"Torchwood, episode 1x03: Ghost Machine" Starring: John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Burn Gorman, Naoko Mori, Gareth David-Lloyd, Kai Owen Owen and Gwen are running full-tilt down some back streets somewhere in the dead of night. Tosh is directing them from the hub via headset. She’s also directing Jack in the SUV. She can’t get visual confirmation of whatever it is they’re chasing, but the signal it’s producing is definitely alien. Jack warns them to be careful apprehending it since they don’t know what they’re dealing with. Um, duh? They follow Tosh’s directions blindly for a while until she sees the source of the signal on a security camera. It’s a young guy in a hoodie and he looks perfectly human. He dives under a closing gate and Gwen, looking as fierce as any terminator, dives after him, so Jack and Owen have fallen way behind them by the time she catches the kid by the arm. The kid just shrugs out of his jacket and keeps running, leaving her panting and moaning that he got away. Tosh says according to her computers, Gwen is now in possession of whatever is sending the signal though. Gwen searches the pockets of the jacket and comes up with a device that looks like a totally unimpressive remote control. It flashes a few lights and, completely ignoring Jack’s earlier warning, she pushes the button on the top. The people around her disappear, replaced by a kid who is dressed in early 1900s clothing. He has a tag around his neck that says his name is Tom Riddle. Chrissy: No it doesn’t. Diandra: Just making sure you’re paying attention. Chrissy: Dork. Actually, it says Tom Erasmmus Flanagan. Gwen asks if he can hear her. He doesn’t seem to. He seems to be talking to nobody in particular as he says he’s lost and he wants to go home. He walks away and her surroundings warble back into the present. Jack and Owen catch up to her and she jumps back as Jack tries to touch her arm. “I’ve just seen a ghost,” she mumbles numbly. By the way, since we are going into this episode directly from the last one, Chrissy and I are still a bit drunk. I’m sure it won’t affect the recap too much. Everyone is back at the hub, where Tosh is checking the security footage. As far as they can tell Gwen was just standing there for a couple minutes staring into space before Jack and Owen arrived. Well, duh. What were they expecting to see? Apparently Gwen was expecting something because she says it was SO real (yes, delusions are often very real too, dear) and she could hear the kid’s thoughts and feel what he felt and...wait. That sounds more like dream reality than reality. Seriously, what was she expecting to see on the footage? Jack is messing with the remote, pointing to the big button on the end and asking if that’s the one she pushed. He looks like he’s going to push it for a second and everyone yelps at him to stop. “As if,” he says, which...sounds odd coming from a grown man and not a teenage girl with a mouthful of bubblegum. Gwen says it felt like an apparition – like she was seeing a ghost. She gives the name from the card to Tosh, who starts searching databases, but Owen yelps “found him” before she can get very far. He waves a phone book at them. They all stare at him like ‘oh. Yeah. I was just going to check there.’ Gwen and Owen pay Tom a visit. She introduces herself to Tom’s middle-aged daughter as Owen’s superior, prompting a few dirty looks from him. She tells Tom they’re looking for witnesses to an “incident” at the train station last night. Tom and his daughter say they were home watching TV all night and would they like a cup of tea? Gwen says sure and volunteers Owen to help Tom’s daughter with it. He looks at her like ‘you are so paying for this later’. Gwen starts chatting with Tom, who she notes is not Welsh. He says no, he was evacuated in 1941 when the Germans were using the East End for target practice. His mother packed his suitcase, his sister wrote his name on a card around his neck and they shoved him on the first train out to the country. He was eight years old and terrified. And the fact that somebody screwed up and the train left Cardiff without him didn’t help. For the slow audience members, this conversation is intercut with images from Gwen’s “vision”. Obviously it all worked out in the end, aside from the fact that his family back in London all died. On the way back out to the car, Gwen is still confused. That old man was obviously the little boy, but he’s still alive so why would his ghost be hanging around the station? Rhys interrupts just then, calling to announce that he’s doing the laundry and if she has any clothes that need