Torchwood is People!

Torchwood: Meat

They tried to make me a Giant Kebab
I said 'No! No! No!'

This week, Team Torchwood are outplayed and outclassed by a bunch of local amateurs (including the pedophile from the infamous Brass Eye special). Even though Torchwood clearly out-number this inept bunch of heavies, they still couldn't round them up with a minimum of fuss and bloodshed. How impressive is that? What possible chance do they have against an organised gang of aliens with swords for arms? But it's hardly surprising that they came unprepared for a fight: Torchwood's idea of surveillance includes Jack rubbing himself up against a co-worker and looking longingly in to her smouldering eyes, instead of, say, keeping his eye on Rhys and the baddies to see what they might have been packing (besides meat, of course).

And why bother with the complicated ruse of using Rhys to get them inside the low-rent villain's warehouse in the first place? It was a bloody warehouse not a secret base overseen by a Bond villain and patrolled by a squadron of boiler-suited goons! Why not let the cops deal with this sorry mess? Surely this kind of nonsense is beneath Torchwood, and besides, they could have dropped retcon pills into the coppers tea after the bust went down.

How does that retcon pill work anyway? How does it know what to selectively remove from a person's memory? How many pills did Jack have to ram down the gang's throats for them to forget that they were butchering an alien space whale for a living? They could have been at it for months! And how did that little meeting pan out, exactly? Jack makes the villains take the pill and then he asks "Can you remember torturing a space whale recently?" and he just keeps going until they all swear blind that they don't know what he's talking about? Perhaps this all went on while Torchwood held the biggest BBQ in history next door. And then Jack lets them go. Back to a life of gun-toting, ketamine-fueled crime. Bless.

"Can you remember torturing a space whale recently?"

I still can't believe that this episode spent so much time and effort on a 'will Gwen retcon Rhys or not?' coda. Humanity has already experienced first contact with extraterrestrials, and even if the government were peddling the brazen lie that there was something in the water causing mass hallucinations, surely people would have been more than a little suspicious after the FOURTH alien invasion turned up?! Where the hell is Jon Ronson and Michael Moore when you need them? They've already seen the Sycorax, they ducked and covered when the Racnoss turned up, they've had to avoid Daleks and Cybermen bitch-slapping each other in the street, and they even saw a flying alien ball disintegrate the American President during a first-contact ceremony THAT WAS BROADCAST LIVE TO THE ENTIRE WORLD! And no, that bit wasn't wiped from the time-line (go back and check Last of the Time Lords if you can be bothered, cos the Torchwood writing team certainly didn't). And then there's the fact that London was evacuated last Christmas because of the threat of UFOs, which resulted in a spaceship nearly crashing into Buckingham Palace. And don't even mention the Zygons' pet swimming up the Thames, the Cybermen in the sewers or a couple of extinct dinosaurs gently necking in Covent Garden.

Bollocks. They should shorten the name of the pill to 'con'.

What chance do Torchwood have against an organised gang of aliens with swords for arms?

This wouldn't be quite so bad if Torchwood displayed just a little consistency. An OAP reacts to both an alien gangster and Torchwood itself in the opening moments of the very first episode of this season as if they are a nuisance rather that an anomaly. How does this square with the "Rhys must never know about us" nonsense! The local pizza delivery boy knows who Torchwood are, the local cops know who they are (they even mention them to Rhys at the scene of the car accident as if he'd automatically realise what they're talking about) even self-obsessed nerds with too much time on their hands know who they are. Just where the hell has Rhys been? Scuba-diving with Catharine Tate?

Maybe humans in the Torchwood continuum have a lousy memory even before they start popping pills. Take the blazing row between Gwen and Rhys. When she tells him that she hunts aliens for a living he acts as if aliens patently don't exist - EVEN THOUGH HE"S JUST SEEN ONE! I don't know about you but if I had seen a giant lump of land-breathing blubber in a warehouse I would have had my suspicions, even if I didn't live in a narrative universe littered with aliens. It would have been so much better if Rhys had simply said "Tell me about it! I've just seen one myself five minutes ago!" thus defusing a situation that was rapidly descending into hackneyed cliches, shot as if This Life was still a cutting edge drama.

Something else that is wholly inconsistent in this episode is Captain Jack's demeanour. It seems churlish to criticise the show for attempting to fix one of its fatal flaws (Jack being a complete and utter bastard, natch) but to do so with little or no explanation at all is simply unforgivable. Two weeks ago he wanted to pop caps in alien heads, now he wants to weep on them. Why? To impress Gwen? To give Ianto the horn? Suddenly he's Mr. Humanity which is maybe why Catharine Treganna used the motif of a "huge manatee" to subtly ram this idea home on a subconscious level. Which flavour Jack will we get next week? Place your bets now.

Owen puts it to sleep with all the pathos and tenderness of a Billy Smarts' circus clown...

And where's Helen Raynor when you need her? Instead of reaching for a fatal overdose of ketamine Owen could have simply rustled up some DNA that would have not only have sealed the poor brute's wound, it would have shrunk it down to size whereby it could happily sit in the palm of Jack's hand, like a warm. steaming turd, before Jack gave it a kiss and sent it packing. Part of me was hoping that the giant whale was actually an evil dictator who, like the Jagrefess before him, would continue to subjugate entire star systems upon its return home. If only Jack had interrogated its sorry, undulating ass! Sadly, this never transpired and we had to settle for Owen putting it to sleep with all the pathos and tenderness of a Billy Smarts' Circus clown.

The great big slab of meat itself is pretty difficult to emphasis with, too. Still, that's nothing new in Torchwood. It looked like a cross between a Mryka dropping, the monster the Millennium Falcon flew into during The Empire Strikes Back, and Ramsbottom, the snake with a Yorkshire accent that used to menace Sooty and Sweep in the 1970s.

But at least I came away from the episode pledging never to eat meat that's been carved from a living, breathing, sentient being ever again. And there aren't many shows that can deliver a potent moral message like that.