Month: December 2006

Out of Time
by Catherine Tregenna


Three ordinary people from the 1950’s meet the Torchwood team.

Synopsis

A plane arrives at a landing field and the Torchwood team are waiting. Out of the plane step three people who left on their flight in 1953. They have fallen through the rift.

Each of the three “pairs up” with a member of Torchwood and begin the process of coming to grips with the new world they live in.

Emma, a young woman, is befriended by Gwen. She is the youngest and most adaptable. Apart from coming to gripes with modern sexual mores, she deals with her loss and integrates into society, but she leaves behind a legacy for Gwen: Her boyfriend Rhys has learned how easily she lies to him.

Diane, the pilot of the flight, is a no-nonsense 1950’s feminist – no stupid man is going to tell her what to do. That doesn’t stop her from doing the horizontal with Owen, who falls hopelessly in love with her. She dumps him to try flying back into the rift.

John, the eldest one, has the hardest time adapting to this new world. His wife is dead, his only son is a childless widower with dementia, living in a home, unable to recognize anyone or anything. John realizes his life came to absolutely nothing. Jack empathizes with him, and even reveals to him that he is from the future and fell through time and has lived in the past.

The circumstances find himself in; his family a dead end, a new world he doesn’t understand, scantily-clad women on magazines and not being to smoke in pubs; is too much for him and he decides to kill himself. In a touching scene, he and Jack gas themselves to death holding hands in a car. (I did warn you there were spoilers.) Of course, Jack cannot die.

In the end, we are left with three sad members of Torchwood.

Analysis

It should come as no surprise at this stage of the game that I don’t care for episodes of shows where all people do is talk. If I want to listen to talk, I’ll have a two-way conversation with a real person rather than watching TV.

Of the three stories, only John’s was particularly interesting. I think the story would have been better if only John had come through the rift and more time was spent dealing with his difficulties integrating into the modern world. His story was really about two things, the inability to integrate and the death of posterity. The inability to integrate was only given superficial treatment with the previously mentioned scantily-clad women on magazines and not being able to smoke in bars. Those were the only things that really seemed to “register” with him as to how out-of-step he was. The story of his son wasn’t particularly compelling until he actually met him and then it was a moving, almost heart-breaking moment. Even there, his son looked “too old.” He looked about 90, which would have made him 37 in 1953. A lot older than we imagine when he’s talking about his “boy.”

Emma’s story was… uninteresting and can pass without much comment. It is only notable in that it sets the stage for Gwen and Rhys’s obviously train-on-the-tracks-ahead-coming meltdown in their relationship. You can’t just sleep around with your coworkers on TV and not have repercussions. Worse, the “lie” that Gwen told Rhys was obviously only as a setup for future problems. Gwen’s lie made no sense. Rhys knows she has to keep her work secret. Gwen could have told him a simple (true) story about her being a displaced teen with no family that she came into contact with through work. That’s equally as effective as saying she’s some relative – and much less easily disproved. The beginning of the breakdown probably couldn’t come at a worse time because Owen has fallen in love for real. How will that impact his affair with Gwen? At a time when she’s likely to need Owen for more support, he may be inclined to give less.

Diane’s story could have been a lot more interesting, but the opportunity was completely squandered by emphasizing her and Owen’s relationship. Of all the three people who came through the rift, I think it is safe to argue that she was the most anachronistic in her own time.

John conformed most to the norm of his time and Emma was just an unformed kid who had not yet become the person she’d be as an adult, but Diane was the “rebel”, straining against the proprieties and conventions of her age. One could suppose that she’d have the easiest time adapting to the modern. Many of the things that she represented have come to pass and so she should welcome this world with open arms.

I think that’s a facile interpretation of what would happen to someone like that. Even when you get what you, it rarely happens the way you expect. (Was it Lathe of Heaven where the hero’s dreams can create reality and so he is manipulated into dreaming the world free of prejudice, only to awake and find that everyone was a monotonous grey?) Wouldn’t that be an even more jarring concept to deal with? John simply has to deal with a new world. Diane has the world she dreamed of and it couldn’t possibly be what she expected.

Further, Diane’s personality isn’t “the visionary” type, it’s “the rebel” type. That sort of personality won’t fit in anywhere, which may ultimately have been the motivation for her leaving, but the impression left by the story was that it was avoid being tied to Owen.

No, this thread in the episode wasn’t about Diane, it was about Owen. It was a ticked off plot point along the way towards the Gwen-Rhys-Owen (and perhaps other) personal relationship “crisis” which is bound to rear its ugly head in the last three episodes. Even considering that this was about Owen, it isn’t convincing. Love is blind, but I’m not convinced that Owen would fall for her. Were she portrayed a little more convincingly (the character, not the actress), I think she would have been just a little too “alien” for Owen to fall for her that quickly. (I’ll allow that a certain amount of “protectiveness” engendered by her plight could have impacted Owen’s radar a bit.)

That’s why this thread was unrealized potential: a potentially interesting story (perhaps as touching as John’s) was both missed and supplanted by an unconvincing story about Owen.

In the end, this episode was a miss for me.

Capt. Jack Mystery of the week: None. Unless, you were wondering if John had lived another few days, would Jack have jumped him?

Next week, in what has to be the longest TV series time ever between “Hey, these guys are our primary alien threat” and actually encountering them in a meaningful way in a story, the Gophers finally arrive… er, the weevils, or whatever the hell they call them.

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