Children of Earth

TARDIS Coordinates: July 6, 2009

“Children” is cheap.

Hardwired into the brain of every human being is the instinct to protect children. Even those of you who hate kids – when you cringe, because one is screaming in a restaurant or a theater – that’s because the cry of a child is precisely tuned to be an attention-getter. We want to protect them. To nurture them. They’re the future. Anything that threatens them, any entity that uses them as leverage, we see as a very bad entity indeed.

That’s why “Children” is cheap. Aliens will hold hostage every child in the world, for stupid reasons.

The trouble is, the bad guys in “Children of Earth” aren’t the 456. What do we see of the 456? Pillar of fire, shadowy two-headed squirty thing befouling a tank, half-obscured by mist. We see the effect but not the cause – the entire British government running around in a panic, resorting to increasingly desperate measures to mollify the aliens.

In fact, I have a thesis. My thesis is that Torchwood exists to prove that the human race really, really sucks when the Doctor’s not around.

Russell T. Davies said it in as many words during “The Christmas Invasion.” The Doctor was indisposed, so the humans were left to deal with the problem as best as they could. And, by the Doctor’s standards, they cocked it up.

If you remain unconvinced, here’s more fuel: reverse the thesis. What would have happened had the TARDIS materialized on Earth during the crisis? Say, half-past Day Three? He’d have them sorted with a teaspoon and a candy wrapper.

It isn’t just that Torchwood fucks up the life of everyone involved. It’s that the human race is really, truly, almost aggressive bad at dealing with global crisis. Nobody – not one single person in the entire government – steps up to be better. Yet the whole point of “Doctor Who” is that “better” is in the heart and soul of the human race.

“Children of Earth” was broadcast over five days in 2009, and is available as a miniseries on Netflix. The scope is a little broader than the episodic first two seasons, and budget cuts are responsible for the shortened arc.

Somehow, the good stories are worse than the bad; knowing that this spinoff is created in the same universe that gave us the wonders of Doctor Who and the Sarah Jane Adventures makes it a little more difficult to swallow. If Torchwood really did exist in isolation or a vacuum, Children of Earth would be next to flawless. There’d be no optimistic point of view to counter its fatalistic storyline, as a government gone mad, in the body of Peter Capaldi’s ineffective middleman John Frobisher, does everything it can to destroy Torchwood – the one organization that can help.

Frobisher is being set up as a scapegoat by a government about to do the unthinkable – hand over ten percent of the world’s children to the 456. (And, of course, every single government in the world, with no resistance or debate, is in on it. Because, you know, if, say, Lichtenstein decided to resist, no one would ever know.) Even more gruesome is the 456’s plan for the children, which is…well, it’s unpleasant.

“Torchwood” being what it is, it has to be the least effective, most nervous, out-of-her-depth character to act on their behalf within the government; some bean-counter who is in no way up to the task. They find this element in the form of Lois Habiba, who, on her first day on the job (of fucking course) is privy to Frobisher’s start of darkness.

Now, all I know about British Civil Service I learned from old reruns of “Yes, Minister,” so I may be a little vague in my assumption that governance has a permanent staff while its elected officials come and go. Seems an odd way to run a railroad, since your average White House intern has a staffing position for exactly as long as the current head of state is sitting in the cushy chair and not one second longer.

The Episode 4 death of Ianto Jones came as a shock to everyone in the world, apparently, except me; given that Torchwood killed its second-in-command in its premiere, wiped out the entire staff in “Fragments,” and killed another two-fifths in “Exit Wounds.” Frankly, I’m surprised they waited so long to get ’round to him. I can’t say I was particularly heartbroken; I’m sure the scene was meant to be terribly sad and all that, but let’s face it; the Hub has a revolving door and Torchwood employees aren’t up for much of a lifespan.

The ending, with Jack putting his grandson (okie dokie, then) into the machinery and baking his noodle was evidently designed to break his heart so that he’d leave the planet, but let’s be real here – Torchwood just can’t hurt my feelings anymore. I’ve seen Captain Jack do dick moves, series regulars on the slab, jackass aliens, humans acting like twats, and guest stars on the hot seat so often in this series that I might be incapable of empathizing with it at all anymore. When my response to Ianto dying is, “Oh, look, Ianto’s dead, just like Owen and Tosh and Suzie,” I have the feeling that Torchwood sort of overdid the whole “Let’s torture our cast” trope in its first two seasons.

