marks the second time in three episodes that Jack totally missed that one of his people was having problems. So either he's not the most empathic of people or his own damage (which he very obviously has) blind him towards the problems of others. In this case, the best course of action would probably have been taking Owen to the pub and pouring enough alcohol into him to make him pass out or at least dilute his desire for revenge somewhat. Alas, Jack prefers to send Owen home and spend the time teaching Gwen how to shoot instead.

Owen eventually does manage to track down the killer of Lizzie Lewis (he does have a phonebook after all) and decides to pay the man a visit, forcing his way in via a fake ID (apparently Torchwood issues its operatives with a whole battery of them). The killer is an old man now, played by someone who was in Blake's Seven and is apparently very famous, though I wasn't familiar with the actor, as Blake's Seven is a bit of Brit SF that has eluded me so far. Owen makes it clear to the old man that he knows exactly what he did, a tense scene which is made even more menacing by the fact that Owen whispers throughout. By the way, did I mention that the guy playing Owen is really great? He was so threatening in that scene that he almost made me side with a rapist and killer. By the way, one thing I really liked about The Ghost Machine is that unlike all those consumate liars to be found in the likes of Cold Case ("Oh yes, I briefly knew the victim some thirty years ago. Very tragic what happened, wouldn't you say? No, of course, I had nothing to do with that.") this killer wouldn't have a prayer of not giving himself away in an interrogation. To be fair, a murder mystery show like Cold Case operates under different rules than Torchwood (where the identity of the killer isn't much of a mystery). Still, the killer driven insane by paranoia and haunted by his crime for some forty years makes a pleasant change from all those cold fish murderers in the likes of CSI or Cold Case.

The old man eventually throws Owen out with the words "I told you before, you'll get nothing out of me". However, the morning is not entirely wasted, for who just happens to be lurking on the street outside the old man's house? None other than the elusive Bernie Harris. Now this would be an absolutely unbelievable coincidence, except that it turns out (once Owen has managed to catch Bernie after a lovely chase scene through Welsh backyards) that it isn't a coincidence at all. In the course of his criminal career, Bernie apparently came across some alien objects in a storage shed. Most of those objects were both useless and harmless, "foreign coins and strange bits of rock" (all gleefully confiscated by Toshiko), but the ghost machine was another matter entirely. And once Bernie found out what it could do (via witnessing a woman throwing a newborn baby into the river), he decided to use it to make some money by blackmailing people with what he saw in the ghost machine induced visions. Which is also the reason why he was lurking outside the house of the old man. Of course, there is a certain irony to the fact that an amazing piece of alien technology was used for a purpose as mundane as blackmail, particularly as both Owen and Gwen found better uses for it. Though I wonder why it took the Torchwood team so long to find out what Bernie was up to - I thought it was pretty obvious from the moment Owen spotted him outside the old man's house.

Bernie also reveals that the "ghost machine" is only one half of an alien device. The second half is even more frightening, because it supposedly has the power to show the future. And when Bernie used it, he saw himself lying dead on the street outside his home while still young. Torchwood confiscates both halves only to have Gwen accidentally set off the second half (maybe they shouldn't hand the dangerous alien technology to the clueless newbie). Gwen has a frightening vision of herself with blood on her hands, saying "Owen. He had a knife. I couldn't stop it." Gwen's vision is, unlike Bernie's, conveniently vague so that it could mean anything. My initial interpretation was Owen kills the old man with the knife, whereas from the words said it is just as likely that Owen is the one who gets killed or even Bernie (what actually happens is quite different, though).

When Gwen tells Jack about her vision, he tells her that having seen something does not necessarily mean it will come true. Nor will Bernie necessarily die, for that matter, as time is always in flux (spoken like a true time traveller there). Gwen is somewhat reassured by this and decides to inform Bernie that what he saw was only a possible future. For some reason, however, both Jack and Gwen neglect to tell Owen about Gwen's vision, even though it does concern him, which is at least partly responsible for what happens in the end. Come to think of it, much of the tragedy in this episode could have been avoided, if someone had actually taken the time to talk to Owen. Not that Owen is particularly open with his teammates, either. He tells no one except Toshiko (who has been breaking the rules by helping him and hence won't tell anyone either) about his little chat with the killer, which is why the Torchwood team catches on to the blackmail thing much too late. Seems to me that Torchwood have some serious problems with internal communications.

The situation comes to a head, when the killer (sorry, but I can't recall the character's name) has had enough of Bernie's blackmail attempts and decides to pay him a visit, at exactly the same time Gwen is visiting Bernie to tell him that the ghost machine induced vision will not necessarily come true. Owen also picks that same moment to confess that he threatened the killer and might accidentally have set him off - unfortunately too late to warn Gwen that the killer might be coming for Bernie. Minor niggle: What exactly are those headsets good for (except looking cool, that is), when Jack still has to use his mobile to contact Gwen, even though she is wearing her headset at the time?

