Torchwood 2.07 ‘Dead Man Walking’

Written by Matt Jones

Directed by Andy Goddard

Starring John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Gareth David-Lloyd, Burn Gorman, Naoko Mori and Freema Agyeman

There are three moments of pure, unalloyed brilliance in this episode. None of them are particularly long but each one sees Torchwood hit a peak of writing, acting and production that it hasn’t, to date, managed.

The first comes in the first fifteen minutes. Like Ianto pointed out last season, the funny thing about gloves is they tend to come in pairs and he tracks down the companion to last year’s ‘Risen Mitten’ in a scene which hints at a far more interesting, diverse, settled view of Cardiff’s more…exotic…citizenry than we’ve seen so far. With the Resurrection Glove in hand, he brings Owen back, giving everyone a chance to say goodbye and…

Jack a chance to get the combination for the medical vault.

Its a wonderful moment, played on the one hand as jet black comedy and on the other as something both tragic and banal. Owen’s gone, he’s already dead and now all that’s left is the housekeeping. That’s what Jack’s job is, that’s what, as the Torchwood Field Commander, has to be his first priority and this is arguably the first script to genuinely address that.

Except Owen doesn’t stay dead. Or human. And that’s what gives the series what, arguably, is the definitive Martha Jones moment. With Owen out on the streets and rapidly becoming something…else, Martha points out, forcefully, that it’s time they stopped viewing him as human. She’s calm, commanding and completely in control of herself and her skills, a world away from the woman who, at the start of series three had to be told what Bedlam was. This is Martha as the vast majority of fandom have always seen her. She’s smart, she’s capable, she’s compassionate and she is fully prepared to do bad things for good reasons. The gifted young doctor is now a gifted, experienced UNIT field officer and she should be a fascinating addition to series four of the mother show.

The third moment comes in the final ten minutes and somehow manages to sidestep a horrifically stereotypical situation and turn it into a moment of incredible emotional power.

Owen has become a conduit for the embodiment of Death, which has run rampant in a local hospital and killed twelve people. Anyone who goes near it, will die and Death, according to Torchwood’s research, will reign on Earth forever. No one can stop it.

Except a dead man.

Owen delivers a speech to a patient at the hospital that, frankly, transforms the character. In a flash, the amoral wideboy of the previous season is replaced by a young man with a fierce, total faith in his work, by someone who knows he’s doomed and embraces that doom. Owen Harper becomes a hero, right in front of you, in the sort of iconic moment the series has been lacking up to now.

These three moments take the series to a different level and, by and large, it stays there throughout this episode. A frantic story that takes in Owen’s death, resurrection, the Black Plague, the Grim Reaper, the clear implication that the Weevils are organised, Martha being put in jeopardy, Jack pointing out that Ianto and Marcel Proust have something in common (Namely, him) and the rise of the personification of Death it never once stops to draw breath. And, unfortunately, that’s a problem.

There are moments where the viewer simply isn’t sure what’s going on and a transition between scenes that at first seems completely nonsensical. After some thought, what actually happened becomes not only clear but actually rather clever but in a story with such colossal amounts of incident and story and depth, it’s a bump in the road that it takes a while to overcome.

Likewise, a lot of characters get lost in the churn, with Martha, Gwen and Ianto in particular sidelined to the point of irrelevancy. Throw in a take on the Grim Reaper that’s beautiful, original and disturbing but ceases to be all of those things the second it moves as well as the frantic pace and you’ve got an episode which is choppy, awkwardly paced and feels rushed.

And yet, works. ‘Dead Man Walking’ sees the series take it’s first steps onto a whole new level of operation and the narrative courage involved in the over arcing plot between this, ‘Reset’ and ‘A Day in the Death’ would be worthy of praise by itself. When taken with the episode’s other plus points, it makes ‘Dead Man Walking’ one of the best episodes to date.