And that’s a problem. I don’t feel this series. I just don’t feel it. I watch it, I enjoy it, but I don’t engage with it. It’s like watching “Titanic.” Get to the end, and once the emotions fade, you wonder what the hell you were watching for. It seems toneless. It’s extraordinarily hard to care about the characters at this point.

That’s not the fault of “Children of Earth.” That’s the fault of “Torchwood.”

Exit Wounds

TARDIS Coordinates: April 4, 2008

“Exit Wounds” was the last “regular” episode of the series, though it gave no indication. It’s the last episode for Tosh and Owen, though their exit seems to be more along the lines of a mercy killing than a tragedy, given the unrestrained misery the writers and producers have put them through. The creators have tried to inject some better moments for the characters, but all that did was make us wistful for them when Torchwood was going through hell. We quietly wished every episode could be “Random Shoes” or “Something Borrowed” when they were giving us “To the Last Man” and “Dead Man Walking.” We knew they could be uplifting, exciting, and optimistic.

And it’s hardly the end of Torchwood by any stretch; “Children of Earth” and “Miracle Day” still lie in our uncertain future. In the original continuity I abandoned Torchwood after “Children of Earth,” giving “Miracle Day” a chance but watching no further after the first or second episode. The series gave no indication that it was going to be transformative.

And that’s strange, because with Doctor Who forming such a fierce and irrevocable aspect of my creative history, abandoning any aspect of it, no matter how dire, must have been difficult. I sat through fucking “Timelash;” I can sit through “Miracle Day.” One possible explanation is that with the bump to Starz, “Torchwood” finally drifted far enough from Doctor Who to be so separate as to no longer have any relation to its parent show – not something you want to see in a spinoff. Even “Frasier,” ten years later, was narratively recognizable as originating in the wood-paneled chambers of “Cheers.”

“Exit Wounds” was clearly conceived by someone who was still aware of Torchwood’s increasingly shaky associations. Depressing though it might be, that’s the gusto with which it approaches its events – there’s even a faint air of nonsense about it, even as Cardiff is falling apart and a John Hart held hostage struggles desperately to mediate the feud between Jack Harkness and his younger brother Gray, who blames him for his captivity and torture. It’s a troubling storyline: “Because of something that happened long before you were old enough to have any responsibility for the outcome, I hate you forever and will kill everyone you know, everything you love, and a few hundred other people.” Gray shows a level of maturity indicating that the last emotionally reasonable moment he had was on that damned beach. It’s a hard sell that I don’t really buy.

Tosh and Owen’s exits weren’t quite so contrived; it may be healthier to consider them unnecessary. Last episode, we saw their beginnings in Torchwood; this episode, we see their end, and they’ve had only a few scattered moments of joy and wonder in between – certainly nothing to justify their association with the organization. Tosh’s particularly gory exit was not required in any sense of the word; one wonders what attractive genius Asian technology experts ever did to Russell T. Davies to deserve the kind of life and death he granted upon this one. It must have been something exquisitely humiliating.

This was a harder hike than it looked; one will notice that these stories have hardly been viewed on a regular schedule. As of press time I’m not even sure when I’ll get ’round to the next bit, except that it had better be before the Tenth Doctor takes his bow, if this is going to make any sort of narrative sense.

Fragments

TARDIS Coordinates: March 21, 2008

Captain John Hart drops a building on Torchwood Three that doesn’t seem to actually do much damage to any of them. (Seriously, Owen should be a bag of marbles at this point.) Except Gwen, because She’s Special. Also, we’ve already seen her origin story, and it’s time for a tour of the past.

Here’s where we realize that Torchwood didn’t make these people into miserable bastards. They were miserable bastards long before then, all driven to circumstances that would have driven anyone a little crazy. Toshiko, whose mother was kidnapped so she could be forced to rebuild an alien gun, a deed that earned her months in solitary confinement. Owen, whose fiance’s early-onset Alzheimer’s turned out to be an alien invasion, whose wife was subsequently erased from history. Ianto, desperate to join Torchwood Three and hide his girlfriend in the basement. And good old Jack.

So every member of Torchwood except for Gwen was tortured into it. (And Gwen didn’t have the smoothest of job interviews either.) I suppose it would have sucked to show these people living their happy lives only to have Torchwood knock the rug out from under them. But it doesn’t demonstrate why in the world any of them would want to join. If I were them, I’d run as fast as I could in the other direction.

