‘Torchwood’s gone,’ Rex tells Vera in the fifth instalment of Miracle Day. ‘It’s just a name, these days.’ Yet for a number of reasons – good and bad – this is perhaps the most Torchwoodian episode of the new series yet.
While Gwen hotfoots back to Wales to visit the family and break her father out of one of the ominous overflow camps (‘All the things I fought with Torchwood and what stops me?’ she asks herself in an attempt to curb her frustration with some poorly scripted externalised inner monologue. ‘Red tape’) Vera joins the rest of the team in California and is promptly despatched – along with Rex as a living corpse and Esther as a barely animated secretary – to San Pedro and another of the camps in order to investigate the mysterious ‘modules’.
At first, the placement of authentically old-school Torchwood scenes (anonymous army buildings, grey industrial estates, ludicrously-headlined newspaper clippings) into the sundrenched Californian coastal setting of Miracle Day is akin to hanging a Constable landscape in a Warhol exhibition – it looks old-fashioned and almost conservative alongside the vividly colourful pop art. But once the lights go out, things start to make more sense.
In the gloom of a Welsh evening, Gwen’s search for her dad (with the help of Rhys, who seems to come and go as he pleases throughout the camp) sits comfortably alongside Rex’s part-Blair Witch Project, part Roger Cook exposé, part Guantanamo Bay tourist video camera exploits in the blackness of one of the modules and Jack and Oswald’s chase through the dimly-lit tunnels and shadowy stages of the stadium hosting the ‘Miracle Rally’. This is the synthesis point of between old and new Torchwood, the place where the UK and US finally meet: in the darkness. And by the end of the episode, things are darker than ever before.
First, there’s Oswald Danes’s pop concert proselytising. After a couple of odd scenes with Jilly Kitzinger in which Bill Pullman seems to have temporarily decided to interpret his character in a completely different way, the presidential paedophile reverts to type and delivers a wonderfully over-the-top rallying cry about a new Great Leap Forward for humanity, replete with a (hopefully) deliberately incongruous, soaring, stirring soundtrack that might have come straight out of an emotionally climatic scene in Dawson’s Creek. ‘Man has risen again!’ Danes roars as the name of pharmaceutical giants Phicorp explodes in light all around the stage. ‘He has a new name – and his name is Angel!’
Quite what he’s on about, Jack (watching from the wings as if John Barrowman was about to spring one of his Tonight’s the Night surprises) has about as much idea as we do; but before we get a chance to draw the breath needed to ask what the hell is going on, Vera Suarez gets shot twice by creepy San Pedro camp commandant Colin Maloney, a study in balding bigotry and sleaze played by Marc Vann. Having waxed lyrical about Hilary Duff and Phil Collins, it’s clear even before he pinches his feyly useless army assistant Ralph’s gun and starts blasting away with it that Colin is a few lambs lying down on Broadway short of a Genesis album. However, what comes next – in what is the first of Miracle Day’s big, what-the-merry-hell? moments – is still a big shock.
Vera, bleeding and barely conscious, is locked in one of the modules. Maloney then turns on the gas and huge, ugly jets of flame gout out all around the helpless prisoner. Simultaneously, on the other side of the world, Gwen realises what everyone else probably twigged as soon as the word ‘camp’ was used to describe the facilities for the living dead: the modules are ovens, designed to burn people alive – and as Rex turns up, desperately and futilely trying to open the door, that’s precisely what happens to poor old Vera.
Whether it’ll actually kill her – or what state the poor woman will be left in if it doesn’t – isn’t immediately clear, but it’s a suitably stunning, sickening way to end an episode that has been grim, frequently frustrating, occasionally confusing, sometimes shambolic but mostly enjoyable – emphatically Torchwoodian, in fact. As P.C. Andy helpfully points out: ‘It might be chaos, but at least it works.’
Airs at 9pm on Thursday 11th August 2011 on BBC One (UK) and at 10pm on Friday 5th August 2011 on Starz (US).