The team discovers a ring who are kidnapping Weevils – wild alien creatures that have come through the Rift and are hiding on Earth – which leads Owen down a dark path to confront the future of his own existence.
First Transmitted
10pm, 24th December 2006, BBC Three and BBC HD; 9pm, 27th December 2006, BBC Two
Guest Cast
Kai Owen (Rhys Williams); Alex Hassell (Mark Lynch); Paul Kasey (Weevil[s]); Alexandra Dunn (Barmaid); Matthew Raymond (Boyfriend [Tommy]); David Gyasi (Hospital Patient)
Writer Noel Clarke
Director Andy Goddard
Setting
Two nights in Cardiff, including The Hayes and Cardiff Bay.
Did You Spot?
For the first time, clips from the prior week are edited into the saga sell. Owen’s Sudaca shirt, first seen in ‘Greeks Bearing Gifts’ (2006), returns. Search-Wise, the engine from ‘Rose’ (2005), returns. Jubilee Pizza, from ‘Everything Changes’ (2006) too. Mark warns Owen that “something is coming… out there, in the darkness… something is coming”, much as Suzie did in ‘They Keep Killing Suzie’ (2006).
Twisted Reality
Although the initial zoom is into the Millennium Centre, the first scene is shot at The Hayes – Queens Arcade (from ‘Rose’, 2005) can be seen behind Jack in the first shot, and the setting for the opening of ‘Ghost Machine’ (2006) is nearby. Although usually television dramas use fake phone numbers a digit short, Harper’s Eels’ 0808 1570987 is a valid freephone number, albeit one not in use. The car park that Jack describes as “not the centre [of Cardiff], a little to the side” is about as near to the city centre as you can get (although the Weevil very quickly manages to get into a residential area far out of the centre). CF10 6BY is not a genuine postcode, although CF10 is indeed a genuine postcode area. “The Weevil has landed” is a reference to Buzz Aldrin’s quote “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The eagle has landed”. Large amounts of the plot, and several of the best lines, are based strongly on ‘Fight Club’, the 1996 novel by Chuck Palanniuk made famous by the 1999 movie from David Fincher.
Love is in the Air
Rhys and Gwen finally confront each other – Rhys initially blames himself but then decides Torchwood is at fault. The barmaid and her boyfriend don’t seem to be getting on well either. Gwen finds out about Owen and Diane and isn’t happy. Tosh’s alter ego on the phone appears to be related to Owen (Jenny Harper) – perhaps his wife. Owen seems devastated at the loss of perhaps his only real love, so much so that he’s willing to throw his life away.
If it’s Alien, it’s Ours
The anti-Weevil spray? The hard drive “bug” that Owen uses when undercover? The amnesia pill is used again, but Gwen seems to overdose Rhys by accident.
Sounds Awful
Dan Hodges uses the crazy frog song as his ringtone, made famous by the German Jamba! group in 2004, based on The Annoying Thing, created by Erik Wenquist in 2000, and based on a soundbite from Daniel Malmedahl in 1997, impersonating an internal combustion engine.
Sounds Brilliant
Over and Over, the first single from Hot Chip’s second album The Warning (2006), plays during a bar scene, and Muse’s Assassin (from their fifth album Black Holes and Revelations, 2006) plays when Owen first enters the warehouse.