washing, now is the time to tell him. Oh, and which drawer does the laundry soap go in? She tells him to just leave it and she’ll get it later. He agrees quickly. Oh, come on, Gwen, he’s never going to learn if you keep doing that! He asks if she’s coming home for dinner. She doesn’t know. “I can live with all the Secret Squirrel stuff, but if you can’t even tell me if you’re coming home...” Secret Squirrel, by the way, would make an awesome name for a rock band. Chrissy: No, it wouldn’t. She accuses him of nagging her, they have a little spat and he says ‘fine then, come home, don’t come home, I DON’T CARE’ and hangs up. Back at the hub, Jack pulls up the record on the guy Gwen lifted the remote from. His name is Bernie and he’s 19 and has a string of convictions already. Tosh pulls up the convictions and notes that he’s not exactly a hardened criminal – he stole food and tried to steal tires off a car only to put them back. Ianto the food and drink fairy shows up with sandwiches and coffee. Chrissy: Hee. Fairy. Diandra: Have another drink, Chris. Chrissy: Don’t mind if I do. Owen – who is so bored he’s playing some sort of video game – asks if they’ve gotten anywhere with the device. Jack says something about nanotechnology and “makes NASA look like Toys R Us” but it’s kind of garbled around a mouthful of sandwich. Gwen picks up the remote and notes that it lit up and went crazy when she touched it before but it’s not doing anything now. Jack, still talking around food, asks where the kid lives. “Splott,” Tosh says, taking much daintier bites of her sandwich instead of scarfing it down like it’s trying to escape like *some* people. Ianto says estate agents pronounce it “Splow”. Yeah, well estate agents are pathological liars who would probably call a house with flood damage stemming from the full grown tree sticking from the roof a “fixer upper”. Seriously, it has two Ts in it. Double letters in the English language aren’t usually a sign that said letters are silent. It’s not a teenage girl whose name looks like her parents vomited a bunch of random Scrabble tiles onto her birth certificate and forced her to go through life saying “It’s pronounced ‘Dez-i-ray’ and no, my parents aren’t usually that stupid.” Splat. Tosh knocks on Bernie’s mom’s door. Before Tosh can get two words out, mom calls Bernie a little bastard who owes her 50 quid and is not coming in the house until he pays up. She slams the door in Tosh’s face. That went well. Montage of conversations with other people in the area go about as well. He’s been banned from the local pub, his friend hates him and a store owner says she wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire. Gwen, Tosh and Owen regroup, stuffing their faces with donuts and bemoaning the fact that they are apparently looking for the Welsh version of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Jack walks up, looks at them like ‘this is what you call working?’ and stomps off. They sigh and take their cue to follow him. He’s headed back to the train station to see if he can replicate the original event and wait for lightning to strike again. Which means someone is going to have to use the device again. “Any volunteers,” he asks, tossing it at Owen before he can protest. And protest he does, saying there’s a slight flaw in this plan: it’s insane and potentially dangerous. Jack snaps that they were the ones who gave up looking for the 19 year old kid so he figured maybe they needed a bit more excitement. They all look everywhere but at him, looking very much like unruly brats being yelled at by daddy. Jack and the girls start moving again, but Owen is held back when the remote lights up in his hands. He yells “wait” and then everything shifts around him and he’s standing under a bridge alone at night while a rainstorm rages. A girl dressed in 1960s clothing stumbles in, sobbing. She starts talking to herself, obviously for the benefit of the audience. She’s rambling about how mom was right, he’s a bastard and she TOLD him it was just one dance and she shouldn’t have gone outside with him. Owen tries to talk to her, but she, like Tom earlier, can’t hear him. Then the guy she’s rambling about shows up, calls her Lizzie Lewis and generally acts like a crazed stalker. She completely fails to run away while she has a chance. She calls him Ed Morgan and says the “girls” warned her about him and they were right. Because this is the sort of conversation you have with a man who has chased you into a secluded back alley at night when you could be running and screaming for help. He steps closer while he continues to taunt her so we can