Tosh, especially; the same people who threw her into a hole and tortured her now want to hire her. Does anyone else get the feeling that the writers didn’t think this through? Owen: We know Torchwood can edit memories – not erase them, EDIT them. Why leave him hanging? It seemed as if their ordeals were contrived to move them into position rather than a series of events that they overcame to prove themselves worthy. No wonder the organization is such a mess.

Turns out that the whole mess is so that Captain John Hart can play stalker. I wish this guy would pick a side. Not that “James Marsters is in this bit” is a sentence that ever means “this show is about to get worse,” but I think the writers were a little lost with this one.

Adrift

TARDIS Coordinates: March 19, 2008

Another episode – dear god, yet another episode – where everything could have been solved if Jack had taken five minutes out to talk to Gwen about something important.

I hate leading with that. It’s a good episode. I’d go so far as to call it a great episode. But how many episodes could we have avoided the whole mess if Jack would just stop being so fucking cryptic about everything all the time – even things he didn’t need to be cryptic about? Giving Gwen the lowdown on the doings at Flat Holm and the fate of the missing person she’s pursuing would have short-circuited the investigation and left everyone happier.

And that’s the pain in the ass with this episode. Gwen unfolds this tragic mystery to provide closure to those who desperately need it and it’s literally all Jack’s fault. And while there may be things about his life where he needs to be cryptic, this is not one of them. Gwen is a duly-registered employee of Torchwood. There’s no paper she needs to sign, no secrecy she needs to be sworn to. There is nothing – nothing – in this entire story preventing Jack from just laying his cards on the table and letting Gwen do with that information as she will.

It’s such a huge flaw that it crowds out nearly everything else – the dedication and devotion that inform the better nature of Gwen’s character, the themes of loss and closure that surround any of those who have had a loved one disappear, even a fleeting look at those who return transformed. There were so many analogies to the story of missing person Jonah and his mother Nikki, so much that was relatable besides the otherworldly mechanic of his disappearance and return.

I want to talk about those, but I can’t, because the entire story is predicated on Jack being deliberately obtuse. The only way the story makes sense is for it to be some kind of cruel test for Gwen, as if she hasn’t been through enough shit already. The second series of Torchwood has been really, really good, for the most part. This episode is a heartbreaker in all the right ways. But I’m just about fed up to the nipples with one Captain Jack Fucking Harkness.

From Out of the Rain

TARDIS Coordinates: March 12, 2008

A popular form of entertainment is shown to be concealing a monster which steals the souls of its audience so that it can thrive.

This post-everything storyline is turning into the “base-under-siege” of the oughts, being one of the most common Doctor Who plots since long before “The Idiot’s Lantern.” This time they’re doing it with old traveling shows from the turn of the century. Captain Jack, who has done everything ever, used to travel with one show as “the man who couldn’t die,” which must have been a pretty gruesome act for the kiddies.

Legend spoke, as it always does, of a traveling show that came out of the rain and took you with it when it left, sort of like the circus running away to join you. The Night Travellers, for what it’s worth, actually look kind of weedy; I get that they have to be creepy, but my instinct upon seeing Julian Bleach gazing like a child molester out of the silent movie screen at the Electro is to run like a rabbit in the other direction. He seems more a character out of German Expressionism, sort of The Man who Laughs combined with Something Wicked This Way Comes. I get the whole “Gaze into the face of evil” thing, but he’s using a medium that, at its center, is seductive.

Possibly because the plot’s been done in this Universe before, or possibly because it really doesn’t take long to either set up the situation and reach a conclusion, the story spends a little more time with the villains than we’re used to. It doesn’t give them sympathy, but we do get insight, which is good; I’m a firm student of the school of thought that says that the bad guys need more than transparent motives, which explains why the Daleks and I never got along. Though, frankly, a Dalek probably wouldn’t get on with anyone.

The resolution is thin and the conclusion blunt, leading the eye back to Julian Bleach, pre-Davros, and what one supposes can hardly be called the “relationship” he has with his fellow Travellers. The whole story looks a little oversaturated, as if shot through an old film camera. This might have been a better episode if it weren’t made almost entirely up of elements from previous episodes. As it is, I remembered little of it on balance. Rewatching remains the salvation of the series.

