"Torchwood, episode 1x05: Small Worlds" Starring: John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Burn Gorman, Naoko Mori, Gareth David-Lloyd, Kai Owen We open on a forest at night, which is never a good thing. An old woman is creeping up to a clearing, dictating what sounds like notes on an anthropological study into a tape recorder. “They’re here,” she whispers excitedly when she reaches the spot and we see small, bright human-shaped creatures fluttering around a rock formation a few yards away from her. Chrissy: Really? You wanted to be drunk through the terminator thing, but we’re going into an episode about fairies stone sober? Diandra: Eh. Mythical creatures and aliens are actually easier to deal with than sentient killing machines. The whole idea of machines becoming smarter than humans gets more laughable by the decade. The woman smiles and calls the fairies “little darlings. She snaps a few pictures of them and walks away, totally missing the little darlings turning into largeish gremlins and making noises one usually associates with creatures coming up from the deepest pit of hell. Chrissy: So Karen Moning’s fairies? Diandra: Maybe? Half the fairies in folklore are evil and the other half are either mischievous or bitter toward humans for forcing them underground. Ask any Irish person. Hub, night. We pan through the darkened upper level, through Jack’s office and down through a hole in the floor to his bedroom, where Jack is trying to sleep except he keeps being woken up by some sort of nightmare involving a train and guys dressed in WWI uniforms with mouths full of rose petals. Two things: is that train going through a tunnel? Because there’s enough imagery in that dream to give Freud a hard on. And speaking of sex, it should be noted that Jack is naked, sheet wrapped around his waist and writhing in a fairly suggestive manner. Chrissy: And knowing you, you’re picturing another man on top of him right now. Diandra: It’s really very disturbing how well you’ve gotten to know me over the years. He gets dressed... Chrissy: Damnit! ...and climbs up to his office to find a rose petal laying on his desk. He jumps and shoves the petal in his pocket when Ianto suddenly appears behind him, riffling through a file folder. The slasher in me squeals with delight at the implication that maybe Ianto woke up in the middle of the night and decided to do a little paperwork since he couldn’t sleep and Jack just came up because he was surprised to find himself alone in bed. “You shouldn’t be here,” Jack says. “Neither should you,” Ianto says. Oh, fuck you guys. You ruined it. Chrissy: They were just threatening to kill each other an episode ago. Stop being so damn impatient. Diandra: *whine* Ianto starts typing on the nearest computer and Jack comes over and puts a hand on his shoulder and asks what he’s working on. Ianto looks flustered by the unexpected contact and unless he turns around and shoves his own hand down Jack’s pants, this whole exchange looks suspiciously like a scene from a sexual harassment in the workplace video. Alas, he just sighs and says they’re picking up strange weather patterns. And we cut away before anything interesting happens. School yard, the next day. Or whenever. It’s after hours and the kids are going home. And by kids I mean girls because this is apparently not a coed school. There is a man watching from a car across the street (RED FLAG) as one girl appears to be waiting for someone who isn’t coming. Meanwhile, a guy is getting chewed out by his wife for nearly forgetting to pick up their daughter. Huh, wonder if those two things are related. A teacher asks the girl – Jasmine – if somebody is picking her up. “Roy,” she says. So, either he’s not her father or she calls her parents by their first names. The teacher gets distracted by the dozen or so other children messing around and Jasmine wanders off. The guy in the car follows her and, when she’s well and truly out of sight of any passersby, he pulls up alongside her and says her mom sent him to get her. Not being a total idiot, she keeps walking and doesn’t say a word. Good girl. He pulls ahead of her, gets out and proceeds to try to force her into the car. A wind kicks up and we switch to the POV of something with a blurry sort of green filtered vision. It buzzes at him, knocking him against the car, and hisses in a layered, demonic sounding voice, at the girl to run. The little girl just watches with a smile as the guy scrambles back into his car, spooked. Then she skips away. Literally. She might be evil. Elsewhere, Gwen and Jack are going to meet an “old friend” of Jack’s. It’s the woman from the first scene. Her name is Estelle and