Immaculate Misconception

Torchwood: Something Borrowed

"Bastard Torchwood!"

Torchwood has given us its fair share of hilarious moments: that chav blowing up Cardiff's Telecoms, Owen swing dancing with Death and Ianto crying throughout Cyberwoman immediately spring to mind. But nothing could prepare me for John Barrowman's turn as the campest monster in the history of science fiction. Just watch him as he sniffs Owen's lifeless corpse and then flounces out of the room like a vampiric transvestite (maybe that's why they're called Nostrovites?). Comedy gold or car crash TV? The jury is still out.

Your reaction to this episode will probably depend on how you handle Gwen's decision to go through with the wedding after being impregnated by a shape-shifting alien. If Gwen's attempts to marry Rhys had been continually thwarted at each and every turn then you could just about buy into her insane desire to stroll down the aisle like that; not to mention having to put all her friends and family through the inevitable "I lost the baby during the honeymoon" conversation a few days later. But under the circumstances, she's either possessed by an alien hive mind or she's f**king lost it. So why didn't anyone point this out to her as they tied her to a table with some leather straps (I'm sure Ianto's got some knocking about somewhere).

Gwen is either possessed by an alien hive mind or she's f**king lost it...

I envy Phil Ford. If you've ever tried to sketch out a plot for a script then you'll almost certainly be familiar with that soul-crushing feeling you get when something that you consider to be utterly fantastic can't possibly work in the context of the story itself. Phil's first obstacle must have been: "how can Gwen have a hen party (or any friends outside Torchwood, for that matter) when she won't be able to explain to them how she became nine months pregnant in less than nine hours?". That would have been enough to stop any rational person in their tracks. But not our Phil. "To hell with it!" he says. "I'll just have them say they were too pissed to notice!" Now that takes balls of steel.

But Phil has special dispensation. He can do anything he likes in this episode because you don't need continuity or consequences when you've got a SUV full of drugs.

I have to ask the question again: just how selective is the amnesia you get from taking a retcon pill? Do the wedding guests remember anything? Like the fact that Rhys and Gwen are even married? Or that poor Mervyn got his nob ripped off? Do you think they scraped his remains off the carpet before or after all the slow dancing? And what happened before Torchwood drugged the shit out the place? Are you seriously telling me that no one called the police? Or the press? Or the Welsh branch of the f**king Ghostbusters??? Would you have stayed on for the disco after witnessing what looked suspiciously like a zombie outbreak in the middle of the nuptials? I'd be in ASDA stocking up on baked beans before they'd even got past the prawn cocktails.

No one called the police? Or the press? Or the f**king Ghostbusters???

It all comes down to whether you want Torchwood to be a show about blowfishes driving sports cars or turgid metaphysical treatises about the existential nature of memory and death. I don't know about you lot but I'll happily take Terry and June meets The Evil Dead any day of the week. At least it's fun to watch. And you have to admit that it's a brave show that dares to liberally mix Brian Rix farce with the birth of Jesus and a splattering of Sam Raimi. Or is it stupidity? At least for the first time in a very long time nobody was talking about committing suicide, nobody cried in an unconvincing manner and Owen returned to the periphary once again. What a blessed relief.

Whether Something Borrowed is "so bad it's good" or "purposefully silly" or just plain old "terrible" is still open to debate. It's hard to see how this episode fits into the grand scheme of things (I've seen more internal continuity in most anthology series) but if they set out to make a bonkers mad parody of Torchwood then they succeeded - with nobs on (poor, poor Mervyn).

I just hope that next week's installment is as silly, self-effacing and audacious as this. Anything's better than the impotent stabs at profundity and angst we've been subjected to so far. The campaign to make Phil Ford next season's showrunner starts here...