Something Borrowed

TARDIS Coordinates: March 5, 2008

Word of God has it that the creators wanted to offset the utter bummer of the last few episodes by presenting something a little more openly comical. If that was the intention, it backfired a wee bit.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a funny episode. But it’s a funny episode after so many hard rides that Torchwood itself now has a reputation for being a hard ride, so no one really notices an open attempt to lighten the mood. There isn’t much in “Something Borrowed” that’s all that grim, but the perceptions inflate the bits that are, and disregard the bits that are actually telling you to enjoy what you’re watching. You spend so much time waiting for the monster to jump out at you that you don’t notice the friendly clown behind you.

Torchwood is a bit inconsistent. And the bits where it is consistent tend to be bleak. Having a story that’s inconsistently bleak breaks the pattern. When the gunshot finally comes, it’s a pie in the face.

To give “Something Borrowed” a fair shake, you have to isolate it. If you’re suggesting “Torchwood” to a friend, make this their entrance vector. Watch it on its own, without any other episodes.

After a rough day at work, Gwen wakes up pregnant. And I don’t mean she has morning sickness and goes to the OB/GYN, I mean she’s like nine months along. (You’d have thought she’d have noticed.) She’s been knocked up by the alien life form she was chasing the night before. Mommy’s coming, and she wants her widdle diddums. And she’s got nooooo problem ripping the surrogate apart to get it.

Taking all this into account, she insists on going through with the wedding.

…Wait a minute, she fucking what??

This…I get that they have to move forward with the story and the chainsaw and the other wacky hijinks, but what? This is a bad decision even for someone whose entire character is defined by bad decisions. I get that a wedding is a big deal and moving it day-of is no small feat, but she’s about to stand up in front of all her friends and family, for all intents and purposes fully along and ready to pop, and then come up with an explanation that doesn’t break the masquerade. She is practically inviting a violent, man-eating alien to come and rampage through her wedding. Her own health, her own life, is at tremendous risk. Her family, her friends, hell, even Rhys – this could go badly for all of them. She even needs to find a maternity wedding dress.

So it’s up to Torchwood to put on a show.

Ianto is off to pick up the dress while the rest of the Scoobies run point. Given that this is a shapeshifter who may be disguising himself as the star’s nearest and dearest, no one is above suspicion. Wacky hijinks, as they say, ensue.

If it weren’t for second viewings, I’d have broken off this project some time ago. It’s the occasional episode that uplifts the spirit that gets forgotten, given the dirge that most of Torchwood tends toward. You had standard sitcom elements – the in-laws despised each other, for instance – and moments of tighter timing, like Rhys with his chainsaw, but nobody in this show is, strictly speaking, a comic performer, and most attempts to get a laugh are down to script or situation.

I’ve been struggling with the perception that Torchwood isn’t as hard-edged as memory insists; the dominant opinion of Torchwood as a somewhat bleak and depressing future keeps overtaking far superior episodes like “Random Shoes” and “Meat,” and I don’t expect “Something Borrowed” to further the inoculation. Still, the series was way the hell overdue for a happy ending.

A Day in the Death

TARDIS Coordinates: February 27, 2008

You know, Owen Harper’s been dead for a while now; don’t you think it’s about time he got over it?

What I mean is that we’re going to go a whole episode with Owen Harper attending his own funeral. I found this episode depressing, but not for the reasons you might expect. I don’t want to spend a whole episode watching a character as cynical and unlikeable as Owen Harper go navel-gazing; unless his characterization is about to make a huge leap forward, I’m not particularly interested, and Torchwood isn’t the best place to go for positive character development.

We meet Owen trying to talk a potential suicide down off a ledge, though, of course, being a twat, the show decides instead to make it look as if they’re going to take the plunge together. We then see, in flashback, Owen Harper’s humiliation conga-line, as first he’s demoted to Ianto’s position, then relieved of duty, then he sulks at home, then he sulks around town…good lord, Owen, just wear black and listen to some Creed albums, why don’t you.

Near the end, they send him on a non-mission where he indicates that maybe his character is actually getting something out of all this, but there’s a sense, a feeling, a tone to the ending that doesn’t really say “Brave new world” to me, just “Well, back to work.” A couple of times Torchwood has tried to convince us that Life is Beautiful, but it’s always something it seems to mutter under its breath while putting the cast through hell, rather than celebrating all the myriad expressions of it.