Outside Bernie's house, Bernie and Gwen are confronted by the killer, and the old man brought a knife, most likely the same knife that killed Lizzie Lewis. And now the old man wants to use that same knife to deal with Bernie and probably finish off Gwen, too, while he's at it, since she's in the way and the old man seems to have a pathological hatred for women anyway, as he blames them for ruining his life. Bernie is understandably paralyzed with fear (after all, he saw himself lying dead on that very street). Gwen is paralyzed, too, which is somewhat less understandable. Okay, she may not have known how to shoot a gun before joining Torchwood, but as a police officer she should nonetheless have been able to tackle an old man armed only with a knife. Of course, Gwen may have been afraid of accidentally causing the very events she's trying to prevent (i.e. the ghost machine induced visions of the future) and hence simply froze up. Still, this scene does smell of the horror movie heroine syndrome with Gwen (and Bernie) patiently standing around being threatened, while waiting for the hero (or heroes in this case, as both Jack and Owen rush to her aid) to rescue her.

Predictably, Jack and Owen have no problem disarming with the old man. But unfortunately, Owen gets hold of the knife during the ensuing struggle and proceeds to hold it to the old man's throat. On first viewing, it seemed a bit unclear why Owen chooses this particular moment to go ballistic - after all, if he wanted to kill the old man for what he did to Lizzie Lewis, killing him while they were alone at his house would have been much more convenient than killing him in front of four witnesses including his boss. Initially, I thought that it was just the sight of the knife that set Owen off. Only upon second viewing did I catch (due to a mumbled line) that what really set Owen off was not seeing the knife but seeing it used to threaten another woman, Gwen. Now Owen suddenly coming within an inch of killing a man to defend Gwen is definitely surprising, considering that so far both characters have mainly expressed extreme dislike for each other. Hmm, could Owen secretly have a thing for Gwen?

Though in the end, the greatest threat to the old man's health turns out to be not Owen at all. For Owen apparently only wanted to scare the old man, and does surrender the knife once he has seen his victim squirm. Unfortunately, Gwen ends up holding the knife, and before she can do anything, the old man (who really doesn't like women, it seems) rushes at her and impales himself on his own knife. Owen, interestingly, immediately tries to save the old man, but it's already too late. Personally, I was rather surprised to see Owen attempting to save the life of a man he had been threatening only seconds before, especially as I had already forgotten by this point that Owen was supposed to be a doctor (he didn't get to display much medical knowledge in the first two episodes). Of course, this moment also illustrates that in moments of crisis, for all his unpleasantness, Owen is still be more interested in saving lives than in taking them. Moreover, it is also highly interesting that the first Torchwood member (excluding Suzie) we see killing someone is not the rather unlikeable Owen (who probably would have deserved to have someone's death on his conscience) but nice Gwen, who doesn't even kill spiders in the bathroom and is supposed to be the moral heart of the team, not to mention the audience identification figure. The contrast between the rather playful firearms training scene earlier in the episode and the grisly reality of death is very notable as well. Even more disturbing is that after three episodes, Gwen has - albeit inadvertedly - caused more deaths than the murderous Suzie Costello, as Gwen is indirectly responsible for the death of the hospital employee in episode 1, all of Carys' victims in episode 2 and now the death of the old man as well. For someone who is supposed to be the moral heart of the team, Gwen sure leaves a lot of blood in her wake. In many ways, The Ghost Machine also marks a point of no return for Gwen. So far, her time with Torchwood has been pretty much a big adventure for Gwen. But now, things are serious, for now she has got blood on her hands.

The story of Owen hunting down a killer is intertwined with a subplot about Gwen's gradually deteriorating homelife with Rhys. The relationship wasn't all that healthy when we first met them in Everything Changes, and Gwen's new job at Torchwood is making things worse. Now it was very obvious from the start that Rhys would be stuck with the Mickey role, i.e. that of the mundane boyfriend dumped for bigger and better things. However, I still liked Mickey and I liked what they did with the character in Doctor Who. Rhys, on the other hand, I don't like at all. As presented in Ghost Machine, he is the stereotypical clingy, whiney partner so common in cop shows. The kind of character who keeps on complaining that his significant other is married to the job, always working and never at home. And I hate that type of character, partly for biographical reasons (I grew up in a family where one parent was absent due to work much of the time, so people whining about "You're home late" seem ridiculous to me), partly because characters of that sort are all about "Me, me, me". Rhys is a classic example of that character. He's constantly phoning Gwen at work (to the point that Owen rolls his eyes when her phone rings), supposedly to ask stupid questions about how to operate the washing machine, but really to ask when she'll be home. And when Gwen says she doesn't know, he throws a fit. Awful character - I don't know why Gwen is putting up with him. Though I do like the fact that the production team gave us a male whiny partner, as most characters of that type tend to be female. Just witness all those annoying ex-wives in cop shows or doctor shows.