get a good look at his ridiculously fluffy hairdo and hear his lisp. He looks like the kind of kid who would get a lot of swirlies in the boy’s bathroom at school, basically. But the 60s were a very different time, I guess. Chrissy: Have you seen West Side Story? This guy is actually more intimidating than any of the gang members in that movie. Diandra: Good point. He grabs her and kisses her and when she pulls away he slaps her. Owen is frozen in place, gasping and making horrified faces while Ed grabs Lizzie by the hair and starts waving a knife in her face. He shoves her into a corner while she screams and then Owen is back in the present, still gasping and looking like he might throw up. Gwen runs over and asks what happened. Owen babbles that he couldn’t move and she was so scared and...and... He maybe starts to cry, but the camera cuts away before he can get very far. Back at the hub, Owen is sitting on a couch looking numb while Tosh runs searches on the girl. She finds a 17 year old named Elizabeth Lewis, who was raped and murdered under that bridge in 1963. And they never caught the guy who did it, apparently. Owen tells her to look for Ed Morgan and, while she’s doing that, Jack comes to a sudden realization. The remote is a quantum transducer. Tosh is yanked away from her search to play exposition fairy, explaining that transducers convert one form of energy to another. Jack says in this case it must be picking up emotional energy. “Ever had déjà vu? Felt someone walking over your grave. Ever felt someone behind you in an empty room?” Well, yes, but I usually attribute that to dreams or one really creepy experiment with meditation. This is not the greatest explanation, so I’m going to borrow Walter Bishop’s and say that events that are accompanied by intense emotions have a sort of ripple effect that can cause them to be felt forward and backward through time. Chrissy: Only you can think any explanation of the shit that happens on “Fringe” makes more sense than simply attributing it to alien technology. Owen tries to redirect back to the Lewis case, ordering Tosh to search for something: witness reports, coroner’s reports, whatever. Jack tries to reel him back in, pointing out that they’d need new evidence to reopen the case and “I picked up an alien device and saw an emotional imprint” doesn’t exactly fly in court cases. He says they should focus on this Bernie jackass and what he knows about the device because that is their JOB, goddamnit. “Gwen, with me,” he barks as he storms off. Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Chrissy: I can think of a cure for that... Diandra: Get in line. Gwen follows him and ends up in a shooting range full of cutout targets of aliens. He points at a table full of weapons and says she needs to know how to use them. She laughs and says she doesn’t even kill spiders in the bathtub. Yeah, I don’t either. I just wash them down the drain and let nature take its course. They put on their protective glasses and earmuffs and he hands her a pistol, which she proceeds to cluelessly wave in his face. Off to a good start already. At least we know if she accidentally shoots him he’ll just pop back up again. He guides her to hold the gun in one hand with her body turned at a right angle to her target which...is totally fucking wrong and a good way to sprain your wrist in real life. In this case, though, it gives him a chance to stand REALLY close to her. He brushes her hair back and grips her shoulders and she has a look on her face like ‘remember, Gwen, you HAVE a BOYFRIEND.’ Chrissy: Pffft. Who cares? Diandra: I’m thinking the boyfriend would. I mean, unless he’s up for a threesome. He puts one hand on her hip and tells her to breathe. Yeah, right. Somehow she manages to stay focused on the target and actually hit it. He tells her she’s on her own now, but remember to fnmaiogwch. Seriously, what? I can’t even blame that on the fact that I accidentally turned the subtitles off and got so distracted by how goddamn pretty he is that I forgot to turn them back on. The captions guy can’t seem to figure out what he said either. It just cuts abruptly to a montage of Gwen shooting one gun after another with Jack throwing out random tips and sometimes demonstrating. It should be noted that when he’s shooting he IS supporting his wrist with his other hand and more or less facing the target. In other words, he’s doing it right but he’s a shitty teacher. The montage ends with her shooting two guns at once like she’s at the OK corral and giggling like a schoolgirl. She takes off her protective gear, looks at her watch, and says it’s getting late. She asks when Jack goes home. “You seem to live here.” He just shrugs and she looks at him like ‘oh, seriously? And you’re telling me *I* have to have a life?’ He spews some bullshit about needing to always be ready and hating to commute. She asks where he sleeps. Chrissy: And what is the maximum capacity of the bed? Diandra: Five humans, two medium-sized aliens and a Shetland pony? Chrissy:...I don’t even want to know what’s going on in your head right now. He says he doesn’t. Why is it that immortals never seem to sleep? You would think being awake all damn day would get really boring after about a century. Chrissy: I assume in this case he gives meaning to the expression “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Diandra: Oh. Good point. Gwen is like “doesn’t it get lonely at night?” Jack just stares at her like ‘where are you going with this?’ But before he can ask if she’s volunteering to keep him company (which he would absolutely be game for, I’m sure), she shakes herself and says she has to get home because Rhys will be worrying. Well, that’s one way to completely kill the moment, GWEN. Chrissy: I’m not sure if the fact that she just turned down the hot guy who was rubbing up against her makes her incredibly noble or incredibly stupid. Diandra: A little of column A and a little of column B? She goes home to find an empty house and a message from Rhys on the answering machine saying he’s playing poker with a buddy and he did the laundry earlier, but they’re still in the machine so she’ll need to get them. She plops on the couch and takes out the remote time shifter thingy (technical term). Okay, so clearly she’s already learned to do the opposite of whatever Jack says. The remote lights up and she pushes the button. She sees some random domestic moments between her and Rhys that make her smile wistfully. When it’s over, Rhys shows up in person. Apparently the guy he was playing with had a row with his wife and ended up on the couch. He more or less apologizes for nagging earlier and says he’s okay with the ridiculous hours as long as she still wants to come home to him at night. She smiles and says “I do. And you’re gorgeous.” Let’s not get too carried away there. Meanwhile, Owen is apparently driving himself insane going over every detail of the Lizzie Lewis murder. He finds a record of Ed Morgan being questioned during the investigation and let go. Then he starts going through the Ed Morgans in the phone book one by one. Somehow he rules all but one out and goes to knock on that one guy’s door. He flashes a fake badge and gives the guy a story about a suspected gas leak to get inside the house. He gets the guy to sit down in the living room and asks how long Ed has lived in this house. Does he remember some of the neighbors he’s had over the years. Like...say...Mabel Lewis? Ed has a piss poor poker face and starts getting fidgety right away. Poor Mabel had to move away after her only child was murdered, of course. “Little Lizzie Lewis,” Owen taunts. “She loved dancing. Do you remember? You should.” Ed’s hands are fisting so tightly his knuckles are turning white. Owen spews a few more details, including a few direct quotes from Lizzie, so the guy will know he’s not bluffing, then whips out the I Know What You Did 43 Summers Ago accusation. The guy is sweating and gripping the armrests of his chair for dear life, although his face is expressionless. There’s a heartbeat pounding on the soundtrack, getting faster and faster until the guy leaps out of the chair and chases Owen out of the house, shouting “you’ll get nothing from me! I’ve told you before. You’ll get nothing from me!” Wait...what? What before is he talking about? Chrissy: And how dare they try to make me like Owen? Diandra: Told you. He’s an ass, but he has his moments. Owen practically stumbles across Bernie sitting on a park bench outside Ed’s house (because that’s probably the only way anyone was ever going to find him) and shouts “Bernie Harris!” This, of course, has exactly the same effect as people in cop shows shouting whatever acronym they are affiliated with while flashing a badge as they approach a suspect: it prompts the suspect to run as fast as possible in the other direction. They might as well yell “police! Start running!” Chrissy: You could totally make a drinking game out of that, you know. Diandra: Please. Like I need another reason to get drunk watching ridiculous, repetitive cop dramas. Owen gives chase down several streets and through several backyards, disturbing a bunch of kids playing and startling some chickens. Bernie finally runs into a dead end and