Episodes like “A Day in the Death” are the sort that I remember when I look back upon Torchwood as a grim and depressing series, and completely forget the brighter episodes like “Random Shoes” and “Something Borrowed,” or more speculative episodes like “From Out of the Rain” or “Adrift.” It’s like an entire series of “Resurrection of the Daleks.” Now, down here in the archives, we know that’s not entirely true, but it seems that “A Day in the Death” is one of the episodes that sets the overall tone for the series, the one that is writ large and overshadows more optimistic or exciting fare, made all the worse for the fact that it goes nowhere. It’s just Owen’s funeral, and Owen’s funeral goes on, and on, and on.

Dead Man Walking

TARDIS Coordinates: February 20, 2008

What would you do if you woke up dead?

There’s a line in “Avengers: Age of Ultron” where some of the superheroes are speculating on the nature of Thor’s hammer, and what sort of science is actually controlling who can pick it up. Iron Man couldn’t budge it; Captain America shifted it slightly, which unnerved Thor a bit; Stark points out that “if you put it on an elevator, elevator goes up; doesn’t mean the elevator’s worthy.”

It’s interesting watching them explore the physics of the hammer in a non-narrative sense, like asking why Clark Kent doesn’t just punch through the bottom of the crashing airplane. Logically, if he were applying all his force to the spot where his hands are, he’d just rip through the fuselage rather than support the entire superstructure.

Owen Harper is dead, killed by a bullet to the chest, because five guys with guns trained on the bad guy didn’t shoot first. (Watch the scene in “Reset” and tell me how contrived you think it is.) Unfortunately, Jack, being a prick, finds another Risen Mitten and rousts him again, ostensibly to get the codes to the morgue, though probably just because misery loves company.Doesn’t work quite the way he intended, though. Once up, Owen doesn’t go back down, even though he has no pulse, does not breathe (so how can he talk?), and all biological processes have stopped. His body is numb because his central nervous system doesn’t work, so he feels no pain. At the same time, nothing heals, so he’s fragile.

All right, fanboys and Internet forum critics; there’s your superpowers. Go.

Something brought Owen back, or at least is using him for a bridge between one world and the next; in a previous incursion, this creature was called “Death,” though stepping back a bit and seeing him in the context of other Torchwood monsters-of-the-week indicates that he’s pretty much just another in a long line of extradimensional uglies conceived and handled no more or less spectacularly than all the rest. Which is actually good; I like the idea of science bringing mythology down to size, or science fiction bringing fantasy to heel. I read an essay about “Ghostbusters” that indicated that the movie was more or less about science studying and classifying what we consider “paranormal,” about the good guys defeating the bad guys with research and physics instead of magic and superstition.

The Doctor once said that life is just nature’s way of keeping meat fresh; in that context, one can wonder whether Owen could rightly be classified as alive or not. The processes that keep his body alive are no longer functioning, but something is certainly keeping his meat fresh, and his mind is still functioning. Granted, dying probably sucked, and his overall frailty is probably no picnic – give him a hundred years and he’ll be a mass of scars and metal plates – but he’s still around to deal with the implications of who and what he is and what it means.

Viewers take note, as well – Martha Jones has been in two episodes of Torchwood so far, and has been a victim in both of them. This bodes not well, Maybe she should quit while she’s ahead. Or while she still has a head.

Reset

TARDIS Coordinates: February 13, 2008

This is the second time I’ve done this. I’ve postponed watching Torchwood for too long, and now I need Jack to show up on schedule for his guest appearance on Doctor Who. Unfortunately, rather than watch the episodes in a timely manner, I’ve put off doing my homework until there’s no choice but to archive-binge the remainder of the season. So, I sit down and watch the remaining episodes in bundles.

There’s a reason I watch Doctor Who one story per week. Gulping down entire seasons of anything usually leaves me feeling a little flat; I’ve absorbed so much information that they start showing up in my dreams, usually in a nasty mood. I watched an entire season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a weekend and hardly remember anything except the sense of a wasted weekend and poorly-managed time. It gets even creepier when you’re watching Walter White or Ned Stark and that sense of brainwashing sets in; you don’t want a pissed-off Don Draper following you around while you’re trying to do the washing up.

I actually don’t remember whether Martha Jones showed up in Torchwood before or after the airing of “The Sontaran Stratagem.” I think it’s a bit before, though it’s probably academic; not much hash is made out of the events of “The Poison Sky” in “Reset.” Of course, if you’re going to do this crossover stuff, you need a pretty good reason. Otherwise, it looks like you’re just trying to goose ratings a bit.

