Adam.

TV Am I the only one who would have preferred the post-Adam versions of the Torchwood crew to have stuck around for the rest of the series, on balance far fruitier and interesting than the characters we’re generally following around? Both Naoki Mori and Burn Gorman seemed far more comfortable in those skins, the former proving that the halting delivery of ‘real’ Tosh is her approach to the character and not performing in general, the latter a potential poster boy for a vocal percentage of the viewing audience (I could tell you stories). What fun to have Ianto just on the edge of homicide all of the time, the viewer never quite sure if he’ll save a weevil's victim or bang their skull against the shutters of the nearest off license.

Jack too benefited from having his memories back, since we no longer have to imagine what kind of a child he was – more on his home world later, but no wonder Jack developed such a open-minded approach to relationships if the only thing to do all day is play rounders (or whatever that was) on a beach. Only Gwen didn’t change that much although there’s probably a great sitcom in the idea of the bloke whose girlfriend keeps forgetting who he is. Oh hold on, someone’s already done that.


If Torchwood was a passenger train it would have a plaque on the side with the words 'entertainingly bonkers' emblazoned on it in golden Helvetica each weekly station stop a highlight and who would have thought that could ever happen? Adam was yet another episode which aped a well-worn sci-fi premise but still managed to shine. Genre fans probably noticed elements of everything from Red Dwarf’s Thanks For The Memories, as I predicted last week Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Conundrum and it even imitated the trick from Buffy’s Superstar of working the interloper into already familiar footage from previous episodes. But it more than made up for its lack of originality through sheer bloody minded invention and experimentation.

Writer Catherine Tregenna’s cleverest decision was to dwell on the changes rather than use them as a backdrop for some less interesting b-plot related to weevils or mysterious murder or whatever the series equivalent of Star Trek’s spacial anomaly might be. She's confident enough in her abilities and the viewer’s interest in these characters to let us simply enjoy the flip sides of their personalities and watching alien Adam change their memories, and in the midst of all that reveal far more about the origins of Captain Jack than we’ve previously seen but not in such a way as it changes his relationship with the team who still don't have a sodding clue who he is despite their apparently messianic devotion.

You could speculate that in the previous series, something like Gwen forgetting who Rhys is would have been the single focus of an episode, with the scene in which she pulls a gun on him being the finale, but here that was just the start of an episode, which despite being a character study developed with some crazy momentum. Giving people false memories is fascinating but then, in the case of Ianto, creating personality changing, murderous encounters as a weapon is pretty shocking and as shot by Andy Goddard probably one of the darkest moments yet seen this series.

I wonder if Tregenna used these kinds of negative memories to signpost that fact that in giving the episode a set piece construction in which each gripping moment is heralded by Adam’s touch, she’s actually it’s not too far from giving this theatre of cruelty the kind of structure you find in slasher films with detective figures -- in the Scream films that’s Sydney Prescott, in this Torchwood, Jack trying to discover who the source of the brutality. The beats were surprisingly similar with one victim becoming suspicious (Ianto) and getting disastrously close to the guilty, their sacrifice giving the detective enough information to figure out the murderer’s identity.

Which in this case was Adam. Every episode of Torchwood this series has the featured the disruption of the status quo by a guest alien or Rhys and this spectre of the mind, deliciously played by the fittingly named (for Torchwood) Bryan Dick fitted the bill perfectly, aided by those atmospheric inserts in which we actually saw the memories manifest themselves within each dupes cranium (does bullet time ever get old?). He wasn’t allowed to steal the show from the other characters though and even in the scenes when he inflicted pain the focus was very much on his effects rather than his malevolence.

This was no more apparent when he became the trigger for Jack and us to discover some of the origin of the ‘Captain’. A healthy contrast from the urban sprawl of the dinas a sir Caerdydd, this sandy wilderness was redolent of nostalgic golden Sundays on Rhyl beach and Star Wars’s Tatooine, especially the fashions, all towels in Earthy colours. Sympathetically realised, this world, wherever it was (Boeshane Peninsula?), teased with what we didn’t find out about it – like that city, part-Logopolis, part-sandstone New New York. Who were ‘they’ and why was the invasion so inevitable? And as a bonus question did anyone else think ‘Daleks!’ for a brief moment before the shrieking began?

It seems that all lead characters with broken personalities are doomed to have endured the death of a parent at a young age (nice one Propp and Campbell) and to lose a sibling in mysterious circumstances is doubly bad luck and since this is the second mention of it this series will probably be of massive importance towards the end. All this sequence lacked was a closing shot of young whatever his name (might as well be Anakin or Luke) was standing on a dune looking up at twin moons as the music swelled. Of course we’re now in the interesting position of knowing more about Jack’s past than he does (unless the grains of sand which filtered through his fingers offered a successful momento mori).

I expect that the closing scenes of hypnotherapy will divide fans but for me they were another extraordinary risk in an episode chock full of them. Why shouldn’t we have glimpse into the relative ordinary memories of the team after the Jack flashbacks? Most of them were sweet too even if it seems an opportunity missed that Tosh didn’t say something along the lines of ‘I was in a hospital. There was a pig in a space suit and a tall goofy looking man in a leather jacket. That was nifty…’ They’re also retrospectively justifying Owen’s attitude – his mother didn’t love him explaining a lot. But I will miss the nerd version, his cartoonish pining for Tosh far more poignant than the reverse status quo.

Only in the very final moments, as the team realised they'd lost two days of their lives, was a rather obvious haulage firm managing anomaly overlooked. Imagine the conversation between Rhys and Gwen when she finally decided to put in an appearance at home. Him: “Hello love. Who you feelin’ now?” Her: “Hwot dyoo mean?” “Ave you got your memories bakk?” “I’ve lost two days, but other than thaatt….” “Yooo pulled a gun on me. Jakk and Adam were the only ones who remembered who I was and we went to the supermaakett and well y’knooow.” “Don’t be dafft. What’s for teee? Ooo’s Adam?”

Next week: On and on she goes, Little Miss Martha Jones, I said on and on and on and on …