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You think you're old and hardened and can take anything TV can dish out. And then you get to the end of the second season of Torchwood and you watch “Exit Wounds” and you wind up crying in front of your stupid computer monitor.
I’m just gonna take a minute.
[weeps]
It’s the characters. That’s what it is. Whether I’m producing narrative or consuming it, I’m a character-driven person. And this is why, in an episode that includes a lot of WTFOMGBBQNO in other respects, if you kill off two of the main characters, even if I’ve never liked one of them, then I will apparently cry for them, even though I know they are imaginary.
As I said, I don’t like Owen; but that mid-season death arc really attached me to him in a way that is not precisely the same as liking. I suppose “Fragments” was an attempt to reinforce that, but it didn’t really work on me that way because I actually hated all the backstories they came up with in that episode except for Jack’s. (Ianto’s is sort of cute but I hate it that they brought the pterodactyl into it, because it retroactively makes Jack’s decision to use the pterodactyl to execute Cyberlisa gratuitously cruel.) They just felt very manipulative, and now I understand why: they were grooming us to cry for Owen and Tosh. There’s nothing about Owen’s behavior before “Fragments” that suggests he has some kind of great tragic love and loss in his past that turned him into an asshole. Why do we need that? To explain how Owen became an asshole even though he’s such a brilliant doctor? I have spent enough time in hospitals to know that being an asshole is actually a common brilliant-doctor personality trait. What I really like about Owen’s development, actually, is that we come to care about him even as he remains an asshole; and that even when he’s at his most assholic, he does still want to be a doctor and heal people. That’s why his death scene is so horribly affecting. After the time he spends in “Day in the Death” hating existence, to see how he’s fought his way back to finding existence meaningful, which is a real victory for him, and yet he’s still Owen enough to go into that full-on freakout when he finds out this is the end for him. The way he gets over it when he realizes how much pain he’s causing Tosh is the final blow to the old feels. We don’t know what would have happened if he and Tosh had gone on that date; one imagines that relationship would have had a hard time getting off the ground, and he never says that he loves her. But he does care enough about her to stop worrying about himself and make comforting her his first priority. For Owen, that’s the freaking Ultimate Sacrifice.
As for Tosh…her death is longer, more drawn-out, and more riddled with heroism cliches; and I also hate her “Fragments” backstory because it turns her into a victim who has to be rescued by Jack. Still, I appreciate the fact that someone actually put some thought, over the past two years, into developing the ‘technical genius’ character–which often doesn’t happen even when it’s a guy. Not a huge fan of “Greeks Bearing Gifts,” during which Tosh is pretty easily manipulated; but I did find my crusty old heart warming over “To The Last Man,” and she eventually gets more grown-up about her unrequited thing with Owen. Anyway, Tosh’s death certainly couldn’t have been made any more badass, and yet at the same time she gets to be herself and to be ‘with’ Owen in his next-to-last moments. Plus her little post-death Easter Egg is just that little extra spike in the heart that brings out the tears–especially the way she echoes, without of course having known she was doing it, Owen’s final reassurance to her: “It’s OK.”
The first two seasons of Torchwood spend a lot of time with death. This was one of the things I found interesting about it from the first episode. Everyone who’s brought back by the resurrection glove insists that there is no existence after death–that “there’s nothing.” This would seem to be another of the ‘grown-up’ aspects of Torchwood: death is the end, heaven is a lie we use to comfort children. But obviously this can’t be true, or the resurrection glove wouldn’t work; the spirits of the departed must exist in some form after death or they couldn’t be called back. So no matter how much they can fuck around with it, and no matter how many times Jack actually goes through it, death remains a mystery. Even after Owen is reanimated and spends the second half of the season ‘dead,’ he doesn’t know any more about what being dead actually means, from a spiritual/psychic point of view, than anyone else. In “Dead Man Walking,” Jack implies that he knows something about being dead and tries to counsel Owen to “be brave,” but we have no idea what he’s talking about and we never find out. Despite all the ways in which death misbehaves in the Torchwood universe–Jack’s invulnerability/immortality, Suzie and Owen’s reanimations, all the activity in that morgue, the resurrection gloves, whatever the hell was going on with Eugene–it remains real and (in the long run) inevitable, and familiarity with it doesn’t make it any less terrifying. So in the end, “It’s OK” turns out to be, really, just about the bravest thing a Torchwood team member can say about his or her own death. Yes, I am about to launch myself into either nonexistence or something that’s probably worse; but it’s OK. We can’t save each other from this. All we can do is try to help each other make our lives mean something before they’re over.
Hence the feels. Now, about the action plot, the less said the better. I liked Hart better before he was redeemed, and Gray…forget it. He’s just one big motiveless malignance. We don’t know enough about him to care about what’s happened to him, and even Jack doesn’t really know the adult Gray well enough to have any kind of chemistry with him. The writing for him is pretty one-note, and the actor does nothing to elevate it. Barrowman is doing what he can to compensate by churning the feels on his end of that relationship; but basically Gray comes out of nowhere, blows a lot of shit up, and then when it’s about time for the resolution he more or less allows himself to be put on ice by his big brother so that Jack can once again save the team–or at least save part of it.
Anyway. I have heard a total of zero good things about “Children of Earth,” so I will probably postpone getting into that mess. But all in all I do not regret the time I burned on these first two seasons. Yes, there were episodes that were basically just cow pats (”From out of the Rain” wins that prize for season 2). Yes, even the good episodes are often somewhat undermined by the over-the-topness of the monsters (”Sleepers,” for instance, would be a good standalone episode were it not for the crazy arm-swords; ditto with “End of Days” and the giant goat-satan monster). But they had a great cast and great characters and I enjoyed spending the time with them. I will miss them.