Cyberwoman
by Chris Chibnall
Summary
Ianto Jones, Torchwood’s faithful… um… what? butler? front man? garbage picker? Clean up man? Well, anyway, Ianto has a secret: He keeps his girlfriend, Lisa, locked up in the basement of Torchwood. The thing is, she’s been half converted into a Cyberman. Ianto secretly brings a cybernetics expert to the help her regain her humanity, but things go horribly wrong when the expert succeeds in weaning her from the life support mechanism – which just happens to be a cyber-conversion unit.
Lisa then shows her colors by trying to convert the cybernetics expert into a cyberman, but the upgrade “fails.†Ianto, obviously completely blinded by love, covers the crime up, while the rest of the Torchwood team begin to realize something is amiss. The rest of the episode is basically a battle to the death, while Ianto tries to save his girlfriend from destruction.
Analysis
I enjoyed this episode a lot. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it contained the single coolest scene I’ve ever seen on TV. How can you not love a cyberman battling a pterosaur? Too cool! (PS, Torchwood team – Pterodactyls are more primitive pterosaur types that have long tails, making Torchwood’s pet something more like a pteranodon.)
Overall the episode was a tense, exciting battle from end to end, although I had some issues with the pacing. Despite that, there’s a lot in this episode that doesn’t stand up to closer inspection.
The most obvious is the cyberwoman herself. Obviously, they’ve tried to make a sexy incarnation of Maria from Metropolis, and the costume they’ve devised is quite good, but… well, why has she still got breasts? Why are her feet cyber-heels instead of cyberman boots? We know from Doomsday that, during the Canary Wharf battle, human females were converted into standard cybermen. The cybermen weren’t experimenting with new models and so the notion that Lisa’s cyber-conversion would ever have had cyber-breasts is ridiculous. During the episode, Ianto explains that the cybermen were upgrading humans rather than “transplanting brains†because they needed troups, fast. That seems like a poor attempt to gloss over this particular plot hole. Clearly the cyber converters, all the way back to the beginning in the alternate universe “upgraded†people rather than did brain transplants on them.
The second is her brain conditioning, which, even on 2 viewings, I cannot determine if the idea is that she’s always been conditioned and she’s been playing on Ianto’s emotions to get free or if something “snaps†when the cyberneticist works on her.
And then there’s Ianto… I just don’t buy this character. Yes, Ianto has been played as mostly a shadow of a character so we’ve been kept in the dark about him, but this performance doesn’t ring true. He’s obviously been Torchwood since before the war, so he’s been a willing part of an organization which is, let’s face it, less than savory. Are we to believe that he learned nothing from the events at Canary Wharf? Love is blind, but not that blind. I could buy the setup all the way up to the point where she attempts to “upgrade†the cyberneticist. Even then Ianto is torn… I can even buy that, but with each progressive demonstration that she was lost, he didn’t get seem to get any clue at all. The only way he could have redeemed himself in my mind was if he’d finally pulled the trigger on the pizza delivery girl once she started on about upgrading.
And what has he got against Jack? I feel like Ianto is going to prove more of a liability than as asset as the show progresses.
Once again Jack’s immortality is put to the test, and each time they do that, I feel Jack’s actions are not in keeping with someone who is immortal. Something like that is bound to impact the way you think and behave more than it apparently has Jack. Jack’s comments about thinking he might die and feeling so alive echo a common theme is sci-fi: that to truly be alive, life must be ephemeral. Perhaps Jack is the monster Ianto says he is.
Speaking of Jack’s powers, what’s with his “kiss of lifeâ€? Does he just has a gay necrophiliac streak or does he have some supernormal power? In Day One he seemed to give some sort of “extra special†kiss to the girl, but that was accompanied by bright lights and fairy dust. Laying one on Ianto’s seemingly dead body appeared to be pointless, although it did seem to shake him out of his death/unconsciousness. It certainly wasn’t meant to be mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Perhaps this will prove to be Jack’s super-hero power.
One last note on the pacing. Television and movies exist in a bizarre time-dilated world where one minute on screen rarely equals one minute in real life. We’ve all been programmed since childhood to understand the shorthand of time on screen, and so to convincingly portray 1 to 1 passage of time, filmmakers usually have to resort to gimmicks to keep the audience “grounded†in real time. Throughout this entire episode, the director never conveyed to me that this was “real timeâ€, and so the arrive of the pizza delivery girl 40+ minutes after the pizza was ordered was jarringly out-of-time. It felt more like a couple hours had passed, but perhaps pizza delivery is more leisurely in Wales. If I were Ianto, I would not accept those pizzas, nor would I give her a tip.