Adam Gone West

Take a retcon pill,
Scrub the painful memories
Of Cyberwoman.

Torchwood: Adam

Well, that amnesia pill certainly did its job; five minutes after the episode finished and I couldn't remember for the life of me whether I actually liked it or not. I think I kind of did - more than Out Of Time, but less than Meat or Captain Jack Harkness - but even after a second viewing I'm not sure what to believe.

The ironies of this episode being about unreality and false visions of the past will not be lost on anybody who suffered through season one. The Torchwood gang make a much better impression upon you when they're not being themselves, and the resolution depends upon their willingness to erase the consequences of this week's activities, which we've absolutely derided the show for when it tossed the baby out with the bathwater willy-nilly, time after time. But mainly it's because a cheap piece of 1988 space-sitcom nonsense managed to do almost the exact same thing in greater depth and less time than the slick, glossy 21st century one. Adam was never going to compete with Red Dwarf: Thanks For The Memories on its own level anyway as the older programme was a pastiche (that is, a deliberate one). It starts with the mystery of two missing days and Lister and Cat's broken legs, but completely ridicules the sci-fi side of it - the early series were brilliant at this before it became exactly what it was supposed to satirise in the first place - by revealing the cause to be something relatively mundane, straightforward and stupid, where Lister just for once wanted to do something nice for Rimmer but ends up hurting him more than if he'd actually tried.

Magnus Greel's invisible moving spiders...

So Adam lacks that element of conceptual genius. It scores elsewhere though by being even more bittersweet and cruel - turning Ianto into a serial killer is easily the single most horrible thing suffered by any of the main cast thus far, as he's that close to going looby-loo mental even at the best of times - and so visually batshit-confusing that you can't help but want to know what the hell any of it is really going to mean by the end of it; though yet again (notice a pattern emerging?) some of the bizarre direction doesn't exactly help.

Adam himself possesses little in the way of physical presence or power in his voice. It's nearly a catastrophic flaw, but not for the obvious reasons you probably think. Like those annoying in-and-out jump-zooms that view like Dawg from the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons being continually stopped short by the rope around his kennel, it's the fault of the direction that this is brought to our attention in such a negative way (the lighting and camera both make a concerted effort to paint Adam as somebody dangerous before his first major blunder a couple of minutes in pisses it all down the toilet), when in fact his ability to fade into the background - at least, until his evil side comes out - is the most important attribute of the character as written; so much so, that it highlights the real problem - that without that critical first error and the chain of dominoes it sets off, you've basically got no story.

Tosh goes up seven cup sizes

If we take a look at those glaring 'mistakes' for a minute: cocking up Gwen's engagement and getting tripped up by basic CCTV security are, not to put too fine a point on it, dumb. Adam's third error isn't in failing to recognise Ianto as such a nerd for detail that he'd note down every little occurrence in triplicate, but rather in not destroying the diary evidence when he had the chance once this became apparent - dumb, once again. Succumbing to pleasure and pushing Ianto so far into madness that nobody in the world will buy it (and since it's a person's belief in what they hold to be the truth that determines the success or failure of a lie-detector test, I don't know what Jack was hoping to accomplish with that), is less a lack of self-control than plain cocksure arrogance, especially after handing the hook for Jack's suspicions over to him on a plate to begin with. But if Adam ends up looking so much like he deserves to fail, it's because like the Moonbase Cybermen, there's simply no way he can lose unless he puts his own foot in it. What difference would success have made anyway? There is not a single character flaw present in Adam that one of the others hasn't already displayed in a more gratuitous fashion, even in the superior season two. He's not some megalomaniacal Bond villain, his only concern is survival, and he's right; Torchwood are more comfortable with themselves from his intervention initially. Tosh goes up seven cup sizes. Yes, yes, alright, do I have the right blah de blah; but if not having permission were the only thing you could hold up to Adam's plan as far as doing anything morally 'wrong' was concerned, then Catherine Treganna would have backed herself into a conflict-free narrative corner. Even with this alternative, there is no real moral point made apart from 'don't get caught'.

The episode also skirts perilously close to coming unglued by the overwrought self-help retcon therapy that goes on for a good ten minutes after what appears to be the episode's natural ending as Adam is carted off, when in fact the one-to-one confrontation that follows is the most important bit. Adam is finally undone by his own trump card, the only live-or-die mistake in the entire episode; his belief that Jack's intense suffering from keeping his past subdued would be so great that Jack would never stand up to him. If this had come off as planned, every other screw-up and more besides would simply not have mattered. But it's terribly easy to look this crucial point straight in the face and not see it. Since there is only one way to provide proper closure to the episode, the final 'Last Temptation' sequence - again with the Christ complex - winds up looking all the more extraneous; Jack's memories were buried before Adam came along, they're buried again once he's exorcised, and no matter what Adam does to him in between, the retcon will take it away again for a net overall difference of zero. But if you're sitting there marking time while Jack slouches around the unreal dream-beach from The X-Files: The Sixth Extinction while his damn-dirty-apes face shrieks "oh shit, it's Vengeance On Varos", you've missed the point in a big way.

Even then I still feel ambivalent towards Jack's past. We have plenty of 'new' history to plug gaps with, some of which may even be true. Magnus Greel's invisible moving spiders are a life-changing event. But it doesn't feel like the right information yet, and the writers are all pulling their own Chris Carters to avoid bringing up the two years of erased memories that are the missing key to the Captain Jack that we think we've known for the last three years. Or had you forgotten? They also gave us so much peekaboo into Jack's background that they completely forgot about the one real bloke whose mind didn't get pissed about with. What is he, some malignant parasitic entity inhabiting the void, like the Eternals? And we came in with Adam firmly entrenched in place, but what exactly happened when Torchwood found him, or the other way round? Am I missing something here? Could I be looking for answers that don't matter? Or is it that they failed to answer the most nagging question of all; namely that if Captain Jack's dad was Bruce Willis, how did he turn out so camp?

If Captain Jack's dad was Bruce Willis, how did he turn out so camp?

And I don't think I really wanted to know the team's innermost defining memories, and certainly not as a Freudian cop-out excuse or apology for who they are and what they do, as Owen's emotional abuse as a child was. But not even Adam can cure Owen of being an arsehole, and whether real or imagined, expressing your desire (ineptly) for a colleague on their anniversary is just an arsehole thing to do. The real Owen doesn't do flowers or apologies. He doesn't do feelings very well either. Arnold Rimmer, Dwayne Dibbley, or Bert from Sesame Street with specs on? You decide. And Ianto; yes, I know you were traumatised by Cyberwoman, it was the stupidest episode ever and you were terrible in it, but for God's sake once and for all GET OVER IT. And as for Gwen; well, all she has to do is ask Rhys what happened over the last two days and they're fucked again.

Hmm, what was it you were saying about selective memory loss last week, Neil?