Torchwood #9 [SPOILERS]

[ewx]

Station ident was CBBC - oops. We didn't notice whether it stayed that way all the way.

Eugene can sit in a car but he puts his hand thru people. Funny how ghost physics is so often compatible with dramatic necessity. They could have worked around it by having everything go down in walking distance, or whatever ghost travel distance is, of the death scene, for instance. I'm reminded of R2D2's ability to efficiently manage staircases provided they're off-screen (e.g. near the start of Return Of The Jedi).

Your son's dead. PS we're pillaging his room. Hope that's OK. Have a nice day. We're going to keep his body our vault too, BTW. But hey, at least Owen didn't say anything too horrible in your hearing, right?

The hand in a jar in an episode about a disembodied eye offers an (admittedly rather tenuous!) connection to the Hand of Rhyn and the Eye of Kwll, from Michael Moorcock's Corum stories. The missing parent thing also offers a slightly less thin connection to the previous episode, though evidently Eugene's father hadn't annoyed him as much as Suzie's had her.

Up until the end it's hard not to imagine that Eugene has no more existence in the story than any other dramatic device. Which would be even more annoying than being dead in the first place, in a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern kind of way.

All in all? I preferred last week's episode; this managed to fail to be annoying in the ways that have become traditional for Torchwood but didn't really grab me - I think it had too much of Love And Monsters about it, although somewhat redeemed by the absence of the execrably bad alien.

Recognize this?