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Exit Wounds

4TH APRIL 2008

(50-MINUTE EPISODE, PART 2 OF 2)

Torchwood’s second series has been nothing short of phenomenal, but I’ll tell

you what: I’m sick to my back teeth of the BBC chopping and changing the broadcast day and time. I nearly missed the first broadcasts of a couple of episodes this year because of this restlessness. Worse still, like a lot of other Torchwood addicts, due to these incessant alterations I’ve had to wait a long fortnight for this episode. All the same, in this one case I can actually understand – if not condone - why BBC Three were not given the green light

to premiere this episode a week early. Exit Wounds is certainly an episode where if the spoilers were to have got out, they would have, well… spoiled it.

Following on directly from Captain John Hart’s futile attempt blow up the Torchwood team

in Fragments, Chris Chibnall’s episode serves as a violent, gripping and agonising season finale.

The X-Files-style screen captions lend a sense of urgency to the episode right from the outset. The clock is ticking and something is going to happen, but Torchwood does not

know what that something is. This excruciating tension and pressure put me very much

in mind of 24 (another favourite show of mine), a parallel that would become all the more apparent towards the end of the episode. There are not many television shows that you literally watch from the edge of your seat, but now Torchwood can count itself as one of

their number.

Each lured to the top of one of Cardiff’s tallest buildings, Torchwood’s members are forced to watch as explosions decimate the city and Weevils flood the streets. As impressive as

it was to have Abbadon loom over Cardiff in last year’s season finale, watching it everyone knew that the reset button would have to be pressed at some point, and that somehow every-thing would be alright. But fifteen inexplicable and crippling explosions? Frightening in a very different sort of way. A 24 sort of way. A real sort of way. And with Exit Wounds, there is no reset button.

“I need you to understand. I really do love you. ‘cos this is gonna get nasty.”

The opening sequence in which John guns down Jack with two machine guns is appallingly brutal. Even though John knew that Jack would get up from it, there’s still something wrong about the wilful infliction of such suffering. But even in these early scenes, before the truth of John’s situation is given away, James Marsters shows us another side to his character. He’s quieter here; more considered. “Suddenly you’re anti-bondage?” The innuendo is still there but it feels so forced. John’s eyes are flat and grey.

Following the attack on Cardiff, John takes Jack back in time to 27AD where he is reunited with his long-lost brother, Gray (Lachlan Nieboer). In what is really quite an astonishing twist, Chibnall reveals that John has actually been acting under duress all along – he has a bomb molecularly bonded to his arm, and if he doesn’t do precisely as he is instructed, he will be blown to kingdom come. John does not want revenge against Torchwood. John does not want to tear Jack’s world apart. Gray does.

The story goes that when terrible creatures attacked Jack and Gray’s home, the Boeshane Peninsula, in his attempt to flee young Jack let go of his brother’s hand and never saw him again. Many subjective years later, John found Gray. He’d been kept alive for years by the creatures in a state of constant anguish, tortured and surrounded by corpses. When John tried to rescue him, Gray turned on him and hatched a plot to use him as an instrument of vengeance against the one man that he blamed for his years of torment – his own brother, Jack.

In the corresponding episode of Torchwood Declassified, John Barrowman describes Nieboer’s performance as like “spitting venom”, and he’s right on the mark. Gray has no personality or any redeeming features. He’s just a machine of pure hate, a reality that is made all the more disturbing by fact that Nieboer sounds exactly like and even looks a bit like Barrowman. It’s the classic Cain and Abel / in a mirror darkly kind of thing and, here in Torchwood, it works astonishingly well. Gray’s plan to bury Jack alive is so malicious and

vile that it makes the mind boggle. He can’t kill the man that lives forever, but he can bury

him alive and leave him to live out eternity choking on soil, doomed to choke or starve to death only to be reborn time and again.

However, John is not prepared to see Jack suffer like that and so he covertly buries a small transmitter along with him - a transmitter that will allow him to locate Jack and dig him up almost two thousand years later. Only things don’t work out quite according to plan – 19th century Torchwood find Jack first and dig him up! As Jack has clearly crossed his own time-line, Torchwood freeze him and set a timer for him to wake up in 2009 so that he can deal with Gray.

