The Walking Dead- Season 2, Episode 5: Chupacabra

"Don't be too hard on yourself. We've all wanted to shoot Daryl."

Again we begin with a flashback, this time of Lori, Shane and Carl making their way away from the many others fleeing and observing as Atlanta gets napalmed. It makes you appreciate the sheer horror of events while Rick was asleep and how they were just trying to do what was best. It's a contrast to the present day where a darker, balder, nastier Shane wants to give up the search for Sophia.

Where is Sophia? This sub-plot is being dragged out so long that she can't simply be dead. Daryl is certainly dedicated to finding her, leading to his accident and his getting unfortunately shot by Andrea. Worst of all, he has a hallucination of his deeply unpleasant brother that feels, at first, as though Merle is genuinely back. Foreshadowing?

There's a fascinating conversation between Dale and Glenn which illustrates, again, how women's rights have gone backwards, subtly and otherwise, since civilisation ended. Maggie is a grown woman, but Dale is terrified that Glenn may have offended their host Herschel by sleeping with his daughter Maggie. She is, in a sense, property; that's the implication.

We end with an awkward dinner showcasing tension between the two groups, and Glenn discovering that Herschell is keeping a bunch of zombies in a hidden place. It's quite a cliffhanger, and quite a well-crafted plot line as ever, but this season is beginning to feel a little too slow-paced.

Torchwood: Miracle Day (Part Nine)

“We need you to write history.”

Two months have passed (“Day 61 of the Great Depression”), and much has happened. This episode feels very different, in fact; the action has largely moved back to Wales, and there’s a real sense that we’re reaching the endgame, with lots and lots of revelations. John Fay does an excellent job of keeping the characterisation on track as we whizz through it all.

The opening scene, with Gwen robbing a pharmacy, has lots of unintended consequences with the recent riots down south, while the use of pizzas echoes Torchwood’s beginnings in Everything Changes, a long time ago now. It’s also quite arresting that Gwen’s dad is being given diamorphine (pure heroin) by his ex-police officer daughter.

Meanwhile, Esther and Jack are holed up somewhere up in Scotland while Jack recovers from his wounds. Once again, Esther shows that she is competent despite her doubts. It’s hard to escape from the realities of what the world has become, though; I’m not sure how Esther is supporting Jack and herself, but Rhys is forced to consider taking a job which is essentially the transport of concentration camp inmates to the gas chambers, just to make ends meet. This series has done an excellent job of showing us how a whole society can eventually come to accept such things.

Surprisingly, it seems that no one at the CIA has noticed Rex’s obvious complicity in last week’s escape. Perhaps Shapiro knows, and is taking advantage of the situation? He’s certainly a lot more pensive and philosophical that he was last episode, even passive in his willingness to allow Rex to pretty much do as he wants.

Rex is certainly on top of things, though, unearthing a 1935 pulp magazine story which is clearly based on Jack’s experiences in 1928. The writer’s entire family seem to have vanished, but the earlier murder of a family member means that DNA traces must exist. Unfortunately, it’s Charlotte who takes charge of this, and she’s an agent of the Families. Unsurprisingly, she finds nothing. There’s only so long this sort of thing can go on before she gets caught.

Things are coming to a head for Jilly, too, as her promotion is shown to consist of a new identity, a one-way ticket to Shanghai and a trip to the “Blessing”. We’re getting a lot of exposition here, not that I’m complaining. An action sequence of some kind is pretty much obligatory at this point, so we have the Gestapo narrowly failing to find Gwen’s dad.

One thing I certainly wasn’t expecting was to see Oswald Danes walking into Gwen’s home. He’s not exactly made welcome, but he has the psychopath’s ability to manipulate. Once Jack and Esther arrive, we get to see what he has to say. At first, all this stuff about “Harry Bosco” doesn’t seem to amount to much, but the simple concept of deliberate mistranslation turns out to be the key to everything. I like this; everything hinges on language, which is all a bit metatextual.

The scene between Jilly and the geeky bloke is fascinating; is he a member of the Families? He certainly seems to know a lot about them, and gets one fascinating line: “One family took politics, one family took finance, one family took media.” It’s implied, though, that this neat division of labour is all in the past.

It all kicks off in the last few minutes. Gwen’s dad is carted off to the death camps, but it suddenly becomes clear that the “Blessing”, whatever it is, runs right through the centre of the Earth between Shanghai and Buenos Aires. Somebody should give Rhys a gold star for his geography homework.

