Tommy is a man out of time. Woken every year from his cryogenic sleep, Jack promises that one day, they will need him. This year his time, and Tosh’s, will come… but his time is 1918…
Length 50’28”
First Transmitted
9:00pm, 30th January 2008 (and in edited form at 7pm the day after), BBC Two.
Guest Cast
Anthony Lewis (Tommy Brockless); Roderic Culver (Gerald); Siobahn Hewlett (Harriet); Lizzie Rogan (Nurse); Ricky Fearon (Foreman)
Writer Helen Raynor
Director Andy Goddard
Setting
Tosh’s calendar shows a date of Friday 20th. As we know this series is set in 2008 (parallel with Doctor Who’s third series, and “90 years” after 1918) and the only Friday 20th this year is in June.
Did You Spot?
Owen gets punched while resurrected Tommy – he complains of similar occurrences in Everything Changes. Tommy comments about saving the world in his pyjamas – the Doctor did this in The Christmas Invasion.
Twisted Reality
Field Marshall Haig is quoted in the opening scene, and in the title of the episode. Tommy wonders if he looks like Charlie Chaplin and recalls Captain Scott leaving for the Antarctic for the second time in 1910. Captain Jack talks about his experiences of The Great War. There is some stock footage of the unrest in Iraq on the television while Tommy speaks to Tosh about being in the war – the BBC News logo has been removed, as with all most occurrences of news footage in the Doctor Who universe. Shell shock is a term used by the military in the past (more recently called Combat Stress Reaction) to cover most psychological and physiological disorders caused by the experiences of war – it also the title of a 2003 Doctor Who novella by Simon A Forward, published by Telos.
Love is in the Air
Poor love-stricken Tosh has evidently been harbouring a growing affection for Tommy, who had left his girlfriend shortly before he left 1918, over the past four years – they are able to consummate their relationship before Tommy returns to 1918. As Jack and Ianto are discussing Tommy, they share a moment in which Jack admits he would not want to have never known Ianto (an indication of love?). Ianto is incredibly moved and leans in to kiss Jack passionately. We see an unusually sensitive Owen advising Tosh in the hospital and consoling her at the end, having experienced a similar situation the previous year (Out of Time) – the second time he has hinted at having some affection for her.
If it’s Alien, it’s Ours
Harriet is using some sort of detector to find the ghosts. The rift key – though it is unclear whether it was built by Torchwood. The team also possess a psychic projection unit.
Torchwood Shop: Now Open for Business
We see a very old Torchwood logo on the documents kept by the 1918 team.
Cymru am Byth
The nurse screaming “You shouldn’t be in huer!” has one of the strongest Welsh accents in the Whoniverse.
To Live and Die in Cardiff
Though there are no visible deaths in this episode, we know that Tommy was sent back to France, still shell-shocked to continue fighting on the front line – he was executed three weeks later by firing squad by British troops for cowardice (though his apparent lack of courage was due to the shell-shock, or, battle fatigue). We are also told of the fates of his parents.
Sounds Brilliant
Mumm-Ra’s “She’s Got You High” (the fourth single from their first album, These Things Move in Threes) plays in the pub while Tosh and Tommy play pool. At the opening and end of the episode, we hear “One of These Mornings” by Moby (from his seventh album, 18) – some of the incidental music, most noticeably when Tommy and Tosh return to The Hub to hear Jack’s plan, echoes Moby’s style heavily.
Quotables
Owen: This gets harder every year.
Ianto: Good left hook though.
Tommy: Saving the world in my pajamas – how daft is that?
Jack: This time tomorrow he’ll be back in 1918
Ianto: In his own time. Would you go back to yours… if you could?
Jack: Why…would you miss me?
Ianto: Yup.
Weren’t You In?
Anthony Lewis was first seen in a 1995 episode of Cracker, and later in segments of A Touch of Frost (1996), The Detectives (1996), Cardiac Arrest (1996), Children’s Ward (1998), Adam’s Family Tree (1997), Emnmerdale Farm (1999-2202), Dalziel and Pascoe (2004), Doctors (2004), Holby City (2004) and Respectable (2006).
