Torchwood: Greeks Bearing Gifts

*** CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

A mixed bag this one. Toshiko gets given an alien pendant which enables her to hear other people’s thoughts. It’s a fairly familiar premise that goes through the motions, even to the point of getting destroyed at the end because the temptation to misuse it is too strong for them.


The B storyline, about Tosh jumping into bed with another woman, who turns out to be an alien, is the sort of thing that makes you wish they’d excise these scenes and just make a passable half-hour science-fiction show.

The unresolved C storyline, (all right then - a few lines in the background) about Jack getting some admin together for UNIT, did peak my interest, simply because it could have, but didn't, answer the following questions:

a) who owns Torchwood (episode one’s claims of independency appear to again have been rewritten with Jack’s call to the PM), and

b) what the two, very similar, organisations’ relationship is. Up to this point I’d been compensating by assuming that Torchwood had deliberately kept itself secret from UNIT, but they can’t use that excuse now.

On the positive side, there’s some good dialogue in this one, and the banter between Gwen and Owen, now stripped of so much uninteresting misery, is actually quite fun.