Torchwood 1.03 -- Ghost Machine
I'm somewhat biased about this episode, what with being a hardcore fan of Gareth Thomas, who plays the older Ed Morgan. Nevertheless, here are my thoughts on watching it again on DVD.
The third episode, but the first to show the team at work after Gwen has had a chance to settle in. As a team they're starting to gel, and outside the story the cast is clearly starting to gel as a team as well -- this is significantly more polished than Day One was. It's still very much the Jack-n-Gwen show, but this episode also focuses strongly on Owen.
No monsters this week, simply a piece of alien technology that is neither good nor bad in itself. The ghost machine of the title is a device that allows its user to see events of the past that created strong emotions in the people that experienced them, and to feel those emotions. Gwen's initial vision induced by the device is sad, but has a reasonably happy ending when they research the boy she saw. But Owen's is far more traumatic, as the machine forces him to watch a young woman being raped some forty years earlier. The team discover that the woman was murdered, and the killer never found. Owen knows who the killer is, but as Jack points out to him, he has no evidence that would stand up in court.
The story pushes Owen hard. He's been a Jack-the-lad, cavalier about consent himself. Now he's forced to confront where that road ultimately leads, and doesn't like it. When I first saw this episode I thought that this was a deliberate piece of story arc. Alas, I've seen too much in the last week about the show's production team repeatedly denying that the scene in "Everything Changes" had anything to do with date rape. But I'm sticking with my personal canon that Owen's extreme reaction is partly self-disgust. Either way, it opens up Owen's character a little more and shows that there's a good deal of compassion under that cynical shell.
So two interweaving cases -- finding out more about the device, and Owen's private quest for justice/vengeance for the murdered girl. As it turns out, it isn't just the past that the device can access, and the team have to grapple with questions about whether the future can be changed.
There's some good material in this episode about the issues the team have to deal with because they are handling technology that can't be publicly revealed, and the moral responsibility they have for their actions, both deliberate and accidental. And it doesn't go for an easy answer in the end. Still shades of grey, which is how I like it.
I really like the way that when Owen and Jack disarm Morgan, you can't be sure whether or not Owen will give in to the urge to kill Morgan. It could believably go either way, with the way the character has been written and played. And Owen is still a self-centred git at the end of the episode, focusing on himself rather than on Gwen. He's one of the good guys, but that doesn't mean he's a nice person.
Random comments:
Owen is downright sinister when he goes to confront the old man Ed Morgan about his past. The scene is beautifully played by both actors.
Now it's Gwen's turn to take alien tech home to play with, clearly unauthorised even if we don't see Jack giving explicit orders to leave it in the base. And what she does with it is use it to see happy past moments with Rhys. As with the scenes in Everything Changes, it's used to show something about the character's personality and what's important to her.
And of course, it's Torchwood so there's porn... The gun porn scene felt slightly out of place and thus gratuitous to me the first time I saw this episode, but it makes sense now that I've seen Day One. Gwen was a beat bobby and has never handled a gun, as the team found out in Day One. So now Jack takes her to the Hub's shooting range to teach her how to use a gun safely. It's well played to show the difference between the characters -- Jack's long familiarity and comfort with handling guns, and Gwen so unfamiliar she makes utterly basic mistakes. (A note for Americans -- in the UK uniformed police don't normally carry guns, handguns weren't common even before the ban on private handguns in 1997, and it isn't unusual for uniformed police to have no experience of using guns.)
It's also extremely hot, with the UST between Jack and Gwen here being a lot more believable to me than in some other scenes. And a bit slimy, given the boss-underling relationship and the fact that Gwen is in a steady relationship with Rhys. On the other hand, while Jack is clearly enjoying the close contact, he doesn't make an overt pass, which is of a pattern with his behaviour before and after this episode. Jack is the galaxy's champion flirt, but he generally leaves it up to the other party to take it further than flirting.
Food porn, as well. First the coffee and doughnuts scene, which is used for a little bit of characterisation -- different eating styles, from Jack stuffing his mouth full of doughnut and talking around it, to Ianto eating very daintily. Then Owen offering around his bag of four pasties for a pound, again with nice characterisation from it. And right at the end, Ianto pouring whisky and offering it around to people. (ETA: Well, spirits of some kind.)
Ianto is almost non-existent in this episode. Yes, in hindsight they were playing him as very self-effacing before the big reveal next episode, but there are some scenes in the Hub where you could wonder why he's gone home for the night when there's something big going on. (And I did notice this the first time I saw the episode, *before* I got the Jack/Ianto obsession.) Though he does get a couple of good lines, and GDL does that dry sense of humour very well.
At what point did the teaboy get his fancy coffee machine to play with, or was it awaiting repair? Because at the moment they seem to be getting their coffee from Starbucks, even if the tea is served in Hub mugs.
Jack tells Gwen that he doesn't sleep. Presumably that's "doesn't need to sleep", since he's shown asleep in other episodes. But another little indicator that he's no longer standard issue human.
The episode's grim in places, but there are also some very funny moments. The chase scene is hilarious.
DVD Commentary -- Colin Teague (director), Helen Raynor (writer), and Burn Gorman (Owen)
Again, a good solid discussion of how and why they made various choices in writing and filming the episode. Since it's a different group of people, you get a slightly different discussion; e.g. director likes to talk about the way the cameras are used to give the right feel, with long shots, zooming, using hand-held for the flashback sequences etc.
Burn -- "the rain machines are the seventh cast member"
The actor playing the young Ed Morgan was on his first job out of drama school.
Burn says that after Episodes 1 & 2 Owen needs this so you know what's underneath the surface, as Owen's otherwise an unsympathetic character.
The shooting range scene was added at a relatively late stage, specifically to make it possible to show Gwen using a gun in later episodes if necessary, after she'd been established in Day One as being untrained. Some interesting discussion around this. They mention that it was filmed at a real shooting range in an old tunnel that just happened to look like part of the Hub.
They mention Blake's 7 when Gareth first appears, but they *also* mention Morgan's Boy, and the director goes a bit fanboy over that for a few seconds. :-)
So overall -- the show has settled down into its long term pattern after the introductory episodes, with a reworking of the idea that ghosts are recorded emotions. Mostly decent script and some solid acting work, giving a lot more depth to Owen. One I'll be happy to watch again even without my fangirl reason for doing so.
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julesjones) wrote,