Quotables
“I hate to break it to you, but you’re not my first.” – Jack
“Hey, hold on sunshine, that’s my girlfriend.” – Rhys
“Rhys, this is Jack.” – Gwen
“Sit down, Gwen.” – Rhys
“He’s my boss.” – Gwen
“SIT THE FUCK DOWN.” – Rhys
“I have this selective deafness when I’m talking to cowards or murderers.” – Jack
“You can be such a wanker at times, d’you know that Owen?” – Gwen
“I do as a matter of fact!” – Owen
“OK, Janet, time for a trip out.” – Jack
“You call it Janet?” – Tosh
“Barbara just never seemed right.” – Jack
“And yourself, what’s the point of your life?” – Mark
“I’m ashamed! And I’m angry! And because I want… I NEED you to forgive me. And because I’ve drugged you.” – Gwen
“You did this to him!” – Jack
“He did it to himself. He had no fear.” – Mark
Unanswered Questions
For a team so obsessed with Bluetooth earpieces, why does Jack have a wired landline? How did Tosh set up a fake website for Owen so quickly? And why didn’t Mark Lynch check the registration date for the URL? If he really wanted to know what others thought about the business, he’d search again for reviews (and wouldn’t find any) rather than trust the company site. Nor, presumably, does he check Companies House or any other credit agencies that would find no record of a business supposedly established in 1993 – although Torchwood has a record of being able to fake IDs etc, its surprising he doesn’t even try. Why does Rhys pass out so quickly from the amnesia pill when Gwen had her drink and took at least an hour to fall asleep in ‘Everything Changes’? Perhaps Gwen overdosed him, or more likely Rhys panics as soon as she says “I’ve drugged you”, causing his heartrate to increase, adrenaline to be released, and the drug to take affect a lot quicker than it would do with the more collected Gwen. Owen says “It has to stop” when he sees the fight with the Weevil, but suddenly he’s very willing to go in and not fight back. What makes him change his attitude so quickly? What are we to infer by Owen’s interaction with the Weevil at the end? Has Owen been a Weevil all along, or has he become one after being mauled? (Jack said in ‘Everything Changes’ that they were a type of werewolf.) Will this affect the other survivors?
Fuck Ups
The barmaid at the beginning is wearing a top that shows precisely zero cleavage, despite her boyfriend accusing her of “flashing [her] tits”. Tosh’s torch doesn’t appear to be on at first when she and Jack are searching the warehouse. When Owen attaches his “bug” to the laptop he does it near the bottom of the screen next to the ports, but in the next shot it is attached at the top of the screen. Even with alien technology, hard drives work in such a way that Owen’s bug is near impossible. The progress bar on Owen’s “welcome” video at his fake website freezes when off-screen. Does Gwen really share a “new message” alert tone with Hodges? The cage shows 41:12 on it when Owen leaves – whether the 41 is minutes or seconds, its wrong.
Torchwood: Declassifed Episode 11 (Length: 10’23″)
Broadcast BBC Three, Monday 25th December, 1:40am.
John Barrowman and Burn Gorman introduce the episode, Julie Gardner, Andy Goddard and Richard Stokes discuss Owen’s development through recent episodes and Gorman speaks about Owen’s anger.
Russell T Davies covers Owen’s loneliness, Stokes his lack of purpose, and Davies and Stokes the viciousness of Lynch’s world.
Davies talks about Owen’s relationship with Lynch and other men. Eve Myles on Owen’s suicidal qualities at the episode’s end.
Davies and Stokes on the viciousness of the fight sequences. Alex Hassell speaks of his lack of experience fighting.
Garder on the cage design, Jason Hujan (stunt Weevil) on his contribution, Gorman and Tom Lucy on the final sequence, and Barrowman, Davies, Gardner and Stokes on the final moments.
Site Review by Rob Tizzard
Episode eleven already, blimey, and it’s the one I’d been looking forward to the least, Combat. Why? The unimaginative title, the writer being Mickey Smith in another incarnation, and the dull outline. Happily I was quite wrong to worry, this is another corker of an episode.
It’s an Owen heavy story again, the character I’ve grown to like the least. He’s moody and in this episode, very violent for a bi-sexual Doctor. To me, the whole setting of the series is brought full circle. These people at Torchwood are not a team, they a group of individuals, all very much alone. We’re shown Owen as a deeply haunted person, closely heading down the road Suzie took. Then we have Gwen, the newest member now very much locked in this dark world. She can’t even remember when it happened, at what point did Torchwood take her life away. She has betrayed her boyfriend but has suddenly realized just how important he is for keeping her sane. Jack knows this and wants her to hold on to her real life as much as possible. The most important scene is when Gwen has tested Rhys’ reaction to her deceit, which is bad, and she finds herself alone in the hub and understands, or rather doesn’t understand, exactly what being in Torchwood means. When she is suddenly inspired into investigation of the current case, she becomes a machine, working tirelessly to solve a problem. Maybe this is why the members spend so much time working, to forgot what they have lost.
