Today, we’ve got the very first episode of Torchwood – Everything Changes. At the time, this was a very big deal. A spin-off from the new Doctor Who co-created by Russell T Davies, starring the then very popular Captain Jack Harkness. Expectations were quite high.
We had to find the time to watch it when the children were in bed, because it was billed as ‘adult’ (a word that covers a multitude of good and bad things).
Let’s see what the first episode has in store for us.
It opens in the rain. The police are attending a murder. PC Gwen Cooper arrives, played by Eve Myles. She chats a bit with her colleague PC Andy. Then the forensic team suddenly start packing off and leaving. Gwen asks why. “Buggered if I know. It’s orders from above.” “But the body’s still in there though, isn’t it? We can’t just leave it.” “Move back, they said, clear the site. Special access, they said.” “For who?” “Torchwood.” “Who’s Torchwood?” “Special ops or something.”
A black car arrives, and out stride four people led by the familiar face of Captain Jack Harkness off of Doctor Who. Of course, Gwen doesn’t know that. The last we saw, Captain Jack had been exterminated by Daleks, and had just been brought back to life by Rose using the power of the Tardis. But that was in the year 200,100, so somehow he travelled back in time. All this is just fan speculation, though, as this programme is setting up a mystery, and we don’t have to know any of that. Yet.
Jack gives a soliloquoy about oestrogen in the rain. One of the team puts on a strange gauntlet, puts it under the dead man’s head, and concentrates a bit, then the man wakes up. The tell him he’s dead, and he only has 2 minutes, but he can’t remember anything about what happened. He was stabbed from behind. Then he’s dead again. Gwen watches the whole thing from above, from a multistorey car park. But Jack notices her.
This recording was a bit glitchy. In this scene there’s a couple of moments where the picture glitches, and we miss a second or so. It’s playing havoc with the subtitles. (See later for a shocking revelation of the source of these glitches.)
Unsure quite what she’s just seen, Gwen returns home where Boyfriend Rhys is watching TV. I do think one of the strengths of this episode is the domesticity. Mysterious things may be happening, but you do get the sense that these are real people.
Gwen’s partner PC Andy has some of the best lines. “Bet you ten quid they’re DNA specialists, it’s all DNA these days, like that CSI bollocks. CSI Cardiff, I’d like to see that. They’d be measuring the velocity of a kebab.”
Gwen gets slightly injured breaking up a pub fight, and when she’s at hospital getting it treated, she spots Jack heading up some stairs. She finds the room at the top of the stairs sealed off, but when she asks, they don’t know why. There’s a long corridor, and she sees someone at the end. He’s not answering her when she asks him what’s going on, and as she looks closer, he looks like he’s wearing a weird mask.
The man she’d asked about the room being sealed up arrives, and hasn’t found out why. He’s also impressed with the mask. “Bloody hell, that is brilliant. That’s like, em, Hellraiser. That’s first class, that is. Look at that, it’s just like real teeth.” Famous last words as the creature grabs him and starts chomping on his neck, with more blood that we’d expect to see if this were Doctor Who.
Jack and his team appear to subdue the creature, and Jack rushes Gwen out of the room. She leaves the hospital, rather shellshocked. The Torchwood car screeches past, so she gets in her police car and goes in pursuit, leaving poor PC Andy standing there. She gives the registration over the radio, and a colleague updates her on the search for someone called Captain Jack Harkness. They found one, but it can’t be him. “American volunteer, Royal Air Force, 133 Squadron. Except he disappeared. Vanished off the records. Presumed dead.” “When was that?” “1941. At the height of the Blitz. On the morning of January 21 1941, Captain Jack Harkness failed to report for duty, never seen again, till now.”
She follows the car to the centre of Cardiff, and calls to them. But while she’s distracted by someone telling her she can’t leave her car there, when she looks again, they’ve disappeared.