she is giving a lecture to a group of maybe a half dozen bored students on fairies. She smiles at Jack as they enter the room and continues talking about how rare it is to get a glimpse of fairies. “One has to have the patience of a saint and the blind faith of a prophet.” She projects her first picture of fairies behind her. It was taken in the same clearing she was in earlier and is somewhat blurry, but assuming Estelle has no reason to deliberately fake a supernatural phenomenon there doesn’t seem to be a better explanation of what the hell those things are. A sudden ball lightening storm? A freak accident resulting in dragonflies so big they wouldn’t even fit into the ecology of Australia (where everything is huge and probably poisonous)? Gwen is rolling her eyes anyway. Estelle says fairies are shy, but she just knows deep down that they are friendly, loving creatures. Chrissy: Yeah, and vampires are just misunderstood romantic types. Diandra: They’re not? Obviously Jack disagrees with her too because he is shaking his head as she’s saying this. “She always gets it wrong,” he mutters to Gwen as people start filing out of the room. Some short time later he’s flicking through the pictures and asking her when she took them. A couple nights ago in Roundstone Wood. There’s a circle formation of rocks in the woods and it’s called Roundstone Wood? Seriously? Estelle tells Gwen that she and Jack have always disagreed about fairies because he only ever sees the bad ones while she just sees cute little pixies flitting around playfully. Jack says they’re all bad. Gwen suggests maybe the problem is that one person’s definition of good could be another’s evil. Or maybe people just see what they want to see? “That’s what his father used to say,” Estelle murmurs and she is obviously talking about Jack. Chrissy: Uh-oh. Have we established how old he is yet? Diandra: Getting way ahead of yourself there. Chrissy: Sorry. Jack asks if she has any more pictures. She says they’re at home. Elsewhere, the guy who was trying to kidnap the little girl is wandering the street, trying to stop a nosebleed that seems to have started when he was slammed against his car. He hears wings buzzing from somewhere and childish laughter and starts freaking out. He darts into Cardiff market, but the wing sounds follow him right inside and some faint shape darts at his head. He staggers and starts choking and rose petals come out of his mouth. Then he’s coughing up water and rose petals. He staggers out into the street again and grabs a cop leaning against her squad car, shrieking at her to help him. He tries to get in her car and shakes her some more when she stops him and she finally handcuffs him. “It’s coming,” he whimpers. “Roy” finally brings Jasmine home after he found her wandering her way down the street on her own. Mom tries to get her attention but Jasmine ignores her. “Do what your mom says,” Roy orders. “You’re not my dad,” she snots. Mom ignores this opportunity to teach the little brat to respect authority when it is in her best interest and tells her she must not walk home alone because it’s not safe. If you only knew the half of it, mom. “It’s all right, Mum, no one can hurt me,” Jasmine says matter of factly and skips off to her room. Estelle’s house. Estelle introduces Gwen to Moses, a pretty tuxedo cat who looks very dazed by the lights and shiny objects being waved at him. So she’s an old lady who lives alone with her cat. No stereotypes there. She hands Jack a folder of pictures and goes to put the cat outside. Gwen peeks at the pictures on Estelle’s mantle and focuses on an aging picture of a guy in uniform who looks suspiciously like Jack. Knowing as much as she does, this obviously doesn’t faze her because she picks it up and says “this is you.” Jack tries to play stupid and say it’s actually his dad, who dated Estelle a long time ago. “They were inseparable.” Gwen asks what happened. Jack says he was sent abroad during the war and she volunteered at a more local post. He hands her another picture. This one is obviously him. I mean, at least in the other one he was wearing a hat that kind of hid his face a little. This would all make sense if Gwen didn’t already know he is immortal. But she does and it doesn’t. Why is he lying to her still? Gwen goes outside to talk to Estelle and “innocently” asks if she saw Jack’s father after the war. No, she says, that’s about when she lost touch. Why? “Did all three of you ever meet?” Chrissy: Praise Jesus, she’s finally showing intelligence! Estelle says no. Jack contacted her only a few years ago. “He’s so like his dad,” she muses. “Same walk. Same smile. I hope he’s still alive. He’s be in