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Stuart Mascair

7 July 2020

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

2.6: Reset

We start the episode with a mysterious VIP visitor who Jack is very excited to see and who would Jack be most excited about? Well it had to be Martha Jones played by the wonderful, Freema Agyeman.

 

What’s amazing about this episode is that you can feel and see the love and friendship Martha and Jack have from their time travelling with the Doctor. It’s the kind of chemistry you get when you see a friend to whom you haven’t spoken for a long time, and when you finally meet, it’s just as if hardly a day has passed. Martha has gained a job at UNIT as a doctor and this makes you cheerfully punch  the air. You know Martha  has just got on with life after The Doctor and has become a hugely successful person in the process. It’s a great piece of character development which is amazing to see in the spin-off series that’s so highly regarded.

 

Back to the story, Martha is drafted in by Jack and she’s found a connection of mysterious deaths that appear to be unrelated until you look at the finer detail. It’s nice to see Martha use her medical knowledge in ways we didn’t get to see in “Doctor Who.” Owen and Martha quickly form a partnership as they’re working together to find out what’s been injected into the victims bodies to kill them. Naturally, it would turn out to be an alien threat, manipulated by humans for their own gain. In this case, it’s small bugs that appear to cure all kinds of cancers, diseases etc in the human immune system. But what doesn’t make sense is why people are being injected with bleach to hide the evidence. Just before one of the victims dies, she tells Martha and Owen about this place called The Pharm, that is using volunteers in their clinical trials to help with their medical history. Of course, where there’s a cure, there’s some kind of money making scheme behind it and that’s when we meet Professor Aaron Copley, the chairman of the whole operation.

 

Martha volunteers to spy on the medical trials to find out what is going on and to recover the missing medical records from the victims that were killed. During the process, she is quickly discovered after being chased by one of the alien creatures being used to create the miracle cure. What’s also great in the episode, is Martha is still affected by what happened to her on her travels with the Doctor - her blood cells having unique properties manipulated by the Time Vortex. This could be a theme to a whole episode in itself. Torchwood usually has its famous McGuffin’s, as Owen luckily has a device which can get the alien creature out of Martha just in the knick of time, before it bursts out of her stomach in “Alien” style. 

 

Reset delivers the very conventional Torchwood plot of the big baddy who needs to be stopped no matter what. The narrative of this episode parallels that of “Meat” where the alien meat was being chopped up to be sold on the  open market for money. What makes the difference, is Professor Aaron Copley thinks that experimenting on aliens and humans is ok if the outcome means he can save the world in the future with this new cure.

 

Just as you think the Torchwood team has just saved the day once again as they shut down the facility, Professor Aaron Copley steps out from the darkness with a gun, ready to take vengeance for destroying his life’s work. Owen, no stranger to facing a gun, steps forward to disarm the situation. As the audience, you believe he’ll come out fine as they always do in Torchwood, until he takes a fatal shot to the heart. It all doesn’t seem real until Martha confirms “He’s dead.” It’s a moment that really is shocking as we’ve just got Martha back and everything felt like it was becoming a bigger family unit; it’s all cruelly taken away in an instant. Jack immediately fires back in anger killing the Professor on the spot. The camera then appears to be flying higher and higher into the air, as if it were following Owen’s soul to heaven.

 

Knowing how Torchwood deal with scenarios, I don’t think this will be the last time we see Owen.


Ellie (TARDISMonkey) 


 

 

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[Source:
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