Saturday 23 February 2008

TW 207: Dead Man Walking

Oh...evil in the dark...what a let down...


"People died because you brought me back."

That should really be Torchwood's motto. "We do things, and everyone suffers." Jack gets the other resurrection glove (as we suspected - but I'll leave it to Jon to work out if they got the correct hand side) and, boom!, things go terribly wrong. Is this really the conclusion to the "something's moving in the dark" arc? (Which wasn't the big beastie of last series?) 'Cos I have to say: big dark = big pussy. Ooohhh, watching the exciting battle of Burn Gorman trying to pretend he's fighting a CGI skelly! Any build up from daring to kill off a team member? Gone!

Freema makes the opening credits, yay!, but any goodwill towards Marsha has vanished as she quickly becomes "girl in distress" from the Hand of Fear reject. Her suffering is all too easily dismissed with a wave of the hand at the end that no-one mentions, much like the cut from the base to the hospital. I can see the author saying "oh, stuff it, let's just cut to it" and hoping everyone would think it was daring. (And once again we wonder if Matt Jones is RTD's puppet, the similarities to The Impossible Satan Pit Planet are overwhelming.)

This episode does manage to step away somewhat from the character arcs, but then it's hard to do character when one's a dead man and not many people can relate to that. And the heartwarming Tosh/Owen near-date moment of last week is conveniently forgotten and Tosh is back to shy-mouse mode. This episode is, in many ways, a step backwards.

Nice build up, but the Buffy-est ending evah!


Next week: Oh, will you just die already? Owen really has become Spike, dead to the world...

[END]

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