Torchwood, Series 2, Episode 2: "Sleeper"

[Mark Hope]

Belatedly...

Episode 2 sees the team struggling against a sleeper cell of aliens.

A fun episode. Good to see the team working well together and good to see recurring themes from earlier episodes (the cryo tanks, Gwen's old colleague in the police). Once again there were some hilarious lines (Ianto and Owen discussing how to deal with the end of the world, heh heh, as well as the relative dangers of the mind-probe machine.) I also liked the fact that the alien sleeper agent was placed in cryo tank #007 . They seem to be setting Ianto up as the guy with the sharp one-liners, which is a big improvement over his largely whiny role in series 1. Oh, plus the whole "I keep my cybernetic girlfriend in the basement, didn't I mention it?" which was rather daft.

I wasn't so sure about the fact that

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the sleeper agent was able to hang onto her humanity so well - although this was played out fairly effectively during the episode, I wasn't 100% convinced

. Still, this did

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play fairly well into her self-sacrifice at the end of the episode, so it wasn't a total disaster.

I did like the revelation (false or otherwise) that

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there are more aliens already among the people of Earth

. I hope that this plot element recurs at some point and wasn't just a throwaway reference. And, as usual, the series didn't pull its punches in putting hapless civilians to death at the hands of nasty monsters.

A major criticism (which is more a personal peeve than anything objective) was the use of the

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ZOMG nuclear weapons!!! threat. Any show that poses nuclear weapons as a threat and then fails to blow them up gets a thumbs-down from me on general principle. It's a rather hackneyed cliche in TV and movies, imho, and rarely pays off. There are notable exceptions, of course and I love me a show that isn't afraid to deliver on the promise of a nuke going boom. So this episode fell foul of the cliche in that department unfortunately

. But, like I say, this is a pet peeve more than anything else.

Anyway, exciting stuff overall. I am looking forward to the next episode immensely, not least because it seems (from the previews) to feature a WWI-era incarnation of Torchwood. Fingers crossed that Billis Manger puts in an appearance!

 

[Mark Hope]

My favourite part of the episode, however, has to be the giant tumbleweed that rolls through the Torchwood HQ about ten minutes before the end. Oh, look! There it is!

 

[Fallen Seraph]

My favourite part of the episode, however, has to be the giant tumbleweed that rolls through the Torchwood HQ about ten minutes before the end. Oh, look! There it is!

Yeah the HQ I would say is a character onto itself.