Before this episode there were lot’s of rumours of similarities to the film Fight Club and I stupidly assumed this meant the clever connection between that stories main characters. The link was in fact the club itself, but I was still waiting for Owen to be revealed as the head of it all, feeding himself the amnesia drug. The disguised voice on a mobile early in the episode made me sure, but it wasn’t that way. There is still something about Owen, displayed in the very last moments…
Reader Reviews
“The first rule of Combat is you do not talk about Combat. The second rule of Combat is you do NOT TALK about Combat.”
Or at least that seems the way for the various reviews and comments around fandom this week. Rather than talk about Combat, it’s far too easy to compare it to the superior, but only superficially similar, Fight Club. Whilst Palanniuk’s novel shares a number of aspects with Combat (and, in fact, with so many pre-Fight Club stories of underground boxing and Gen X twoddle; Palanniuk was hardly original there) most of the better parts of this story are pure Torchwood, for what we find to celebrate about this story is the regular characters we’ve come to know and love/hate. The episode is primarily Owen’s, and a much more feral Owen than we have witnessed before – from the second bar scene, in which he can’t stop kicking Lynch’s man when he’s down, through to the final fifteen minutes, in which he clearly becomes entranced by Mark’s world, it’s clear Owen is a very different person since his encounter with Diane.
Backing up Gorman in this story are the ever-superb Kai Owen and Eve Myles, who make a lot out of the moments Clarke has given them. The opening scene, where Rhys finally loses his temper, had me already sitting on the end of my seat before the episode had truly begun (“sit the fuck down” would be echoing in my head for a large part of the first half), and the chillingness of Gwen’s decision to drug him (carried in a large part by Myles’ very flat, calm, delivery) shows clearly just how far she’s come. Throw in a few nice moments with the increasingly background-bound Jack (mainly running, jumping and shooting, action-hero style), Ianto (a lovely “good cop” in the hospital sequence) and the criminally underused Sato (if only for the little smile she gives when watching Owen’s promo video on the Eel website) and we have yet another solid outing for the main cast, who have taken a fairly average script and made it something special once again.
The main guest character of the week, Tyler Durden (or is that Mark Lynch?), is unfortunately woefully miscast. Not only was he unconvincing as a successful businessman (that cockney accent, with all the pronounced T-dropping, did nothing for me) he wasn’t enough of an everyman to be able to relate to. To briefly return to the Fight Club parallel, Fincher at least tried to “ugly up” Brad Pitt in his similar role, but Lynch just looks like he’d be more at home in the latest Next catalogue, or semi-clad in a coffee advert. Why would I follow him? I wouldn’t. There are far more commanding actors out there who don’t have to resort to showing off their chests to make me want to enter their world and find out more about something I could never understand. Think how much more shocking the moment where he punches the chained Weevil would be if we weren’t already thinking what a slimy bastard he is. Sorry, but Hassell would be better placed elsewhere than in this position.
Overall, a wonderful character piece based on an average script allowing Gorman and Myles to prove why they’re two of the most underrated actors on British television at the moment, and to further prompt the production team to wonder why the Hell they created a spinoff show around an increasingly absent Captain Jack Harkness.
Arthur Penn
Doctor Who regular actor, Noel Clarke (Mickey Smith) swaps roles for Torchwood, and delivers a promising first script for the series. Although the basic concept of ‘Combat’ is a plain lift from the popular Hollywood movie, ‘Fight Club’, Clarke’s script impresses on other levels. Gwen and boyfriend Rhys are afforded more screen time than at any point since the beginning of the season, and Clarke explores how their partnership is coming apart at the seams. Gwen’s confession to Rhys about her affair with Owen is a very strong, well-written scene – and it’s clear that Gwen is going off the rails big time. It’s fun and games elsewhere, too, as Owen is finding it increasingly tough to come to terms with losing Diane (see ‘Out of Time’), to the extent where clearly he entertains a death wish… He survives, but there’s another twist that promises to make this character even more compelling.
Alan Hayes
