Torchwood Day 5 finale
The end of Torchwood: Children of Earth culminated in an emotional, gripping, and uncompromising hour of science fiction television. Day Five was a pitch perfect crescendo to the past four days blazing bitter-sweetly across the screen with a plot line that gave no quarter and threw more surprises into the mix within the first 3o minutes compared to 21 episode seasons of some shows. Comparisons to Battlestar Galactica, the penultimate science fiction programing that gave no quarter in its allegory of the modern day war on terror mixed with spiritual matters, were definitely fair comparisons.
Day Five opens with a Gwen Cooper staring at the audience in a grainy home camera frame as some past time capsule to the human race. Initially, we are not sure when the message was filmed, but by tone we can assume the worst. Gwen addresses the nagging question of any Torchwood fan when an emergency of such epic proportions comes to Earth: where is the Doctor? Her answer is chilling and practical. She concludes humanity’s behavior is at times so pitiful, so low, that the only thing the Doctor can do is turn away in shame. And so begins the end of the story that is at once tearful, yet triumphant song of the complicated human experience.
With the Torchwood teams card played in Day Four, and thoroughly defeated, the world and its leaders are left with but one option, to gather the 10 percent of the worlds children to give to the 456. Jack Harkness, defeated and crushed by the death of Ianto agrees, with Gwen Cooper being the last hold out. The immortal man cannot stand to see any more fragile humanity lost, even if it means damnation for the species’ spirit. He sends Gwen out on one last mission to protect Ianto’s neice and nephew from the collection.
Even in agreeing to the sacrifice, the reasoning of the 456 for the collection and the fate of those children only makes the last option more loathsome. Almost immediately in the episode the powers that be learn that the chemicals produced in children’s brains are like a sweet drug to the 456, hence why they demand more. They are monstrously powerful, intergalactic drug addicts.
Without blinking it is revealed that ultimately, humanity is whoring out its lowest class of children in a drug exchange for a superior alien race chipping for the next high.
No one, with the exception of Gwen, Rhys, PC Andy Davidson, Ianto’s sister, and the masses who eventually rise up against their own governments as children are taken away are left relatively unscathed. Everyone else is left haunted by the horrible decisions they are willing to live with in order to survive.
The story, once again like day one, strongly returns to the idea of family, with a darker twist this time. John Frobisher’s own haunting past drives him to not be willing to make the sacrifice of his children to the 456 by decree of the Prime Minister. When it is demanded for him to give his own children to create a plausible cover story that the government was “betrayed” by the 456 when the children disappear Frobisher refuses. He sees his haunting mistake, the sins played back upon his own house for his actions in 1965, and does the only thing he can think of. He chooses to execute his wife, children, and himself so those children do not become drug sources, attached for eons to the 456. The scene plays out with excellent framing and visual storytelling that makes it one of the most haunting few minutes on television.
Jack too is to pay for his collusion in the sacrificing of 12 children. In no other place or storyline, not even his guilt over losing his brother, is Jack’s immortality seen to be such a curse. He will forever be haunted by the compromising actions, the killing of his own grandson, in order to save humanity. That grandson becomes a conduit to repel the 456. Somehow the children are a bridge to a psychic and frequency connection with the alien force who can cause the menace harm. Jack deduces this after he is freed by Johnson and told to do what he does best, save humanity.
The sacrifice of his own flesh and blood is made when the grandson is used as a focal point to create a cascading wave that we can only assume by the red blood splatter causes the child we see the 456 feeds on to die as well, and in turn wounds the 456. In the process Jack’s grandson’s brain is also fried. The act was a wound that cut against what he learned from the Doctor and repeated in Day 4, an injury to one is an injury to all. Jack would carry the weight of saving humanity from perpetual enslavement, and his daughter’s hatred, for all eternity.
In the end, it would appear the elasticity of humanity’s self absorption prevails. The Prime Minister gets his comeuppance when he is forced to stand aside. And six months later, as the story jumps, we are left with seeing Rhys and a much bigger Gwen driving and stopping at the end of a road, a pretty recognizable symbol for what is about to happen. At the end of that road is Jack, who has walked the earth for months, but still found no peace. His only option is to run further away, into the stars, at the dismay of Gwen, who must stay, yet not go back to her life before Torchwood, with nowhere to run.
Jack wonders if his mere presence is what brings death and destruction. He reiterates a common hero trope – is it the nature of the universe that the greater the hero, the greater the danger and threat. If Jack leaves, he seems to suggests, perhaps the safe status quo can return without consequences or repercussions.
The question now of course is, will Torchwood return with Captain Jack? Or will the next time we see him (in a linear timeline of the Doctor Who universe) be as the Face of Boe? If the series can keep the pace and questioning up that it has in Children of Earth, this reviewer truly does hope for its return.