whines “don’t hurt me, please, I’ve got asthma!” Yeah, right. You ran, like, a mile and Owen is more out of breath than you. Would you like to try another obviously phony excuse? Awkward cut to a bar, where Owen apparently takes Bernie to interrogate him. Why? Who cares? The rest of the team saunters in and Jack slaps the remote on the table in front of Bernie. Bernie starts babbling like a freaking brook. He and his buddy were using this lockup that belonged to some possibly insane old man and this was just in there with a bunch of rocks and “foreign coins” and I didn’t know what it was I swear! Oy. He wouldn’t last a day in prison. He leans in toward Jack, all wide-eyed, and whispers “it makes you see things.” He saw a woman dumping her dead baby in the river. And he happened to know who the woman was because he’d seen her around Splort recently as an old woman, so he went and asked her about it and she threw money at him to keep him quiet. Obviously it didn’t work. “You blackmailed her,” Owen sneers. Owen, have you ever heard the one about glass houses and stones? Bernie launches into another story, describing the Lizzie and Ed echo Owen saw, which probably explains what he was doing outside Ed’s house. Owen concludes that Bernie knows nothing of any use to them and the team packs up and starts to leave. “So you don’t want the other half then?” Bernie blurts. Bernie’s apartment. Bernie sits nervously watching Jack and Gwen dig through the tin full of money and rock (all of which Jack declares to be alien, naturally). Tosh plays around with the two halves of the remote until it clicks together into something that resembles a video game controller. They go to leave, but Gwen lags behind long enough for Bernie to whimper that he only used the other half of the device once because it freaked him out. He saw himself die. Right out on the street in front of his apartment building. And it looked like the near future. Gwen looks shaken...or confused...or something and runs downstairs to try to flag down Jack before he can get in the car. The controller starts blinking in her hands the minute she hits the sidewalk and she pushes the button. Night. Gwen sees herself holding a bloody knife. Vision Gwen turns to her and whimpers “help me please. I was too late. I couldn’t stop it. He’s dead. Owen had the knife. He wanted to kill him.” She keeps wailing that she couldn’t stop it, but then Gwen is back in the present and Jack is ripping the control from her hands and demanding to know what the hell she was thinking. She just stares at Owen. Sometime later, she’s telling Jack what she saw. He summarizes that Bernie saw himself dying and she saw Owen with the knife. She says no, she was holding the knife. Jack brushes it off. It’s just one potential future that might not actually happen. Also, since this is a totally common trope, it’s entirely likely that what she saw was so vague that she won’t see it coming until it’s too late anyway. Back at Ed’s house, Ed goes to call a number he has written on a scrap of paper and chickens out. Bar. Tosh tells Owen she found Ed Morgan. Owen says um...yeah, so did I and I “put the fear of God in him” this morning. Tosh looks nervous. She says according to Ed’s medical records he’s claustrophobic, paranoid and depressed. He attempted suicide a couple times and hasn’t left his house in years. Which would make him agoraphobic, not claustrophobic WRITERS. Sheesh. Learn the difference. At any rate: Owen just taunted an unstable head case. She says if Jack finds out what Owen did...he’ll what? Spank him? Chrissy: Augh! Don’t put those images in my head! Diandra: Too late. Chrissy: Ew...I need a brain scrubber. Ed stares at the number while something that sounds like it was lifted directly from an X-Files soundtrack plays ominously in the background. He dials. Bernie’s cell phone rings. Owen wonders aloud why Ed thought he wanted money. “He kept saying ‘you’ll get nothing from me’.” Tosh says it’s probably the paranoia. Except Owen recalls the part where Ed said “I’ve told you before” and gets a weird look on his face. Chrissy: That’s how he always looks. Diandra: Ha, ha. Funny. Gwen is knocking on Bernie’s door at just that moment. She has apparently decided that Bernie needs to hear that the future he saw isn’t set in stone and he may not die. Never mind that the fact that she’s there might be setting off the very chain of events that leads to his death anyway. Apparently she’s not familiar with sci-fi clichés. “Some things you’re just better off not knowing,” he moans. Gwen’s cell phone rings. It’s Jack. It seems Owen came back to the hub and told