Does Martha have a good reason for being in Torchwood? The rationale is that she and UNIT are studying the same thing – the effect of an alien parasite on a bunch of medical test subjects. Of course, this being Torchwood, it’s not enough that the miracle cure proposed by the medical tests has a bad side effect; no, it has to include an alien chestburster.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s nice to see her again, it’s nice to be reminded that, at its core, “Torchwood” takes place in the same universe as Doctor Who, and it’s nice to have a Doctor Who character providing something of an anchor for Torchwood, which frequently gets lost in its own crazy.

It’s all right to have a TV series and its spinoff be oppositional in nature; “Cheers” was about a bunch of working-class misfits visiting a Boston pub every night, while “Frasier” was about a pair of effete, sophisticated brothers trying to find love in 1990s Seattle, but they didn’t want for thematic continuity – one actively courted the other’s audience even as it maintained its own identity, and it did so without cheap tricks like magical crossovers. “Mary Tyler Moore” and “Lou Grant” couldn’t have been more different, and even they shared a certain number of themes and viewpoints.

But then you see Martha Jones strapped to an operating table with Frankenstein about to do horrible things to her, and you start to wonder: is she just here to be a victim? Shouldn’t she be there to demonstrate the character growth or provide the vital information that only traveling with the Doctor could have given her insight into? Is she going to be just another employee of Torchwood who gets her life fucked up by it? Holy crap, I don’t want to see that.

I don’t want to be too hard on “Reset,” because it does deliver. For part of the episode, it looks like we’re actually in a position to take a break from the brutality of the overall series and just remember the show’s roots. Then they inflict the pain of being in Torchwood on the last person we want to see it happen to.

Donna Noble would have kicked everyone in Torchwood three times around Roald Dahl Plass if she’d been invited along.

Adam

TARDIS Coordinates: February 13, 2008

You know, I actually kind of like Torchwood better like this.

Torchwood has entered the Matrix, apparently, and nothing is the way it was in the last episode. Owen has become a nerdy introvert in frame glasses. Gwen Cooper can’t remember her own fiance, or that they’ve lived together for years. Tosh has been dating for over a year, and is terribly happy in her relationship. And, apparently, wearing a push-up bra. Ianto is suddenly having memories of being a serial killer, haunted by the gruesome corpses of the girls he’s murdered. In the center of it all is poor Adam, the heart and soul of the series, trying to be reassuring and comforting, even as Captain Jack starts suffering terrible visions of the past, and the day his brother disappeared.

What do you mean, who’s Adam? He’s been there all along. He’s even in the credits, for heaven’s sake.

Adam can exist only in the memories and perceptions of other people. At some point in the past few days, he’s inserted himself into Torchwood, a trusted, loyal, reliable, long-term member of the team. Trouble is, he sucks it. He might have had better luck inserting himself into, say, a family, or another workplace, but everything is so relentlessly catalogued and recorded around Torchwood that it was pretty much only a matter of time. The Torchwood team do not take kindly to having their minds fucked, and head for the Retcon to wipe out the last couple of days.

I see that TV Tropes shares my opinion that “Adam” is a swipe at fan-fiction writers; the new author inserts himself into the text and starts having the characters act the way he wants them to act, even if it’s a wee bit off-model for them. Unfortunately, as his plan falls apart, he props up ever more devious manipulations until even the characters are exchanging glances and going “What the hell.”

He seems more complicated than merely malevolent, and his abject terror at “not existing” makes me wonder where he is when he spends his time in storage. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want to hurt anyone until he gets desperate.

Wiping out their memories of the last two days, however, is essentially wiping out their memories for the past three years, and some of those memories are a bit hard to shed. Tosh takes it hardest, still convinced her love is real, though Adam essentially took the phrase “mind rape” to a whole other level with her. So despite Adam’s initial presence, he might actually be one of the worst aliens they’ve ever encountered, because he invades on such a personal, private level. His last ditch effort to survive involves inserting himself into a restored memory of Jack’s, something he’d buried years ago – wiping out Adam will mean wiping the memory. It’s one of the most difficult moral choices Jack has made so far.

Frankly, it’s nice to see Jack Sue actually showing a touch of vulnerability and facing a real choice. I know Russell T. has a boner for him, but there has to be some weakness in that steel spine and iron will of his; some uncertainty, some..well, depth.

And remember, kids, the magic arc word is “Gray.”