his early nineties by now.” Gwen suggests she ask Jack about him. Estelle says Jack never seems to want to talk about him. Jack interrupts at that moment and makes Estelle promise she’ll call him if she sees these fairies again. Night or day. “And be careful. It’s important to me.” He hugs her and kisses the top of her head. As they’re leaving, Gwen asks how often he sees her – only when she claims she’s seen fairies? Jack says that’s what Estelle calls them, but there really isn’t a name for what they are because they are “from the dawn of time”. She asks if they’re alien. “Worse...they’re part of us. Part of our world yet we know nothing about them. So we pretend to know what they look like. We see them as happy. We imagine they have tiny little wings that are bathed in moonlight.” In reality, he says they’re a dangerous creature you can only somewhat see out of the corner of your eye that are “a touch of myth, a touch of the spirit world, a touch of reality, all jumbled together.” Chrissy: I’m starting to see why the Irish believe in them. Diandra: Because they’ll believe anything? Chrissy: Because people see all sorts of things after they’ve had a few too many pints. Didn’t some American claim he saw aliens once after drinking a jug of Moonshine and taking potshots at barn owls? Diandra: Yeah, I’m sure that happens a lot in the south. There was more to Jack’s explanation, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. He says they have to find them before “all hell breaks loose”. Um...didn’t you just say they’ve always existed? Why would they be something you have to apprehend now? Elsewhere, Jasmine the possibly demon child skips across her backyard and crawls through a hole in the fence out back. Roy is in the kitchen wondering aloud why she doesn’t have any friends and whether there may be something wrong with her. “When’s the last time you saw her watching TV,” he asks mom. “Or reading a book? Or playing with a doll? Or sitting down to have a chat with us?” Yes, that would totally be normal for a...what, ten year old? Chrissy: Hey, I talked to my parents all the time. Diandra: I said “normal”. A category in which neither of us fits. Jasmine stops in a little field with a couple trees and smiles as the voice hisses “come away, o human child.” Back at the hub, the team is looking at pictures from Estelle’s stash: two girls, both surrounded by fairy lights. “I blame magic mushrooms,” Ianto says. “What you do in private is none of our business,” Jack fires back. “Since when,” Ianto does not ask. Gwen says they’re obviously fake. Owen points out that both Arthur Conan Doyle and Houdini believed in fairies. Gwen points out that Houdini was a fame whore and Arthur Conan Doyle was quite possibly off his rocker at the time (which, given that he also believed Houdini really was magic, is a distinct possibility). Apparently Gwen researched the whole thing for a paper when she was in school. The girls admitted the pictures were fake when they were older. They come to the more recent pictures Estelle took. Owen says he knows the woods they were taken in because they’re sort of infamous. Ancient people were afraid to go into them for any reason including chopping trees for firewood and the Romans wouldn’t go near them either. Tosh says she’s had no reports of a sighting. Jack says she wouldn’t because radar can’t detect fairies. Because they vibrate at such high frequencies that they aren’t still long enough to be seen (Colfer, 2001, pg 73). Or, you know, magic. But they do screw with the weather, so if they watch for changes in normal weather patterns they should find something. The police officer manhandles the attempted kidnapper into the station. He’s babbling “they tried to kill me!” Cop says he claimed there were flowers in his mouth, but she couldn’t find anything. He thinks maybe God is punishing him somehow and he’s really, really sorry, but he just can’t stop touching little girls and could they please lock him up? This gets the cops’ attention. That night, I imagine they embellished this story when discussing their day with their significant others so it didn’t sound like they were just sitting around with their thumbs up their asses until a child molester fell into their laps and shrieked “arrest me, please”! Woods. Gwen tells Jack she had a little chat with Estelle about his “dad”. He’s still sticking to the story: Estelle lost touch with dad after the war and he happened to get back in touch with her more recently. Owen, who is waving some sort of instrument around, notes that the woods have been relatively untouched since prehistoric times as they come upon the stone circle from the picture. “Anyone could