him everything and he’s put two and two together. Bernie was blackmailing Ed and Ed thought Owen was working with him. Gwen says uh, yeah...I’m with Bernie now. Jack grabs Owen and runs for the car. Tosh pulls up the camera feeds around the apartment and sees Ed stumbling toward Bernie’s building. No wonder Ed is paranoid. This show makes Wales look like it has more surveillance cameras on every corner than downtown Manhattan in the most distrustful “Big Brother is watching you booga booga!” universe. Chrissy: So in other words: ”Person of Interest”. Diandra: Yes. Except the lead actor on this show is better looking and capable of putting normal human inflections in his voice. Chrissy: Ouch. Bernie looks out a window and starts running for the front door. Gwen starts to follow, but has to go back for her ringing phone. It’s Jack. As she’s whining that she doesn’t know what’s going on she has a sudden flashback of Bernie telling her he saw himself die right outside his apartment and starts running after him. Yeah, like I said. By the time you figure it out, you’ll be too late to stop it and the airport security guys will be shooting you in the back right in front of your younger self. Chrissy: You saw “Twelve Monkeys” recently, didn’t you? Diandra: Maybe. Bernie and Ed meet out on the street. Ed has a knife and is babbling that he knew “they” would come for him eventually. Gwen comes up behind Bernie and Ed thinks she’s come for him too. “I used to see it in people’s faces when they looked at me. They knew!” That’s called guilt, Eddy. Gwen sidles up to him and calls his name. He goes from scared old man to raving psycho in a second flat, calling her a bitch. “You’re all the same.” Bernie swears they won’t tell anyone. Ed says ‘of course not, dumbass, you’ll be dead’. Gwen’s eyes keep flitting behind Ed, where Jack and Owen are creeping up quietly. She’s not being subtle at all, but Ed is so deep in his delusion that he probably wouldn’t notice anyway. Ed goes to lunge at them just as Jack grabs him and Owen wrenches the knife from his hand. Owen, suddenly realizing that he’s got a weapon and is standing in front of a psychotic killer, gets defensive of Gwen, who he notes Ed would definitely have killed if they hadn’t gotten there in time to stop him. Gwen is all wide eyed and having flashbacks of her flashforward where she was babbling about Owen having a knife. Chrissy: Flashbacks of a flashforward. Sheesh. What is this, “Lost”? Diandra: I wish. Don’t make me nostalgic. Both Jack and Gwen shout at Owen to knock it off, which he does, after a long pause. Gwen takes the knife from him and has about ten seconds of relief that they stopped her vision from happening and prevented anyone from being killed. And then Ed, being about ten bricks shy of a load, goes to hug her with relief and impales himself on the knife still in her hand. He drops and bleeds out almost instantly. Gwen drops the knife and looks at her blood-soaked hands, babbling “I couldn’t stop it” over and over. Hub, Jack’s office. Tosh is reassuring a traumatized-looking Gwen that Ed was depressed and wanted to die and would have found a way eventually. Owen apologizes for screwing up, but notes that he didn’t kill the man even though he had a chance. Gwen is like ‘gee, Owen, thanks for throwing me under a bus just there’. Tosh asks what they’re going to do with the device. Jack waxes philosophical about how humans can’t just see the future without wanting to change something, which is why it’s dangerous. Duh. He hands it to Ianto to lock away in the “archives”. Gwen can’t stop crying though, and she’s still moaning about how she killed him later when she and Jack are standing out by the bay for...some reason. He repeats the ‘he killed himself’ line and starts rambling on about how they’re surrounded by these emotional energy “ghosts” even if they can’t see them. “We just have to learn to live with them.” Not sure how that’s supposed to cheer her up. Or was it meant to be profound somehow? Eh, whatever. He puts his arm around her and she leans on his chest as the shot fades to black. He showed a lot of restraint in this episode. Chrissy: She’s traumatized. Diandra: Like that’s ever stopped a screenwriter before. Have you watched “Bones” recently? Chrissy: What is it with you and dumb police dramas? Diandra: They provide a break between mind bending episodes of “Fringe” or whatever awesome shows are on. Anyway, Booth and Brennan jumped into bed together immediately after she was crying over one of her coworkers being shot to death right in front of her. Chrissy: That’s just...wrong. Diandra: Tell me about it.