‘Torchwood located,’ C. Thomas Howell’s nameless assassin announces at the beginning of ‘Escape to L.A.’ – and although, of course, he’s talking about the uneasily cosy team of unofficial saviours of the world, he could equally be referring to the show itself. After recent swings between first-day-at-drama-school over-emoting and clichéd continental contrasts confusion, Torchwood: Miracle Day is now somewhere near the high level of quality promised by the opening instalment in the series.
The revival of fortune is nothing miraculous, however. It’s simply down to a vastly-improved script from Jim Gray and former X Files exec John Shiban, which maintains the one decent thing from last week – the quietly emotional intensity of the increasingly enjoyable Alexa Havins as Esther – and adds all the things it lacked: pace, excitement and some snappy back-and-forth dialogue between the team members (Rex and Jack in particular) that’s amusing rather than awkward. ‘What is it with you?’, the hard-bitten, half-dead CIA agent growls at the man whose omnisexuality has apparently vanished along with his immortality. ‘Do you make everyone around you gay?’ ‘That’s the plan,’ Jack replies with a wink, as if the idea of getting it on with Gwen has never crossed his mind.
Such a notion may occasionally have drifted into our thoughts in the past and it can’t be denied that Eve Myles utterly outfoxes the other female principals this week in a slinky black one-piece that hugs her like a needy relative, coupled with hair that Audrey Hepburn’s hairdressers would have been proud of. Yet it’s not just her glam and gorgeousness on display; after spending the previous episode acting so parochially that she looked uncharacteristically stupid, Gwen gets to laugh at Americans and herself when she adopts a comically awful U.S. twang (‘Sure thing, hot diggity!’) and then, in response to a reprimand for it from Jack, admits: ‘Do you mind? I’m absolutely mortified.’
Elsewhere in a densely-packed, pacy and unprofligate script, Oswald Danes goes from execrable paedophile to evangelic politician (the scene in which he holds the abandoned baby girl is astonishingly sinister), pro-segregation campaigner for the short-lived (ha!) ‘Dead Is Dead’ movement Ellis Harley-Monroe (Mare Wittingham) gets to snark at the Fox Network’s pro-Tea Party stance and Rex tries and fails to confront both his father and the fact that if the miracle ends, he’s going to die. There are also references to ‘John Smith’, Piers Morgan and Middlemarch (Jack emphasising that George Eliot is a ‘she’) before an astounding, show-stopping line from Lauren Ambrose, when Jilly Kitzinger says to Danes: ‘I can’t look at your hands without remembering what they’ve done.’
By the end, when Rex has saved Jack and Gwen’s lives from death at the hands of an anonymous bad guy, handily shooting him in the throat so he can’t provide a name for the triangularly logoed organisation behind the miracle beyond saying ‘They are always; they are no one’ (a line that reeks of writer Shiban’s connection to Chris Carter), it seems almost churlish to point out the one genuinely clunky moment, where Mekhi Phifer does a ‘deep in thought’ face that’s straight out of a Joey Tribbiani acting masterclass.
Yet we point it out simply as an illustration of the only bum note in a melodious, magnificent hour of entertainment that restores Torchwood: Miracle Day to its place in the list of ‘must-watch’ television quicker than Gwen can shout ‘Bollocks!’ at a phone call from Rhys.
Airs at 9pm on Thursday 4th August 2011 on BBC One (UK) and at 10pm on Friday 29th July 2011 on Starz (US).