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They Keep

Killing Suzie

3RD DECEMBER 2006

(50-MINUTE EPISODE)

Bottom line: this episode is downright disturbing. If, like me, you are the sort of person who does not find monsters all that scary and instead prefers to be frightened by episodes that mess with your head, then They Keep Killing Suzie is the one for you.

Admittedly though, They Keep Killing Suzie is not the greatest episode of Torchwood in the world. For one thing, half the plot is absolute pants. Get this: in the year or so leading up to her suicide, Suzie joins an organisation called ‘Pilgrim’ and gives this geezer named ‘Max’ retcon every week. Eventually she conditions him to be a ‘time bomb’ of sorts, so that after her death when he goes off on a murder spree that sees him write the word ‘Torchwood’ in blood on the walls of his victims, her former colleagues will do a bit of detective work, trace him back to ‘Pilgrim’ and subsequently to her, and then have no choice but to bring her back to life to solve the murders! I mean, come on! Even the Master’s heinous machinations are never quite that contrived! However, this one, crippling flaw is just about bearable as the rest of the script is so very, very good.

“The wearer of the glove can bring somebody back, but looses their life in return.”

Fundamentally this episode is about Gwen and Suzie and their similarities and differences. Not only did the two of them share a job description and an affinity for scoundrels named Owen Harper, but they are also bound together by the ‘Resurrection Gauntlet’. Here it is Gwen who advocates its use, and it is Gwen who brings Suzie back from the dead and unwittingly keeps her alive using her own life force. And as the episode progresses, this

life ebbs out of Gwen and flows into Suzie; the energy even beginning to mend the gaping chasm in the back of Suzie’s head where she shot herself.

GWEN           So what’s out there?

SUZIE            Nothing. Just nothing.

GWEN           But if there’s nothing, what’s the point of it all?

SUZIE            This is. Driving through the dark. All this stupid tiny stuff. We’re just animals howling in the

                     night, ‘cos it’s better than silence.

The rapport between Eve Myles and Indira Varma (Rome) is absolutely beguiling. A lot of their dialogue is very dark, dwelling on death and heavily implying that the atheists have got

it right. It’s very easy for science fiction shows to talk about ‘other plains of existence’ (here’s looking at you, Stargate SG•1) and this, that or another; and so I was quite impressed by Torchwood’s quite deliberate and powerful ‘no’ to all that. You don’t need expensive aliens or monsters; all you need is someone to come back from the dead and tell the living that there is no ‘great beyond’ and you have one hell of a scary show. Star Trek: Voyager did it years ago in a much more vanilla sort of way, but it was not anywhere near as effective as this. This is shit your pants scary.

“Why did you think I was so desperate to come back? There’s something out there and it’s moving.”

But it’s worse than that. They Keep Killing Suzie doesn’t say ‘you die, and then it just all goes black’; They Keep Killing Suzie says ‘you die, it all goes black, and there is some-thing out there in the darkness waiting for you’. Okay, so it doesn’t hold up tremendously

well theologically, but in a television show it certainly evokes the desired reaction.

And so in the end, Paul Tomalin and Dan McCulloch’s episode raises more questions than

it answers - big questions that puzzle the will such as ‘what is out there?’, and small, practical questions such as the ever-pragmatic Ianto’s “gloves come in pairs?” But, if you can forgive an almost unbelievably contrived master plan, then They Keep Killing Suzie is a top-drawer thriller.

Copyright © E.G. Wolverson 2006

E.G. Wolverson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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