have made this circle,” grumbles Scully/Gwen. Jack wonders why she keeps doubting him. Um...maybe because you are OBVIOUSLY LYING ABOUT SOMETHING? Seriously, Jack, trust goes both ways. Chrissy: And it’s not like his secret is going to get out if he tells her the truth. She already knows he can’t die and suspects he’s a lot older than he looks. No one else has seen the pictures. Diandra: Exactly. As plot devices go, this one is particularly pointless. Jail cell. The child molester is woken by a buzzing noise and looks up to find one of those goblin fairy things hovering by the ceiling. It dives for him and he screams. Jasmine’s mom hears Jasmine talking to somebody in her room and giggling. She opens the door and the buzzing thing flies out the window and Jasmine pretends to be just laying in bed twiddling her thumbs or something. Mom’s like ‘who were you talking to’ and Jasmine is like ‘I didn’t hear anything. Must have been the television.’ Chrissy: Not only is she evil, she’s a terrible liar. Precinct. A cop leads Jack and Gwen to the molester’s cell, rambling about how he’s never seen anything like this and the guy kept talking about shadows chasing him so everyone thought he was just cuckoo. Tosh comes up and announces she’s had the witnesses transferred and is working on wiping the CCTV. They get to the cell and Jack stands by the door and lets Tosh and Gwen go in to inspect the body and cell, respectively. Does he not want to get his coat dirty or something? Tosh says all signs point to suffocation but there’s no bruising or anything to point to how he suffocated alone in a locked cell. Gwen grabs some tweezers and fishes three rose petals from his mouth. Tosh looks surprised and says they’ve never seen anything like it before. Jack looks uncomfortable and says he has. Elsewhere, Estelle appears to be having some sort of séance in the hopes it will help her find the fairies again. The buzzing wing noise interrupts her and she shuffles into the kitchen and looks out the window to see what it is. A pair of glowing blue eyes glare at her from the woods just outside and then something flies at the window, crashing through the glass. Hub. Jack says the dead guy was a convicted pedophile. Wait, he was convicted and he was still hanging around schools without anyone seeming to notice? Gwen asks what the rose petals mean. Jack says it’s the way the creatures operate – they play games, torment and kill with flowers. It’s like a sort of warning or punishment. “They protect their own. The chosen ones.” The chosen ones being children, obviously. Tosh asks how they stop them. Jack says they can’t trap them because they have control of the elements and can suck the air right out of a human. They have to find the child they’re protecting now. A phone rings, startling them. Jack punches a speaker and Estelle’s voice comes out. Wait, wasn’t she just ambushed by fairies jumping through her kitchen window? What happened after that? They just disappeared? IS IT REALLY TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR A LITTLE CONTINUITY HERE? Chrissy: You sure you don’t want a drink? Diandra: *grumble* No. Maybe some aspirin. Estelle says he was right, there are bad fairies. Jack says they’re on their way and tells her not to go anywhere near them and they run off. Estelle seems content to follow Jack’s instructions, although I’m not sure what good it does since the fairies already blasted her kitchen window open. Apparently we’re pretending that didn’t happen now. Chrissy: Deep breaths. Diandra: Ooooooohhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmm... Anyway, any thoughts of staying put are blasted to hell when a cat outside shrieks. Estelle goes to crack the door open and call to Moses. When he doesn’t respond – which doesn’t necessarily mean anything since he’s a CAT – she steps outside and the door slams behind her, locking her out. Oy. The cat’s fine, by the way. Probably plotting with the fairies because, you know, many cats are evil. The fluttering wings sound gets louder and a torrential rain storm starts up. In the truck, Tosh sees a sudden flare of rain on her weather tracker despite the fact that it’s a clear night. This is because it’s centering on Estelle. Moses watches from somewhere nearby, dry and happy, as she makes half-hearted attempts to cover her face and then just gives up and lays down in the mud. Not much of a survival instinct on that one. Seriously, she’s out in the open, not trapped in a water tight container. This would make more sense if she was coughing up rose petals too but she’s not. The team arrives and when Estelle doesn’t answer the door, they run around the back to find her dead. Owen