back to black

this is rhys. he doesn't get to have a spiffy torchwood-logo'd action-y wallpaper image like the core torchwood team -- more's the pity, since he's totally worthy of one. rhys is the glue that holds gwen together ... and, while jack has been messing up badly at playing defender-of-earth, gwen's been doing a lot of the heavy lifting, with rhys there to carry her bag and come up with brilliant theories every step of the way.

this review is shorter and not as originally written, b/c my macbook's hard drive crashed yesterday, taking with it my work on "day five." thankfully, i have an awesome brother-in-law who sorted me out on trouble-shooting and buying advice (new HD on the way). and also a spare laptop, my trusty old ibook g4. so now come the KAPS:

SO TORCHWOOD: CHILDREN OF EARTH "DAY FIVE" AIRED LAST NIGHT ON BBC AMERICA, BUT I'LL STILL SAY SPOILERS AHEAD! BEWAAAAAAAAAAAARE.

we got some answers at last in this episode, which is rich in deep, dark irony. but one burning mystery remains: what will become of the TW SUV?

anyway. rhys didn't have much to do here, except sit on a park bench with a laptop, waiting for gwen's signal to transmit evidence to the world's media. and help gwen try to hide the kids rhiannon and johnny had taken in. btw, the aliens want the kids for the "hit." they're mainlining earth children. and it seems to be a growth market (or a serious addiction). it's kind of horrifying and kind of darkly funny -- very russell davies.

and so today the children must be collected -- all of them, say the 456. the afternoon quickly degenerates into scary scenes of the-monster-is-us: soldiers descending on the kids, citizens fighting back, everyone screaming, and gwen running running running ...



... but jack saves the day by reversing the polarity on the 456 -- which requires a child, steven, who will of course have to die. jack saves the world but kills his grandson, alienating his daughter for, probably, ever. his fellow middleman, frobisher, also pays in blood, after finally drawing the line when the PM taps him to be the government's symbolic dupe and publicly send his daughters for "inoculation." instead, froby goes home and shoots his family and himself, mere moments before jack fixes everything.

bridget takes the torchwood contact lenses and records the whole child-snatching operation, ruining the PM's career and leaving denise effectively in charge. boo-yah!



so where's RTD gonna go after all this horror and trauma? after burning down the whole bloody thing? ianto dead, and more of a mystery than ever? (it seems like a waste that ianto could have blossomed as a character and now won't get the chance; but i guess that's life.) torchwood disintegrated? jack mercilessly frying his own grandson, tears streaming down his cheeks while his daughter screams her son's name from outside?

well, where else but six months later, as rhys and a very pregnant gwen meet jack at night on a hilltop. she gives him his time agent wrist gizmo, and he says the whole planet is like a graveyard to him. she cries and says it wasn't your fault, but jack says ianto, steven, owen, tosh ... everybody was his fault. he began to like it, and look what he became. the monster was us ... but it was also jack.

well, like i said. he wasn't all that fantastic a person (charming or not) even before he became immortal. but i guess he tried. so maybe he'll live long enough to learn how to do better. but for now he's too tormented to stick around. so, time to go off to the intergalactic monastery and become the face of boe, or something. yep, he's running away -- again. gwen weeps ... for jack, for her lost purpose, for everything they've all lost. and rhys -- who is still there, like always -- says let's go home. gwen takes his comforting arm.

"yeah."

TW: CoE comes out on video this tuesday.