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Dead Man Walking

20TH FEBRUARY 2008

(50-MINUTE EPISODE, PART 2 OF 3)

I think it’s fair to say that the thoroughly shocking ending of last week’s episode was marred by being immediately followed by the trailer for Dead Man Walking, showing Owen back from the dead. Now, as much as I love the character of Owen, I must admit that

I was infuriated as I hate cop-outs with a passion. What’s the point of killing off a character

to make the viewer think that ‘no-one is safe’, only to bring him back the very next week?

Well, I’m sure that writer Matt Jones would argue that the point is to tell an absolutely thrilling and shit-your-pants scary story. Indeed, even with my loathing for the reset button, I have to say that Dead Man Walking is one cop-out worth forgiving. In fact, it is the best episode of Torchwood to date by some distance.

“I’m using the glove. I’m gonna bring Owen back.

If you’ve got anything you need to say to Owen, now’s your chance.”

Those viewers who expected a rehash of They Keep Killing Suzie need not have worried. As downright disturbing as Paul Tomalin and Dan McCulloch first series episode was, their plot was about as far fetched as John Peel’s War of the Daleks novel. Here, on the other hand, Jones crafts a script that plays upon those same primal fears – the same fears that he explored so well in his Doctor Who two-parter, The Satan Pit – whilst telling a truly gripping story to boot. And, just to round things off, Jones delivers a story that tugs upon the viewers’ heartstrings every bit as much as keeps them awake at night.

Armed with the second resurrection glove that he steals from the Weevils in the pre-title sequence, Jack attempts to use it to bring Owen back to life for just a few minutes so that

the team can say their emotional goodbyes – including a tearful “I love you” from Tosh – and so that he can get the code for the alien morgue. I found this scene absolutely horrible, but not in a bad way; it’s just such a fundamentally frightening scene.

Burn Gorman’s performance is absolutely top-drawer; he captures the character’s anger and sorrow so exquisitely. To see Owen thrash around and sob and rage is incredibly harrowing. He knows that his life is spent and that, within mere seconds, he will be gone forever. And, because he has been dead already, he knows that there is nothing there. Nothing except something in the darkness waiting for him – presumably the same ‘something’ referred to

by Suzie in the first series.

“You don’t care about me! You brought me back for an alarm code!”

But of course, there is a cop-out coming. Owen doesn’t die. Fair dues, he hardly comes back to life in the true sense, but nevertheless Owen is walking and talking and interacting with the living. And it’s not long before he’s retreating behind his wit and his cynicism. His ‘pearly gates’ scene with Martha struck me as being particularly well done, summing up all

of Owen’s fears.

The scenes showing Owen trying to adjust to a living death were also very impressive. The scene in jail where he has to stand on his to get the alcohol out of his stomach (yep, the ‘sick handstand’ scene) may have been slightly gratuitous but it was making a significant point,

a point that Owen later sums up by saying something “I can’t drink, I can’t shag, and I can’t sleep. And they were my three favourite things”. The poor bastard.

“I shall walk the Earth and my hunger shall know no bounds.”

But things were worse than Owen knew. Unbeknownst to him, the ‘something’ waiting for

him in the darkness was Death itself, and it had used him as a vehicle to cross over into the mortal world. The scenes that show Owen possessed by Death are on a par with those in The Satan Pit that show Toby possessed by the Devil in terms of their fear factor. In fact, seeing Owen possessed is all the more disturbing because he is a character that we know and care for.

Eventually Death leaves Owen and manifests itself as a sort of skeleton shrouded in black mist. It’s a fairly traditional yet striking interpretation of the Grim Reaper, and one that I feel works very well indeed. Separating Death from Owen allows Jones to give Owen what could have been the ultimate send-off – what better way to be flung off the mortal coil than in a battle with Death himself? The inspirational talk to the kid with leukaemia. The snog from Tosh. The ingredients were all there. This was Owen’s blaze of glory. And he did it. Owen beat Death, sending him back from whence he came. But, at the end of it all, Owen was left standing.

“Watch me beat death.”

Early in the episode, Jack confesses that when he brought Owen back, he didn’t do it to get an alarm code – he did it because he was hoping for a miracle. And, against every instinct, whilst watching Dead Man Walking I was hoping for that miracle too. And from what I saw

of next week’s trailer, it looks like we both got what we wanted.

However, as Dead Man Walking is such an emotional story for the Torchwood team, Martha Jones seems to spend much of the episode sidelined in the most bizarre of ways. The only thing that Martha really brings to the mix here are the first signs of UNIT / Torchwood conflict that become apparent when she confronts Jack about his keeping the resurrection gloves

a secret. These criticisms hardly blemish the episode, and indeed were Martha a series regular then they wouldn’t be noteworthy at all. But, as a very heavily-promoted guest star, her limited exposure here just doesn’t sit right with me.

“You had the power to bring people back to life and you never told UNIT about it. Why?”

On the whole though, Dead Man Walking is an incredibly well-written, well-performed and well-produced piece of work. And, best of all, by the end of it nothing is resolved. Jones’ script is very careful not to pigeonhole Death into any category – we have no idea whether he’s an alien, an Eternal, or even a genuinely supernatural being. And, more importantly still, we don’t know what the deal is with Owen. The energy that he absorbed from Death during their battle seems to be keeping him going, but there’s no telling how long it will last…

Copyright © E.G. Wolverson 2008

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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