checks her and says it looks like she died from drowning, though the rest of the garden is dry. Owen and Tosh proceed to disappear because their part in this scene is obviously over. Gwen hovers as Jack closes Estelle’s eyes and cradles her in his arms and cries. “It wasn’t your dad that was in love with her,” Gwen says gently. “It was you.” Jack finally drops the ridiculous cover and mutters that they once made a vow they would be together until they died. Was this before he knew he was immortal? Because otherwise, that would be a really stupid promise for him to make. He kisses her forehead, cries some more, then puts her down, announces he needs a drink and runs off. Apparently he was referring to the liquor he keeps in the hub because the next scene is in his office. Gwen is still hovering, asking questions about him and Estelle. He says they met at the Astoria ballroom in London before Christmas. “She was 17 years old...I loved her at first sight.” Luckily this was the early 1900s because that can get you thrown in jail these days. “But nothing lasted back then. Promises were always being broken.” And yet you went ahead and made a promise you knew damn well you would break. Seriously, you ditched her and didn’t come back until her memory was fuzzy enough for her to buy that you were your own son. As far as she’s concerned, the love of her life ran off and she NEVER HEARD FROM HIM AGAIN. You suck, Jack. Chrissy: And I’m sure that makes his boyfriends very happy men. Diandra: Are...are you trying to distract me from my rant? Chrissy: Is it working? Diandra: What was I saying? Chrissy: I’ll take that as a yes. Jack moans about her having to die like that and gulps at his scotch or cognac or whatever that is. Gwen decides it’s time to refocus and asks where he saw that rose petal suffocation thing before. Was it during the war? Now, why would she assume that? He says it was before that. We flashback on a train, carrying a bunch of troops through Lahore and the timestamp says it’s 1909. Flashback Jack is sitting with fifteen men (who Present Jack says he was in charge of) in a train car. They are all joking and playing cards and one guy is playing a harmonica. Then the train goes into a tunnel, everything goes dark (except, conveniently, the muted patch of light on Jack’s confused face) and that loud wing fluttering noise starts up. The harmonica stops playing. Then everything else goes quiet. The train emerges from the tunnel and everyone except Jack is slumped over with rose petals spilling from their mouths. Chrissy: There goes your Freudian analysis of the “dream”. Diandra: Oh, it still applies. Seriously, a train goes into a tunnel and when it comes out, everyone is dead and covered in rose petals. Somebody clearly has issues. Present. Jack angsts about the fact that all the men he was responsible for were killed. Gwen wonders why them. He nurses his drink some more and admits that some of the men accidentally killed a child a week earlier when they were driving drunk through a village. The child turned out to be one of the “chosen ones”. That still doesn’t explain why they left Jack alone. They didn’t even go near him. And if they’re being selective, why didn’t they only kill the ones who were in the truck? Chrissy: Why must you always ask inconvenient questions? Diandra: BECAUSE SOMEBODY HAS TO. Gwen’s apartment. Gwen enters, Rhys right behind her, in the middle of saying she’s had a bit of a weird day at work when she turns on the light to find their living room ransacked. Forest leaves and rose petals are scattered everywhere and there’s pieces of what looks like a broken pot arranged in a circle on the floor. Jasmine’s house, morning. Jasmine’s mom is setting up for a party, which Jasmine doesn’t seem interested in attending because it would take away from the time she could be playing with her demon fairy friends. After she takes off for school, mom turns to Roy and says he was right about her spending way too much time in that wooded area behind the house. Roy says he’ll take care of it and heads for the car to drive her to school. And by take care of it, he apparently means reminding Jasmine that they are planning to tear up that area to build...something. She just stands beside the car, smiling an evil little smile. He grumbles that it’s no wonder her dad left when she was little. He must have known what was coming. Okay, not the best way to talk to a child, even if she is an evil little brat. Chrissy: ESPECIALLY if she’s evil. Might as well kill himself now. Dad climbs in the car and Jasmine waves at the fairies apparently hiding in the trees across the street before climbing in after him. Jasmine’s