DVD review: Torchwood 1.08 -- They Keep Killing Suzie

(If you're reading this on the Dreamwidth journal, you'll need to go over to LJ and pick up the torchwood boxset tag to see previous installments.)


"We're talking to the wrong corpse."

The very first episode showed how Torchwood is the worst and best job in the world, with Jack's second-in-command getting a little too carried away with her job, and ending up on ice in the vaults herself. Three months later, the team have reason to find out just what she knew about the background of their current problem -- and in Torchwood, even suicide isn't always an effective way to resign from the job...

Intricately plotted, well acted, and wonderfully filmed and directed, this meditation on life and death shows just what Torchwood is capable of -- from what was originally one of the over-commission scripts which were commissioned to give the production time extra material to draw on in case of problems with the primary scripts.

Watching it for the first time is like playing with one of those Russian doll sets; every time you open up a layer, you find something else nested inside. This does sometimes give me suspension of disbelief problems on rewatching, in part because Suzie's plan is so elaborate, but on my first time through I was too mesmerised by the developing story and character interplay to care.

( They Keep Killing Suzie )

tear down the wall

Yesterday I posted about my visit to the Hack Green Secret Bunker museum, where I stood and looked at a pair of decommissioned nuclear missiles. I'm at the older end of Generation X -- I was already a young adult twenty years ago. I grew up in the shadow of the Bomb, with the knowledge that there was the capability and perhaps the will to go to Mutually Assured Destruction, the potential end of civilisation in a war that was not survivable in any meaningful sense.

And then, twenty years ago today, the most blatant symbol of that terrible, deep division between nations -- was repudiated. The East German people decided in large numbers that they had had enough of being divided from their own across the Berlin Wall, and the newly installed leader of East Germany declined to give the order to shoot. An order that had been given many times in the past, but not twenty years ago today.

It was a process that began before the Wall came down, and continued long after. It is a process that is not entirely complete, that has had reversals. There is still suspicion, there are still madmen with access to the tools of mass destruction. But twenty years ago today is a day I can point at and say that that was the day I really believed that the world would not end in fire just yet.