So, the team splits and heads to those two cities. Rex seems to have very little trouble getting permission from Shapiro to “go off-grid”; to me, this heavily implies that Shapiro knows exactly what he’s doing, and is far more in control than he appears. But he and Esther, as soon as they arrive in Argentina, are somehow betrayed by Charlotte. Jack, Gwen and Danes(!), in Shanghai, meanwhile, find Jack’s health beginning to deteriorate at an inconvenient time; is he dying?

Jilly’s trip to see the Blessing is dragged out by all sorts of suspense. We even get a strangely Moffat-esque line about “something in the corner of your eye that you can’t quite see.” What we see, though, is very abstract and odd. We still have no clear idea what it is. But what people see is subjective. And Jilly’s revelation is that “I’m right.” What does this mean? No doubt we’ll find out in the last episode.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Jack’s serious health problems might not be as inconvenient as they appear at first, as his blood seems to roll towards the blessing…

Torchwood: Miracle Day (Part Six)

“Never question a miracle. You might not like what you find.”

There’s a definite change of focus here from the very start, as we begin with Phicorp middle manager Stuart Owens and Janet, his assistant and bit on the side. He’s curious about what his employers are up to, but as soon as his bloke in Shanghai discovers something big, which we don’t see, he’s so horrified he commits suicide by jumping from a very high building. The “forty-five club” is just the latest of many brilliantly horrible concepts which have followed on from the main theme of the season.

We turn to Rex, recording a message about what he’s seen in the San Pedro Overflow Camp. He’s deeply affected by what he’s seen happen to Vera, and the awful reality of the extermination camp. He has a very clear idea of the implications, noting that it may start with the Category Ones, but will soon spread to convicted felons, illegal immigrants (there’s a subtly disturbing later dialogue echo of this), and so on. It may sound extreme, but all of this has of course happened before.

Marc Vann is superb as Colin Maloney, struggling to come to terms with the reality and the consequences of his actions. The conversations between him and his agonised underling, a kind of Lady Macbeth, are gripping drama. The banal, Pooterish little man from last episodes, with his golf buggy and liking for Phil Collins, is long gone. This is the banality of evil writ large.

Gwen, meanwhile, is trying to get her father out of another camp, on South Wales, and one of her scenes in particular is at the very heart of what this episode is about. As soon as Dr. Patel washes her hands of what she’s doing with a simple “I don’t make the rules, you know,” Gwen lets rip, and she’s magnificent. “Don’t you dare look at me and tell me you’re obeying orders,” she says, “Don’t you bloody dare.” There’s no answer to that. And the parallels are very, very stark.

Jack, meanwhile, might be rather clever in what he’s doing but he doesn’t really discover much. Still, it’s fun to watch how he cleverly manoeuvres himself to confront Owens in a plush restaurant, only to discover that Owens, much though he’d like to, doesn’t know anything, and is no more “evil” than most of us. But this middleman, this ordinary man, nevertheless gets a magnificent speech in which he makes clear just how deep this conspiracy has to go, and how long it must have been planned. We do learn one thing, though; “the blessing” has something to do with it. We know, because we have a basic understanding of how serial drama works, that this will eventually prove very, very significant.

This is an episode full of scenes paralleling other scenes through a series of one-on-one conversations. Dr Patel, seemingly decent, has her hands deep in the blood whereas Owens is hard to particularly condemn.  Rex’s scene with Maloney is different, though. In direct contrast with Jack, he assumes he’s dealing with a decent man who can be reasoned with, and only we, the audience, realise the danger he’s put himself in; the scene where he’s looking for a weapon and alights on a simple pen is the single scariest moment in this episode. Maloney has had a very long day.

Esther has been very self-assured thus far, but as soon as she finds herself in a situation of physical violence she pretty much loses it, only eventually being saved by a change of heart from Private Lady Macbeth. Esther has another crisis of confidence after this, getting a hug from Rex. Is something going to happen between the two of them?

Gwen and Rhys are every bit as magnificent as we expected, not only rescuing Gwen’s dad but blowing up the ovens, and using the Torchwood contact lenses to reveal the truth to the world. Mission accomplished. Except… it’s not. Yes, there’s public revulsion, but the authorities refuse to budge and the situation continues. It’s horrible, but I suspect it’s realistic.

Gwen returns to America, and the lenses are turned against her to provide quite a cliffhanger: “they” have her mother, her husband and her daughter. And they want Jack…