school, recess. A couple bigger, meaner girls shove Jasmine to the ground for no damn reason. The teacher sees her on the ground and runs over, helping her up and asking who pushed her. Jasmine says she doesn’t know. The teacher sighs. Jack is standing in the living room of Gwen’s apartment, watching Gwen angrily sweep up crap from the floor and rant about how she has never had to deal with this sort of shit before in her own damn house. “This means these creatures can invade my life whenever they feel like it and I’m scared, Jack! What chance did Estelle have? What chance do any of us have?” Jack says absolutely nothing and generally acts useless. She says he said these things protect the “chosen ones”, right? Who are they? He says the fairies were all children once, from varying points in time going back all the way to the “lost lands”. Gwen has no fucking clue what he’s talking about and is looking increasingly frustrated. Chrissy: What else is new? What do they want, she asks. He says they want the next chosen one. And we cut to Jasmine, because it wasn’t obvious enough yet who that could possibly be. She is sitting on her own next to the playground staring up at the trees when the two brats who pushed her earlier accuse her of telling on them and threaten to kick her teeth in. They have all the subtlety of a sledgehammer upside the head. They drag her to the ground and get one half-hearted kick in before the buzzing noise starts coming from the trees. At the hub, Jack is ordering checks on any unexplained deaths in the area when Tosh interrupts that the weather monitor is going apeshit right in the vicinity of an elementary school. The bullies are shoved back by gusts of wind. As is EVERYONE ELSE except, of course, Jasmine, who stands in the middle of it all laughing like a pint-sized maniac while everyone else shrieks and runs around in a panic. By the time the team gets there, it’s over and the kids are all being sent home. Gwen cuts away from the group and heads for the playground, but then she seems to hear the rustling and giggling in the trees and runs back the other way like her ass is on fire. She runs in as the rest of the group is talking to the teacher, just as the teacher gets to the part about Jasmine standing in the middle of the chaos, a light shining down on her like some sort of protective aura. Jack asks where Jasmine is. She’s gone home already. Gwen’s like ‘the chosen one?’ And Jack is like ‘no shit.’ Jasmine’s house. People are milling around the backyard, where a banner announces mom and Roy’s 5th anniversary party. Jasmine is helping mom with plates of food in the kitchen and mom confronts her about these “friends” she claimed to be waving to on her way to school that Roy couldn’t see. “That’s because they were in the trees,” she says innocently. Mom asks if this is one of her “games”. Jasmine’s like no, why? Mom switches gears and says she should have invited them to the party. Jasmine says they don’t like parties. Yeah, I’m guessing creatures whose idea of fun involves choking people with rose petals wouldn’t get much enjoyment out of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Or an alternative theory: mom mutters she supposes they wouldn’t if they live in trees. Jasmine says oh, no, they don’t really live in the trees. They could be anywhere, anytime. Mom, getting increasingly worried about her child’s mental health, I’m sure, asks where she met these friends. This one Jasmine can’t really answer except to say that they promised they would always look out for her “even through time”. Mom covers up her ‘holy shit, my kid is insane’ face with a smile and carries food out to the patio. Jasmine follows, then runs toward the back of the property, where Roy has erected a new fence, cutting off her usual path to that wooded area. Roy follows her, trying to herd her back and she kicks him in the shin and bites his arm. He slaps her, which he is perfectly justified in doing at this point, and calls her a “little bitch”, which is not so justified. Thunder rumbles. He goes back to Jasmine’s mom, who is less than thrilled by the prospect of a storm ruining their party. He shrugs it off. He’s also completely unconcerned about the fact that his inherited demon child has neglected to come back to the party. Some time later, he gives a speech about how Jasmine’s mom is his rock and his best friend and they’re looking forward to building their family together. This is interrupted by the fairies suddenly appearing in the trees behind the house. This is the first time we get a good look at them...and they are hideous. They look like Gollum grew wings and a skin condition. The fairies jump down, knocking