Another good episode in the run, seeing Tosh come out of her shell a little bit more.

While I have no qualms about different aspects of sexuality, I’m getting a little worried that Torchwood makes it seem like 75% of the population of Wales (or specifically Cardiff) are either bi- or homosexual. Here Mary and Tosh go at it hammer-and-tongs without much resistance on the side of the latter. Does Jack leak some kind of weird alien hormone that turns everyone close to him into raving omnisexuals?

Anyway… there was something almost Gelf like about Mary and the special effects were excellent. It was interesting to see Tosh’s reactions to her new found telepathy and seeing the reactions when it failed to work on Jack.

On the weak side, it was another episode that left you wondering why the main character stays. Tosh knows what her friends think about her now – and it wasn’t very positive. Like Ianto and his Cyberwoman… why stay? Why tolerate Torchwood and the people who work there? Unless they know there is no escape?

Damn that lead writer, Chris Chibnall… We’ve suffered his sex-crazed alien and his deranged Cyberwoman… do we really need to go through anymore? Maybe I’m tarring Chris for something the director insist on doing wrong. Maybe Chris weaves delicate and exciting stories of extra terrestrials, cyber-violation and the supernatural – and then the directors make an unqualified pigs arse out of shooting ’em. On the other hand, perhaps Russell T has far too much faith in this man and Chris, as a result, is driving Torchwood into an early grave, utterly unsupervised.

Countrycide starts off on solid ground, building tension and a sense of the creepy unknown in all the right sorts of ways. It has all the tension that the trying-too-hard-to-be-Alien sequences from Cyberwoman never had. However, the episode rapidly slides into an odd combination of Bones and The Hills Have Eyes – set in south Wales. Oh… with a splash of The League of Gentlemen for good measure (who, after all, can resist a small portion of the Special Stuff). The team find bodies stripped to the bone in the woods, lose their cars, find an abandoned village… then Tosh and Ianto get ambushed and captured by the weirdo locals. That’s where it just loses it…

The episode provides a plotline that shifts away from the extraterrestrial and the supernatural into something downright unsavoury… and serves up not only the other kind of meat, but also a supremely unsatisfying ending. I don’t care what kind of action hero Jack might be… you’re not telling me he can wade into a room and single-handedly take everyone down without so much as a scratch.

After the exhilerating high of Small Worlds, this provided a dollop of mixed feelings, but mainly disappointment…

Watched Small Worlds again yesterday and noticed a new connection between Torchwood and Doctor Who continuity.

At the beginning of the episode, we get a shot of Jack standing in the foreground of his office, with his desk sitting behind him. He’s talking to Ianto, I think. Anyway, on Jack’s right (the viewing left) sits a table lamp – and hung over the rim of the lamp’s shade… a pair of 3D glasses, presumably the ones the Doctor used to view the void stuff while at Torchwood One (in Army of Ghosts and Doomsday). Doubt Ianto had the time or inclination to pick them up while rescuing his girlfriend, so seems more likely they were salvaged from Torchwood after the Doctor sealed the rift into the Void.

Neat.