Unanswered Questions
Tommy from 2008 tells Gerald and Harriet via the rift to take him out of the hospital – how did they figure out that they would have to freeze him and thaw him out once a year? How many years passed before they figured it out? Did the ghosts only show up in the hospital once a year? Owen’s bedside manner has improved a LOT – what caused this change? How did Torchwood enforce a temporal lock on a piece of tin? Why is Ianto so bitter about “nothing changing”? How were Gerald or Harriet able to draw or describe to an artist what Tosh looked like so accurately based on the few seconds they saw her? How did Jack know that Tommy wouldn’t retain any of his memories of being frozen? Why doesn’t he? Jack’s explanation that the freezing has something to do with it makes no sense whatsoever. And while it would certainly preserve the timeline, but with no proof that he would lose his memories it is awfully risky to send him back without altering them. He has lived approximately 90 days since he was originally frozen. When the timeshift starts, what is the effect? Did they have any cleanup work to do?
Fuck Ups
Jack tells us that a million British soldiers died in the Great War, whereas actually the total was closer to 900,000. When they run onto the pier, Tosh and Tommy run straight over a reflective panel that disappears in the following shot. Tosh drops her bag on the pier twice in the scene they decide to go back to Tosh’s flat.
Torchwood: Declassified Episode 2.03 (8’24”)
Broadcast BBC Two, Thursday 31st January, 7:50pm, immediately after the edited version of the main episode.
Naoko Mori, Russell T Davies, Anthony Lewis, Chris Chibnall and Andy Goddard discuss their reactions to the plot and the massive wind machine.
Helen Raynor and Davies explain why Tosh took centre stage and Mori bemoans Tosh’s love life. John Barrowman still believes Tosh gets more action than he does.
Rayner compares Owen to Tommy and the Tommy/Tosh relationship. Goddard, Mori, Chibnall and Rayner talk about the characters of Tosh and Tommy.
Mori, Goddard and Lewis takes us behind the scenes of the shooting while Rayner talks about the goodbyes.
Site Review by Arthur Penn
Helen Raynor doesn’t do lines. She doesn’t even do moments. Her talents lie in sublimely beautiful plots and storylines.
(Let’s forget Daleks in Manhatten. I know I have.)
I’m struggling to remember a classic line from this episode, or more than a handful of those “tingle” moments that Torchwood occasionally specialises in… And yet, with To The Last Man, this new season goes from strength to strength. Such a simple, bold and straightforward concept, and yet the fifty minutes fly by.
As always, while Chris Chibnall finds some of the most talented writers in the UK, the director and cast deserve due credit for making the most out of the characters created for them. After the poor attempt last year at giving Tosh a love story (nothing against the lesbian aspects of Greeks, but the whole relationship there never quite rang true), Mori clearly relishes the chance to work with a far more believable plotline, and gives us some of her best work to date, dragging us kicking and screaming into her quiet world as it’s rocked by Tommy. Anthony Lewis provides a perfect and believable opposite to her – a far younger man (and therefore in some ways matching her level of emotional maturity) with no ties to the world, and therefore with the complete freedom that Tosh secretly craves. An instantly loveable character, the final moments with a shellshocked Tommy crying at the strange events around him are all the more powerful with Lewis’ engaging performance.
Once again, though, the focus on Tosh has come at the detriment of the other characters. Gwen (yet again), Ianto, Owen and Jack all take something of a back seat… and while there’s nothing wrong with that from time to time, it’s sad that the series’ best episodes so far all seem to avoid using the entire ensemble. That minor criticism aside (which is more of a criticism of the setup – Davies seems to have created a world where focus on the team interactions often lead to mediocre segments), this episode is another absolute classic. Following on from Sleeper, the standard has been heightened considerably, and after a first season that varied from the ridiculous to the sublime week-on-week, Torchwood is now becoming consistently brilliant.
