A Day In The Death.

TV Last week’s somewhat disappointing installment, was an episode so dramatically inept I went all emo and wrote fifteen hundred words which made me thoroughly depressed so I can’t imagine what it was like for you reading it. I wondered if after many weeks rehabilitation, Torchwood had finally done a Renton, mainlined and disappeared into the carpet. I really wasn’t looking forward to A Day In The Death, which hasn’t been the case since the dark days of series one. The very title and the brief synopsis in The Guardian’s tv guide didn’t inspire too much confidence: ‘Owen searches for absolution’ which sounds for all the world like the plot of an average episode of Touched By An Angel or Highway To Heaven.

And indeed the opening of the episode didn’t help matters as a regular character who we’ve already met told us his name and gave a synopsis of the past season and a half, illustrated by montage sequence that included the dodgy moment from Everything Changes for which the jury’s still out on whether it was date rape. It seemed as though we were going to have to endure another Love & Monsters knock off and my finger was actually hovering over the remote control, mere seconds away from Rock Rivals (am I wrong about Michelle Collins?). I didn’t think I could endure a whole fifty minutes of Owen talking to me, especially with all of the other voices in my head.

And indeed throughout death related plot holes nagged. If Owen can’t exhale, how come we could hear him breathing and for that matter since the breath isn’t their to vibrate his vocal chords how are we able to hear him talk? How come he could work the iPod if his body lacks the necessary oomph? When he came out the bay, where did all the water which must have entered his lungs go? Some unseen chunderfest? Surely that’s going to attract attention. These are exactly the kinds of things I usually jump upon, throw in the face of a writer to suggest that they’re really not looking at what they’re doing (although I missed the one about the neatly clothed Weevils – I’m slipping).

I would jump on them, if this wasn’t one of the most thoughtful, most intelligent, most, well, romantic pieces of writing the series has yet seen. Joseph Lidster’s first television script was perfectly paced, poetic mediation on the meaning of life. This was everything last week’s goofy episode could have been, capturing the philosophical mood with far more delicacy than Last Man Standing’s discussion of death, which ended up simply full of deaths. Torchwood has experimented with these themes before (Out of Time) but by focusing on a regular character and reducing the mission story to little more than an infiltration it was able to more clearly provide an emotional through line and actually make us care about what must be one of the series most unpopular characters.

Flashback structures are incredibly difficult to get right, particularly if crosscutting between two time frames – there’s always the danger that the audience will become so engrossed in the flashback that the return to the present is an unnecessary wrench. On this occasion, the ‘present’ setting gave an insight into Owen’s state of mind in his past, not simply linking exposition, a perfect example being his attitude to Tosh when she appeared at his apartment and proceeded to complain about the life he no longer led. It also worked because as well as finding out what Owen’s state of mind was, there was the mystery of who the suicidal woman was and what led up to her wanting to end it. I genuinely gasped when the grim fate of her husband was revealed in that beautifully shot sequence, aided by Christine Bottomley’s all to realistic performance.

Similarly, you can’t help but feel that a lesser episode, after casting Richard Briers, would have introduced Henry Parker (Sir Clive Sinclair to Henry Van Stattan’s Bill Gates presumably) far earlier than occurred here, perhaps in a false attempt to create suspense by showing us some glow from the MacGuffin. He would have been a far more vital presence, perhaps with some nefarious plan to break into the Hub to steal some items for his collection.

Instead, Lidster cleverly built up the suspense instead by creating a range of obstacles which underscored the importance of whatever if was Owen was meant to be capturing and then finally revealing a decrepit old man who’s clinging onto life using a giant gleaming placebo. In just a few lines, aided by proper actor Briers, Parker was a far more rounded character than we were used to. I imagined he was an Indiana Jones figure in his youth with an interest in alien artefacts. I almost wished he’d mentioned the Sontarans to tie it in to a similar speech in Eye of the Gorgon from The Sarah Jane Adventures.

But of course, the episode’s biggest achievement was in the treatment of Owen. With the exception of the breathing malfunction this was a rational investigation into how a dead person still walking around might cope with not being able to do any of the things humans take for granted such as drinking, eating, sleeping and bleeding. I’ve complained about Burn Gorman’s walk in the past, and he didn’t seem very comfortable during his season one focus Combat, but here I think we saw his very best work, usefully sympathetic even when delivering V from V for Vendetta-style platitudes. The goodish doctor became quite poetic in his mortality, but much of this was to underscore the differences between himself and Jack, ‘You can’t die and I can’t live’ he says.

Lidster toyed with the audience, the MacGuffin’s healing power just one reset button away from bringing Owen back to the world of the living. But again, we’re confounded since the man is staying dead, at least in the short term and how beautiful that the wobbly blob created a benign lightshow for once, instead of threatening to blow up half of Cardiff? Whilst it’s still a shame the production team felt the need to put another essential immortal in the midst of Torchwood, at least Owen has this added level of fragility, in that any of the cuts and bruises which are all a days work at this organisation which may or may not be more or less important than UNIT. That hand of his isn’t going to last long is it? Now that he’s back working for Torchwood though, aren’t we at some point going to have the icky prospect of a corpse doing an autopsy on a corpse?

Three episodes in and Martha’s out and apart from the infiltration of the Pharm from a couple of weeks ago her appearance hasn’t really lived up to the hype. Freema’s been as sparkly as ever and the actual scenes she’s been in were rather sweet, particularly in this episode, but it did seem a bit pointless bringing her back only to have her appear in episodes focusing on Owen. Perhaps having the appearances sprinkled throughout the series would have provided more impact – as seems to be the plan in Doctor Who – rather than have her (with the exception of becoming an oldie) moping about the hub for two episodes. Production and budgetary issues perhaps, but you can’t help but feel that she could have gone on a girly night out with Gwen and Tosh or something. See you in a month or two, Martha.

“Thanks.”

Who said that?

Next week: Gwen's got a bad case of the Hilarys.