Now I have to say, I love this angle. The ‘buried alive’ idea is an incredibly powerful one and, if you think about it, Jack must now be over two thousand years old – twice as old as even the Doctor. And to have him cross his own timeline and be frozen, though a bit superfluous, is a truly fascinating twist. If you think about it, in 1941 there will have be three versions of Jack on Earth – the eldest one, in the deep freeze; the middle one, working for Torchwood; and the third one, trying to flog a Chula Warship to the Doctor and Rose! Brilliant.

“I gave you absolution. Do the same for me”.

However, I don’t think that Chibnall adequately explores the effects that being buried for so long would have on Jack’s psyche – the matter is barely touched upon. But Jack existed for about ten times longer underground than he had lived prior to that, and then once he is dug up, suddenly he’s fine? It doesn’t add up. Even relatively short periods of incarceration and isolation drive many people mad – but nigh on two thousand years? Jack would be an utter

wreck, surely?

That said, I love the romantic idea that Jack allows himself to be buried because he sees

it as a penance for letting go of Gray’s hand all those years ago in the far future. Gray is so damaged and so evil that he begrudges Jack everything, but even after two thousand years buried underground Jack still cannot bring himself to kill his own brother. Even after all that suffering, the guilt is still there.

However, even in such a bleak story the show still finds room for humour. The Hoix, better known as the Doctor Who: Love & Monsters alien, has an amusing cameo early on but it

is Chibnall’s masterstroke of having Rhys and PC Andy Davidson holed up together in the besieged Police Station that really gives the episode some much needed comic relief. In spite of everything else that was going on towards the end of the show, I still had to crack a smile at Andy’s “Abergavenny” line. Priceless.

“I’ve heard people say that death is such a waste. I imagine it more a relief.

What’s it like? How does it feel? Are you afraid? Are you sad?”

What I liked the most about Owen’s death at the end of Reset was its immediacy. He got shot, and a few minutes later he was dead. Fair dues, in the next episode he got brought back to life with a resurrection gauntlet and served as a host for Death himself before being left with a bizarre sort of half-life, but in the context of Reset at least, Owen’s sudden death was chilling in its pragmatism. Imagine my surprise when Tosh went the same way. Gray shoots her and she dies. No-one’s safe! The Torchwood Institute in Cardiff might as well

be CTU Los Angeles.

Looking at the twenty-six episodes of Torchwood as a whole, the one constant in them is death. Whilst Doctor Who is a celebration of life and living, with death portrayed as merely

a fence facing, Torchwood is a constant rage against the darkness; a tooth and claw fight against the unavoidable. And no-one hung on longer than dead man walking, Doctor Owen Harper.

OWEN            Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t keep screaming!

TOSH             ‘cos you’re breaking my heart.

OWEN            We never did get that date did we? We somehow missed each other…

And this is encapsulated perfectly by the scene where Owen and Tosh meet their deaths together. Owen’s sheer rage. Tosh’s silent fear. It’s little wonder that Eve Myles broke down in tears when she first read this script; watching Exit Wounds I was hard pressed not to do the same myself.

“Now we carry on. The end is where we start from.”

The harrowing closing moments of Exit Wounds are not easily forgotten. Whilst I’m sure that provision could be made to bring back both characters if the production team so wished – only Owen’s body may have been destroyed, for example, and with Tosh there may always be another resurrection gauntlet out there (some aliens have three hands) –, their deaths do both seem so ‘final’. Tosh’s heartbreaking ‘logout’ message and Owen’s uncharacteristic calmness as the isotopes washed over him were endings, not commas.

All told, Exit Wounds is an exceptional piece of television, and I can only hope that it isn’t Torchwood’s last hurrah - I’m kind of counting on a third series of Torchwood to get me through the barren television schedules of 2009! There are so many stories left to tell; so many questions left unanswered. But with two of the regulars apparently written out, and

no announcement as yet of further adventures to come, I’ve got this horrible feeling…

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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