selenak

Helen Gaynor seems to be the one scriptwriter who does better on Torchwood than she does on Doctor Who. Last season's The Ghost Machine impressed me, while on the other hand her Dalek episodes were the nadir of an otherwise very good season 3/29 of DW. To the Last Man is excellent.

Given all the debates about how differently Americans and British viewers watch the show from last week, I couldn't help but think that WWI as an emotional touchstone is something very European, too; as far as I can tell, it simply doesn't have the same kind of presence in consciousness on the other side of the Atlantic. While Paul Cornell's Human Nature/Family of Blood two-parter remains untouched, I thought To the Last Man used it really well. The McGuffin of a WWI soldier frozen in cyrogenic sleep and woken up one day a year could have been a simple repeat of last year's Out of Time guest stars, but they used the fact Tommy did have those days in between his past and the present for a very pointed and poignant comment - the sequence where he watches the news on the tv in the pub, the Iraq War news clip, and comments that they told the soldiers in WWI this was "the war to end all wars"... and thirty days, for him, there was a new World War, and so on, and so forth. Are we as a species worth saving, he asks Tosh, and Tosh says yes. At the end of the episode she still says yes, though more bitterly; battle-hardened. I appreciated that they used the shell-shock for something other than explaining Tommy's presence in the hospital - bringing in the fate of those soldiers shot for "cowardice" was gutwrenching, and yet another counterpoint to yet another ep from last season, Captain Jack Harkness. Real Jack dies, like Tommy does, a few days after the farewell, but his airplane is shot down by the enemies he's fighting. Tommy is killed by his own people. And the obvious parallel: Torchwood 2008, too, sends him to his death deliberately, including Tosh, because they have no choice.

I've seen complaints that Owen's sympathy for Tosh comes out of nowhere, but given that he had a very similar experience with Diane the aviator last season, I found it plausible he would empathize with Tosh. The Diane encounter, the suicidal stint in Combat and being nearly responsible for yet another apocalypse by opening the rift are enough life-changing experiences to turn another page, and while he's still capable of being a git (see landing Gwen with the night watch in the hospital last episode), Owen hasn't behaved viciously to someone this season so far, and the occasional moment of empathy (there was one in the season opener, too, when he asked Jack after Jack said "I found my doctor" "And did he fix you?") with his co-workers appear to be another part of this turning-a-new-page.

Speaking of relationships, the conversation between Jack and Ianto was the first time I felt a genuine emotional connection between them. My problem with the Jack/Ianto 'ship has always been that it went with nearly no transition from "OMG MY GIRLFRIEND IS DEAD AND YOU KILLED HER" to "Coffee, tea, or me, sir?", but this season they take the trouble to actually show us moments of Jack and Ianto connecting beyond innuendo and kissing. Ianto's awareness that Jack, too, is out of his time and the question he asks Jack impressed me far more about the reality of them dating than the ensuing kiss.

Lastly: Old School Torchwood was love. And of course the name "Harriet" made me think of - no, not of Harriet Jones, oddly enough, but of Lord Peter Wimsey's significant other. WWI and 20s fanfic would be fun. Since it's been announced we'll get an Agatha Christie episode in s4 of DW, and since Sarah Jane and the kids encountered an old lady who with her husband went through adventures involving aliens and mysteries in the 20s, too, I wonder whether there'll be an overall connection...