shit over and kicking up a windstorm and everyone screams and runs, nearly bowling over Jack and the team as they arrive. One fairy tackles Roy to the ground and shoves its whole arm down his throat, which...ew. Chrissy: What’s the safeword?! Diandra: And congratulations. You just made it worse. Chrissy: I try. Another blasts a hole in the newly constructed fence and jumps on Jack, looking like it’s going to try the same maneuver. Gwen shrieks and tackles Jack to the ground before it can get far. It gives up strangely easily and both fairies retreat back into the woods. Jasmine, who was apparently watching all of this with that evil look on her face, disappears through the hole in the fence while her mother sobs over Roy’s now dead body. Jack and Gwen chase after Jasmine, who stops in a clearing and turns to chat with them calmly like they didn’t just witness a murder that SHE ORCHESTRATED. She says they’re in an old, magical forest and she wants to stay in it. Jack says no she isn’t, it’s just an illusion. “The real forest can never come back,” he says loudly, looking up at the trees warily. Jasmine says yes it can and they’re going to take her to it. Because while mom did a good job of teaching her not to get into a car with strangers who make promises like that, she neglected to mention that the same basic rule applies to demon creatures that look like Gollum sprouted wings. Jasmine’s mom, by the way, is heading for the back fence, but Tosh and Owen are trying to hold her back, which is freaking her out. Because Jasmine might be a demon child who talks to fairies and gets them to kill people, but she’s her DAUGHTER, damnit! Chrissy: Mothers are the most unreasonable force in the universe. Diandra: You’re just now figuring this out? Gwen tries a different approach: what about mom? Doesn’t she want to stay with her mother? Jasmine practically rolls her eyes. No, she doesn’t. Jack gives up talking to Jasmine, yanks her close to him defensively and tells the fairies to let her go and find another chosen one. “Too late,” says Gollum. “The [precioussssssssss] belongs with us.” Jack asks what would happen if they refused and made Jasmine stay. Jasmine answers for them: a lot more people will die. “Next time they’ll kill everyone at my school.” She rants about how they can control the elements and they could kill every living thing on the planet if they wanted, which is why she wants to GO WITH THEM, DAMNIT! Chrissy: This? Has every teenage rebellious streak licked. Diandra: How would you know? Your rebellious streak lasted, like five minutes. Chrissy: And in those five minutes I never once threatened global genocide. “The child won’t be harmed,” Jack asks. Gwen’s eyes bug out. Gollum says no, dumbass, she’ll live forever. Jasmine asks if he wants to be responsible for the death of all life. Jack points out that that wouldn’t benefit the fairies’ cause any because there wouldn’t be any more chosen ones. “They’ll find us,” she hisses in a demonic voice much like Gollum’s. “Back in time.” Jack lets her go and she runs toward the tree the fairies are perched in. Gwen shrieks and tries to run after her but Jack grabs her and spews something about this being their only chance against the demon fairies. Chrissy: Yes, because giving in to terrorist demands is always the best option. Diandra: No, but it establishes nicely how far Jack is willing to go for the greater good. Now I’m wondering why people were so surprised when he did pretty much exactly the same thing later. Jasmine’s mother arrives just as Jasmine skips away, surrounded by the smaller versions of the fairies that Estelle was taking pictures of, and disappears. She throws herself, screaming and crying hysterically at Jack. He just apologizes and sits on the ground with her while she sobs into his shirt, looking like he might cry along with her. As they’re headed to the car, Jack turns to talk to the others but they just brush past him petulantly without even a glance. “What else could I do,” he demands. They don’t answer. They just all pile into the SUV and wait for him to get in the driver’s seat because I guess he has the keys. That drive back to the hub is bound to be awwwwkward. Back at the hub, Gwen is looking at that famous, old picture of fairies again and notices something. She zooms in on the face of one of the fairies and...it’s Jasmine. “Come away, o human child,” the Gollum voice says in voice over. “To waters and the wild, with a fairy hand in hand. For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” Chrissy: In other words: the world is shit, so go ahead and run away with the demon fairy creatures if they offer. Diandra: Yep. Goodbye, kids! Sweet dreams!