That night, she goes back to the city centre (the show making the most of a very distinctive looking locale) and figures out a ruse. She asks the local pizza place if they ever deliver to a Captain Jack Harkness, but nothing comes up. She’s about to leave, foiled again, when she asks “I don’t suppose you’ve got a Torchwood?” “Oh, aye, we do them all the time. They’re good customers.” So she gets the details, orders a couple of pizzas, and knocks on Torchwood’s doors. It looks like a tourist information booth. A young man asks her who the pizza is for, seems amused when she says it’s for Mr Harkness, and presses a button, opening a secret door.
She goes down a corridor, into a lift, then out into a very large space filled with stuff. There’s things preserved in liquid.
Someone’s doing welding.
Someone else is doing weird computer stuff.
Everyone seems to be ignoring her as she walks slowly through, until one of them starts laughing. “I can’t do this, I’m sorry. I’m rubbish. I give up!” The others start laughing too. They’ve clearly been pretending to ignore her, despite knowing why she’s really there. Jack comes out, telling them all about the hilarious banter he’d got worked out. Gwen is deflated. “There’s your pizza. I think I’d better go.” “I think we’ve gone past that stage” replies Jack.
This is a good scene. It plays off our and Gwen’s expectation that in such a super secret organisation, when she’s been allowed to see so much, and she’s already seen a mad murdered by a strange creature, which they covered up, it’s probably her turn to disappear. But Jack offers to give her the tour. Including, with no explanation, a pterodactyl flying around.
He shows her the thing that murdered the man in the hospital. It’s a “Weevil”. “But we’ve got a couple of hundred of them in the city living in the sewers, feeding off the… Well, it’s the sewers, you can guess.”
He introduces her (and us) to the team. Owen Harper (Burn Gorman).
Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori) who was first seen in the Doctor Who episode Aliens of London.
Suzie Costello, second in command (Indira Varma).
And Ianto Jones (Gareth David-Lloyd). “Ianto cleans up after us and gets us everywhere on time.”
Gwen is still convinced they’re going to lock her up or do her in. Jack has other plans. “You’re coming with me.” “I’m getting tired of following you.” “No you’re not, and you never will.”
He takes her out through the scenic route, a platform that goes right up to the ceiling.
And through, up to the centre of Cardiff. People are walking past and nobody bats an eyelid. “It’s called a perception filter. He can sort of see us, but we don’t quite register. Just like something in the corner of your eye. It only works on this exact spot.”
Jack takes her for a drink. They discuss Torchwood, and its mission to investigate all manner of alien threat. They discuss some of the rather obvious alien happenings recently (as seen in Doctor Who). Gwen says “My boyfriend says it’s like a sort of terrorism. Like they put drugs in the water supplies – psychotropic drugs, causing mass hallucinations and stuff.” He says they collect alien technology, keeping it safe from any one nation. “Cos if one power got hold of this stuff, they could use it for their own purposes.” “But so could you.” “All alien technology stays on the base. No-one’s allowed to take anything outside.”
Cut to Toshiko, who’s brought an alien gizmo home with her.
Owen’s got a glowy alien after-shave.
Suzie has taken the life-bringing glove home.
Back at the bar, Gwen tells Jack he could be helping her and the police find the serial killer, whose victim we saw at the start of the episode. He tells her they weren’t there to find the killer, they were there to test the magic glove that brought him back to life. “Well, that’s tough shit. Cos if you let me go, then I have a duty, cos that glove could help us.” “If you remember.” “What d’you mean?” “How’s your drink?” “Have you poisoned me?” “Don’t be so dramatic. It’s an amnesia pill. My own recipe, with a touch of denial and a dash of retcon.” I love that the amnesia drug is called retcon, a name that could only come from someone who’s been in fandom a long time. Gwen goes home and starts writing a document about everything she’s seen, her typing getting more and more random. But Ianto is hacking in to her computer, and deletes everything.
