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I don’t like Owen Harper. I don’t feel bad about that because I’m clearly not supposed to. He’s introduced as a cynical, obnoxious, shallow asshole to whom women matter only as casual sex partners and for whom the phrase “commitment issues” is laughably inadequate as a description of his difficulties with human relationships of all kinds. His looking-out-for-number-one attitude creates a lot of problems for characters I like better (in “Ghost Machine,” for instance, when his response to finally experiencing compassion for someone in pain is to go all vigilante on everyone’s ass, and in “End of Days,” where he deals with having his heart broken by shooting his commanding officer). And yet, so far I have been unexpectedly moved by the arc dealing with his death in “Reset”–and this despite the fact that both “Dead Man Walking” and “A Day in the Death” are, from a premise-and-plot point of view, vastly flawed episodes. Unlike “They Keep Killing Suzie,” in which the existential horror of the revitalized Suzie’s existence is buried by the elaborate con game constructed by the plot, Owen’s death arc foregrounds the human consequences of Jack’s unwillingness to let Owen go. In a way, ironically enough, watching Owen struggle to adjust to life after death connects with my own experience of going through menopause.
It cheers me up somehow to know that if Owen were real, and able to read that sentence, it would make him throw up. But for those less squeamish, you can read all about it behind the cut tag.
Menopause came for me early. I underwent a total hysterectomy as treatment for endometrial cancer several years ago, and once they take out your ovaries, there’s nothing left to make estrogen for you except for whatever body fat you might have. The effect of this loss is gradual, but unmistakeable and not fully reversible, though as I have discovered it is possible to mitigate it. Without getting too much into the details, let me just say that estrogen is not all that dries up. Essentially, whoever designed the human female body assumed that once we were all out of eggs, we wouldn’t be needing sex any more.
Even without hot flashes and the other stereotypical symptoms, which I never had, this is a rough transition. I’m warning all y’all now–and if you’ve got ovaries, this will eventually happen to you–that it is not pleasant and you are going to hate it. Unless you go in for hormone replacement therapy, it will eventually become impossible for you to experience sex the way you did before. (By the way…all those actresses in their 40s and 50s who appear to have stopped aging at 35? That’s hormone replacement therapy. It’s the loss of estrogen that causes us to start looking like old women.) And that is a loss. It’s not as bad as being dead; but it’s bad.
Anyway. I bring this up because one of the things that Owen struggles with in “Day in the Death” is the loss of sex; and one doesn’t see that story told very often on TV. The writers have basically decided that Owen’s dead body works more or less like a vampire’s: he can walk and talk, and he’s forever young, but although his body doesn’t decay, it doesn’t change either; all his biological processes have stopped. This means, of course, that he can’t get it up any more; it also means he can’t eat or drink (well, he can, but he derives no pleasure from it and the results are not good) and he no longer feels pain or really much sensation at all. Since this covers basically everything Owen’s ever done with his life apart from his work at Torchwood, he is understandably depressed to discover he’s lost it all.
So Owen is stuck trying to motivate an existence of which he cannot rid himself–any attempt to kill himself will only leave him trapped in an even less functional body–but which gives him no pleasure and very little to hope for. It is a predicament to which surprisingly and alarmingly large numbers of people can relate, since Owen’s death-in-life replicates many of the features of clinical depression: numbness, loss of interest in favorite activities, isolation, feelings of worthlessness, etc. And to its credit, the episode takes some time to sit with that, and to allow us to feel the horrible emptiness of Owen’s daily existence.
At some point, I said to myself: His problem is that he keeps trying to lead the kind of life he had when he was alive, and that’s just nothing but pain. It can only remind him of how much better everything used to be. He needs to start discovering new things that he can do now that he’s dead that he wasn’t able to do while he was alive. He needs to accept the change, let go of the past, and build a different future. Because of course that’s what I did, eventually.
And that’s what the case in “A Day in the Death” eventually allows Owen to do. Now, there’s a lot that’s stupid about the way this case is set up. For instance, it’s ludicrous to suggest that fucking Torchwood would be stymied by a few heat sensors in some guy’s home security system; and it’s also a problem that these energy spikes Tosh is reading are always treated as lethal until we suddenly find out they’re not. Also, the Star Trek films have ruined me for Voyager references. However, with a tiny headcanon adjustment, none of that shit matters.
For I have decided, in my “Day in the Death” headcanon, that this whole case was a put-up job organized by Tosh and Jack, in collusion with Gwen and Ianto, solely for the purpose of showing Owen that he has a future. We’re not shown exactly why Jack decides to relieve Owen of duty, but one can assume that he had already started showing the emotional strain. So, Jack is sharp enough to know that a) Owen is constitutionally incapable of accepting help when it is offered to him overtly; b) nevertheless, Owen cannot get himself out of this hole without help. So he takes Owen off duty, which takes Owen out of danger during the worst of the emotional stuff and also allows him to call a team meeting without him and plan the hoax mission. They arrange it so that while he’s bringing the coffee he can overhear them discussing the plan. Gwen’s worrying about the heat sensors reminds Owen that there is at least one upside to his change of life, which is that he can now foil most security systems, which are naturally designed to keep out living people. He volunteers, which is the first step out of the hole, since it allows him to connect with other people and indicates that he is finally taking an interest in something. They accept his help, showing him that they still want him on the team. Martha’s attention and concern give him the chance to do a little of the old flirting, and perhaps clue him in to the fact that since most of his flirting was never going to amount to anything anyway, he can still at least enjoy that part of the game. He literally gets a charge out of outing himself as dead to the security goon, which suggests he’s developing the ability to be proud of his new self. And when he confronts the nearly-dead millionaire, he has the opportunity to make a human connection with someone whose predicament he recognizes as similar to his own, which proves to him that in fact he’s not so unique that he is doomed to eternal isolation. As for the Pulse, in my headcanon Tosh realized that its energy was benign (after all, if anyone was able to figure out what that thing was and how it affected people, it would be her) and that it would have a salutary effect on Owen. The death of the millionaire, of course, was not part of the plan; but fortunately the Pulse could counteract Owen’s despair at not being able to save him. Owen’s intervention with the girl on the roof is another sign that he’s making the transition: instead of saving lives as a doctor, he’s now able to use his unique perspective on death to save other people from bringing it on themselves. The worst thing that could possibly happen to him has happened; and yet he has made the transition, and said yes to...well, to continued existence, anyway.
And that’s worth a couple hours of fairly cheesy plotting, in my book. With a show like Torchwood, I can accept ridiculous crap about resurrection gloves, being saved by Faith, and fifteenth century legends of Death that Gwen found on Google as the cost of being able to raise questions like: what does it mean to be alive? Would it be better or worse if we didn’t die? How do you survive the loss of something so important that life itself is a metaphor for it? To me that’s what science fiction and fantasy are for: to ask the questions that realism is just too cool to even admit to having.