TARDISMonkey's Torchwood Diary - watching Torchwood an episode a week from the start...

2.5: Adam

We begin with the Torchwood theme, but hang on a minute, there’s a new addition to the team, who we as the audience, have never seen before. I love that the opening has immediately smashed the 4th wall perspective by adding this new team member, Adam, to immediately create a sense of confusion, implying he had been there since the beginning of the series.

The whole concept of this episode is the theme of, “What If?” What if Tosh became a more confident woman; what if Owen was more of the reserved nerd. It’s an interesting twist we’ve seen a fair few times with superhero/ Sci-Fi genres, to really change the dynamic of the team and how they’re going to combat this. I love that with Rhys being more involved with the team, there’s a sense of gravitas and consequence to their actions and how they need to keep the team safe. The whole first half of this episode does leave a long trail of what does Adam want and why has he decided to become part of the Torchwood team in this way? Again as the audience, we’re treated as the people who always know more than the team and for me, I find myself shouting at the TV as soon as you know they’re being used or put in imminent danger. It’s a kind of weird,out of body experience watching the episode. 

Adam is an alien existing by living in other people's memories. Everything all seems fun and games as the team carry on as normal, up until Gwen fails to recognise who Rhys is. After a very intense fight between Gwen and Rhys, Jack turns the tides and there is a compromise between them both. Rhys almost has built a slight sense of trust, despite everything else.

In an interesting turn of events for this story, we delve into Jack’s history and where he’s come from. Adam tricks Jack into remembering his past which he has long forgotten. With Adam’s alien powers, he’s able to access Jack’s memories of losing his family when he was younger and we as an audience, start to get that understanding of why Torchwood means so much to him. The scene of Jack letting go of his little brother’s hand, is heart breaking. Jack Montgomery, who plays young Jack, puts so much into showing the pain of his mistake and the burden this places on  himself as the older Jack. Torchwood is the stable family he found enabling him to recover from his past.

You feel Adam is almost helping the Torchwood team until - well let’s just say Ianto is the character who takes a considerable chunk of heartbreak and emotional torment in this episode. We’ve seen up until half way through the episode, that Adam has given the team good memories, as well as exploring forgotten memories; but what happens when things don’t exactly go Adam’s way? Ianto in his dorky way, kept a diary of all the teams adventures and finds that in a not so shocking twist, Adam isn’t in any of the entries. This is where the episode becomes incredibly dark and twisted. Adam not only has the ability to provide good memories but also bad ones. In a horrific montage of images, he leads Ianto into thinking he’s a predatory murderer, making him believe all the false memories. It turns into a scene which is incredibly uncomfortable to watch but Gareth David-Lloyd really puts everything into the emotions and you can feel the pain and anguish.

This is the last straw for Captain Jack. He takes Ianto to a lie detector to prove he didn’t murder anyone and also convinces the team that Adam can only exist by using their memories. They realise the only way to get rid of Adam, is to retcon themselves. However, Adam is not quite done yet. He convinces Captain Jack to relive family memories and the good times they had, however, Adam tries to distort them and leaves Jack with a conflict; he either lets Adam live by remembering these memories or  he has to forget everything he’s discovered about his family. In the end, Jack makes the ultimate sacrifice for the team by forgetting the last 48 hours as if nothing happened.

The ending has a sombre tone as the team wake up after taking the retcon and can’t remember anything. At the end, Jack finds an open box which belonged to Adam showing the sands of Jack’s home world;  however, with Jack’s memories gone of his home world, in confusion, he places it back where it was found. It’s an ending that breaks your heart completely.

Ellie (TARDISMonkey) 

 

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[Source: DWO]