Interesting, during the montage of the Torchwood team, where we see Toshiko use her gizmo to scan an entire book while it’s still on the bookshelf (I want one of those) and Suzie using the glove to revive a dead fly, this broadcast is entirely missing the scene where Owen is in a nightclub, and uses his magic aftershave to make himself irresistible to a woman, and then, to her angry boyfriend. I suspect it’s the swearing that might have caused the cut, despite this going out at 9PM on BBC Three. But the whole scene is missing. (It’s on the iPlayer copy which is how I know). (Once again, this mystery is solved later.)
These sweeping shots of Jack atop a very high building look slightly like it’s actually a Captain Jack action figure. It’s probably a stuntman, though.
Next morning, Gwen doesn’t even remember who Captain Jack Harkness is. She goes to work as normal. But in the office where they’re investigating the serial killer, she sees a picture of the suspected murder weapon. “Clever, mind, they worked it all out on a computer. Took measurements from the stab wounds, calculated the shape of the blade and stuff, even those prongs – I don’t know how they do it.” But the picture sets her mind off. It reminds her of something she’s seen, but can’t remember.
It takes a whole montage of Gwen at work and home to percolate through, but eventually she goes back to the city centre. Suzie is there, at the monument. “Hello again. You were right. You told Jack we should liaise with the police. I was the only one who bothered. So I was the only one who saw the report. They got a good likeness.” She shows Gwen the knife. Gwen says “I’m arresting you for… How do I know you?” Suzie pulls a gun, and starts monologuing about how the job gets into you, how she has to leave now to get away. “How come we get all the Weevils and bollocks and shit? Is that what alien life is? Filth?” “Why did you kill those people?” “For the glove. I needed the bodies. That’s how it works. Violent death.” I’ve noticed something strange about this broadcast. There’s been a few MPEG glitches, and they all seem to coincide with, shall we say, adult moments. Swear words, violent scenes. Up till now I had thought it was just a poor recording, but now I think that these aren’t glitches or cuts to the broadcast programme, I think these are edits that I’ve made to the raw file. I think I might have been seeing if it was possible to edit a version of the episode that we could show to our young children, who were already big Doctor Who fans. In the end, I don’t think we did, not for this series. But it certainly explains why this has appeared to be so very, and specifically, glitchy. My editing software must have not been very good at cleaning up the edits. (Sure enough, as I keep watching, there’s another line containing the word “Shit” that’s glitched over.)
As Suzie goes on, Jack rises up from the magic lift, unseen by both of them. And Suzie talks about how she’s always working, then says “and that’s why the perception filter isn’t gonna work on me” as she shoots him in the head. Oddly, that shot seems to be intact. Was it only the swearing I was worried about? Anyway, Suzie levels the gun at Gwen, but here she hesitates, long enough for Captain Jack to stand up behind her and tell her to put down the gun, as the bullet wound in his head heals up. But Suzie can’t go quietly, and uses the gun on herself (and this shot was edited out).
Jack and Gwen have a debrief, on the top of another large building. “Owen and Toshiko, you didn’t tell them that you were shot in the head and survived.” “You didn’t tell them either. Followed my lead. Keep doing that, and you might just get through this.” Jack offers Gwen a job, now there’s a vacancy, and she accepts. And the last edit here was the Next Time trailer and credits. So I was being brutal.
Media Centre Description: Science-fiction and crime drama created by Russell T Davies dealing with the machinations and activities of the fictional Torchwood Institute in Cardiff.
BBC Genome: BBC THREE Sunday 22 October 2006 21:00
I think this still really holds up as the opening episode. There’s only a little of the leery sex side of it, and much more of the mystery. It’s a very good start.
It seems a bit odd that I don’t have the second episode, broadcast immediately after this one, but I can see that I have a later recording of the BBC Two Double Bill coming up, so I guess that was the one I wanted to keep because it doesn’t have the BBC Three Logo all over it.
VHiStory 