It is notable that Gwen barely interacts face to face with Rhys in this episode - most of their interactions are carried out via the phone, which symbolizes the growing distance between them. And there is a very poignant scene where Gwen takes the ghost machine home into her empty flat (three episodes in and Gwen is already violating the rules) and uses it to recapture memories of happiness with Rhys, because she can't be happy with him any other way anymore. When Gwen first unpacks the ghost machine in her flat, I halfway expected it to replay a scene of Rhys cheating on her with someone else. In fact, I almost hoped to see such a scene, because I don't like Rhys and this would get rid of him nicely. But in retrospect, having the machine conveniently reveal that Rhys was cheating on Gwen would have been far too easy. For even though I don't like the character, Rhys isn't a bad guy in himself. He's simply the wrong guy for Gwen, which she is in the process of finding out. And even though Gwen and Rhys seem reunited by the end of this scene, I really don't see them together by the end of the series.

If Rhys is the wrong man for Gwen, it seems as if Jack just might be the right person for her. At any rate, there is a level of intimacy between those two that doesn't exist between either of them and the rest of the Torchwood team. Which isn't that surprising in the case of Gwen, after all she's still new to the team. In the case of Jack, however, it is a bit surprising that he seems to get so much better along with Gwen than with the rest of his team, even though he has probably known them for a long time. Jack's lack of connection with his team is doubly surprising, considering that back in Doctor Who he seemed to be the kind of person who makes friends easily. But of course, various interviews with people involved in the production of Torchwood indicated that the spin-off would feature a Jack who had grown colder and more distant as a reaction to the events of The Parting of the Ways (even more so considering what we didn't know at the time of those interviews) and who needs Gwen in order to reconnect with humanity. Hence, it seems that Torchwood features yet another take on the "lonely and battle-scarred was survivor is saved by the love of a good woman" plot that was also the basis of the first season of new Doctor Who. Which might be clichè, except that Gwen and Jack are both good characters and the chemistry between the actors is great. Particularly the shooting range scene literally crackles with sexual tension, complete with the waving about of phallic objects. Plus, it ends with Gwen and Jack about an inch from having wild and sweaty sex on the floor. In fact, Gwen's hasty "I'd better go home" (after asking Jack if he doesn't get lonely at night) is the only thing that saves them from ending up in bed together. Though ironically, Gwen comes home to an empty flat, because Rhys has apparently tired of waiting for and has gone out by himself (the guy so deserves to be dumped). And the final scene, of course, shows Gwen and Jack watching the sunrise together after a night where Gwen most definitely did not go home.

As the focus of this episode is very much on Owen and Gwen and Jack is the star anyway, Toshiko and Ianto again get very little to do. Toshiko mans the computer and digs up some information about the killer's history of mental health problems (foreshadowing the suicide later on), which she passes on to Owen against Jack's explicit orders. This scene hints at a somewhat deeper connection between Toshiko and Owen, though what sort of connection this is (good friends, former lovers, something else?) is impossible to say at this point. As for Ianto, he makes coffee, brings food, pours brandy and gets to put dangerous objects into the safe. He is certainly a very useful member of the team (if only, because without him they wouldn't have coffee or pizza), but so far we know absolutely nothing about him. Though judging by the "next time" trailer (which looks fabulous BTW) that should change soon.

We do, however, learn a bit more about Jack. For example, we learn that he lives in the Hub (because he has to always watchful, he tells Gwen) and that he never sleeps, probably a side effect of his immortality. Another interesting observation is that Jack does not appear to drink any alcohol. At any rate, he is drinking water when he drugs Gwen in episode 1 and at the end of this episode, Jack is the only one who does not drink from the lovely crystal decanter in his office. This may well be another side effect of his immortality, as he did drink in Doctor Who.

The Ghost Machine makes a bit more use of its Cardiff setting than the previous two episodes. There also are some Welsh in-jokes which are probably impossible for anyone from outside Cardiff to understand. For example, there is some sort of running gag regarding the part of town where Bernie and the old man live, a place bearing the poetic name "Splott". Jack apparently mispronounces the name early on (at any rate, Ianto corrects him) to general hilarity. Which wouldn't be a problem except that Jack seems to have been in Cardiff for some time (probably decades even) and should have figured out how to properly pronounce the local tonguetwisters by now. Plus, the others also call it "Splott" later on. Or maybe I am totally misunderstanding something here. That said, I actually don't mind the occasional reference I don't get and I do like seeing parts of Britain that are not London or Manchester and small quirky towns, where 90 percent of British TV series and films seem to be set. Plus, I enjoyed the fact that The Ghost Machine showed us parts of Cardiff that look more like Britain (e.g. the chase through typically British backyards) and less like CSI style US cityscapes. Because frankly, the many aerial shots of not particularly impressive modern buildings did seem a bit weird. Besides, it is nice to finally see Cardiff as itself rather than pretending to be someplace else. I'm also getting used to the Welsh accents of many castmembers by now. Though I do understand if certain people have problems with regionalism in TV shows. Now I don't have a problem with Wales, frankly I know too little about Wales to have any problems with it. But I do refuse to watch any German TV shows which are excessively Bavarian, so I can understand why some British viewers may mind the Welshness of Torchwood (which I personally find quite endearing).

All in all, The Ghost Machine is a quiet but nice tale, which actually gets better with repeated viewing. And it does show us that Owen has some redeeming qualities, though he is back to being an asshole by the end of the story. Still, this seems to have been a bit of a filler episode, while tomorrow's looks absolutely spectacular.

posted by Cora link 01:41