Torchwood 2.13: Exit Wounds

[selenay]

Well, that wasn't what I expected! After last week's lovely background
episode, I was expecting that we would lose one character and I was pretty
much prepared for it being Ianto that we'd lose. Hey, I expect people to
break my heart and kill off characters that we've all got a lot of emotional
investment in!

To lose two was unexpected. For one of those characters to be Owen was even
more unexpected, somehow.

I'm not quite sure how to react to it yet. A year ago, I would have been
quite happy to for Owen to be killed off, preferably as painfully as
possible. Now I'm rather saddened by it because I had grown rather attached
to the smug, selfish bastard. It hadn't even occurred to be that Toshiko
might be the character we would lose. I loved her characer, I kept hoping
that they would let her move past Owen and give her some great stuff and
then they killed her. Bastards.

I'd had a lot of hopes for what they could do with her next season :-(

Overall, I enjoyed this episode a lot. My only tiny quibble: um, why were
Jack's clothes only slightly stained after nearly two thousand years buried
in the ground? I'm sure some archeologist friends out there can give me a
reason, but wouldn't they have rotted?

Yes, tiny quibble that one.

I completely bought into the "Captain John is an evil bastard" concept right
and assumed that he had Gray locked up somewhere to use as bait for Jack.
Right up until the 27AD scene and then it dawned on me that actually I might
have made an error. I think that is a matter of conditioning: I'm used to
seeing James Masters play that kind of evil character and the first Captain
John episode had not given me any reasons not to assume that this was
TimeAgent!Spike. I was still expecting him to burst out into a spate of evil
even at the end when he said something about sticking around to see what
Cardiff was like. Huh. Does that mean he might be a regular next year?

I am dying to know what the creatures were that kidnapped Gray. Part of me
suspects that it's the Daleks, another part suspects that it's an alien we
haven't met yet that will be sprung on us at a later date. In many ways I'd
prefer the latter because that could be an interesting story arc. Another
part of me suspects that it would be such a cool idea that the TW writers
will probably go with Daleks despite the lack of logic to it...

Overall, it was an episode worthy of being a season ender leaving us with an
absolute ton of stuff to discuss, speculate and write about over the next
nine months. I am sure that I've left out dozens of things that I wanted to
talk about in this review, but I also have DW squee to record so I shall
move on now and revist TW (multiple times) later.