Hey, Scavenger Thing

Torchwood Episode 1x01 - "Everything Changes"

Episode Grade: A-


Oh look, hexagons again. In a T shape. Cast names appear one at a time, one beneath the other, in the exact same font as Lost's total lack of opening credits. And the theme tune, obviously, cannot even remotely compare to that of its parent program.

And lo, it is begun. Aerial view of Cardiff at night. Zoom down to some dead guy. Forensics-y people mill around. A little further away, non-forensic-y police people also mill around, drinking coffee. Focus to one of them in particular, and screw it, I'm not going to pretend not to know anyone's names this time; this is P.C. Gwen Cooper, and she'll be playing the part of Rose this evening, essentially. She shares some idle chit-chat with another cop for a while, which would probably be pretty uninteresting, but this show's just started, so I can still be going "Ooh, the Welsh accents!" and it doesn't really matter what they're saying yet. Give it time. Anyway, they bring a halt to this palaver when some sort of hoo-hah appears to be beginning among the forensics guys. They've been sent orders from on high! To pull back! And grant special access! But to whom? Why, Torchwood, of course. And here they come now, with their black van and black leather jackets and general black theme. "Who's Torchwood?" Gwen asks a random forensincs guy; "Special ops or something." Gwen's worried that they'll contaminate the body or somesuch, forensics guy, after stealing Gwen's coffee, complains that there's no procedure any more and tests out this adult timeslot thang by dropping in a "fucking disgrace", which wasn't really all that gratuitous, I guess. More on that theme later. Gwen looks confused at Torchwood for a while, then goes running up some stairs to spy on them from above.

Now, there could be some people watching who never saw Captain Jack on Doctor Who, so let's get him in a speech as quick as possible to add them to the ranks of gushing fangirls. It's raining and Jack can taste the estrogen on it from all the contraceptives people flush into the water supply. You can taste the estrogen on me any time, Jack, cry the fangirls. Giggle. He also drops in an "I love this planet" to tell/remind us he's not from around here. And a "Still, at least I won't get pregnant. Never doing that again." as if there weren't enough of those fanfics already. Swoon. What a guy! Now, that that's over with, the less important members of the cast might get to speak, so allow me to introduce them. There's Suzie, wearing the Glove of Myneghon, we'll see a lot more about that later. There's Owen, who has an annoying Mockney accent, and is an annoying dick. And there's Toshiko, who... well, I've watched both of these episodes, and frankly I don't have a clue. So, Suzie's having a little trouble getting the glove to work, Owen is complaining because he's a dick, Tosh is doing and saying nothing, because that's her thing. Suzie gets the glove working, and rests the dead guy's head on it, while the lights they've set up around him flare up, and the soundtrack plays the Lost cliffhanger noise. There's a jolt, and the dead guy wakes up, breathing heavily, babbling incoherently. Tosh tells him they only have two minutes, it's important that he listens, and that he's dead. She tries to find out whether he saw who stabbed him, but he's a little hung up on the whole dead thing. Eventually she gets it out of him that he didn't see anything, what with having been stabbed from behind, and then she can't think of what else to ask, so clearly she's no hardened expert at this. Jack takes over, introduces himself, and asks what the guy saw when he died. He gets a little intense about it, obviously thinking of his own death experience, but all dead John can tell him is "I saw nothing, oh my God, there's nothing!" Jack looks saddened by this. Owen complains some more, "I said it was stupid telling him he was dead." Knowing what the actual point of this thing was, I can't see that that matters, so shut up, Owen. Jack points out that the last guy wasted the whole two minutes screaming for an ambulance when they told him he was injured. "Maybe there's no right way of doing it," he says, then shouts up to Gwen "What do you think?" She jumps back, startled, and runs.

Sweep around more aerial views of night time Cardiff in scene transition, and, like much of the show, it's all very Angel. Gwen arrives home. Her boyfriend, Rhys, who is of the sweet but dull type that will undoubtedly end up either dying or leaving her by the end of the season, probably very soon after finding out about all the alien stuff. Just you wait. She's surprised to find him still up, and they have a highly inconsequential conversation, then she goes up to bed. Ooh, Welsh accents. It's losing its charm already. Gwen lies in bed, eyes open. Because Captain Jack is so hot he CAUSES INSOMNIA! Probably.

Next day. You know, I've written 15 recaps thus far, not including this one. I wonder how many paragraphs I've started with "next day"? I'll bet it's a lot. I'm not going to stop, you understand, just making an observation. Gwen arrives at work, asks a colleague to do a search on "Captain Jack Harkness" for her. See, she's totally forgotten the other three were there! That's how hot Captain Jack is. Of course, it might be because none of them mentioned their names at any point, but I doubt it. Colleague complains that she's already swamped, there a proper channels, blah de blah, but she'll do it anyway. Gwen thanks her and goes upstairs.

Where Detective Chief Inspector I Don't Really Know All That Much About The Inner Workings Of The Police Department So I Pretty Much Just Assigned This Guy The Title Of Detective Chief Inspector At Random is reporting what they know of the local serial killer so far; three murdered, all with a blade approx. eight inches long, three inches deep, and that's the only link between the victims. Someone mentions that the two women were stabbed from the front, but John Tucker was stabbed from behind, and asks what this tells them about the murderer, Dectective Chief Inspector I'm Not Typing Out That Ridiculously Long Name Again, I Mean Come On replies "That he's a coward." Because he only stabs women from the front? Wuh-huh?

Gwen gets out of her patrol car, asks her partner what Torchwood is. He parrots "Dunno. Special Ops." Gwen asks what that actually means, he goes on a rant about how they're probably DNA specialists, because everything is about DNA these days, "like that CSI bollocks", blah blah Welsh nationalism yadda yadda. They enter a pub where a bar brawl is in full swing, "We Are The Pipettes" playing loudly on the jukebox, following the "crazy loud pop music as horrible things happen is always genius" rule, though this isn't that horrible, and the music's not playing that loudly, so it's a mild example. In the ensuing scuffle, Gwen gets pushed pack and hits her head on a pillar.

Hospital. Gwen gets her head stitched up, and on leaving the room, spots a black coat running up the stairs, so, of course, there's a long scene of her in pursuit. Nice to see they're sticking to their roots a little. When she eventually reaches the top, there's no black coat to be seen, and a covered doorway with yellow and black tape telling no one to go through is the only exit. Sounds like a case for Jonathan Creek if ever there was one. Gwen finds a porter wandering, and asks him what is the dealio with the sealed doorway, only she doesn't ask it in such a profoundly stupid manner. He's surprised she doesn't know, given her police uniform; he figured they put it there. He just came in this morning and discovered it sealed off, no one told him what for.

So, Gwen decides to investigate matters herself. It's pretty evident that she's never heard the one about feline curiosity. She wanders into the sealed area and calls "Hello?" And out creeps... well, it looks a whole lot like a Buffy vampire, but a really old one, like The Master, or Kakistos or a Turok-Han. So, I'm going to call him Noodles. Don't ask. Gwen asks if he saw a tall man come through in "one of those big sort of military coats". Noodles just stares at her and growls a little, so Gwen gets all "this is official business", so answer the damn question, PUNK. Noodles continues to stare and growl, and is looking about to jump on Gwen when the porter comes through the doorway. He walks the full length of the hallway without once taking a breath, babbling far too quickly for me to take any of it in, but I don't think it's important. He reaches Gwen and takes in Noodles, and starts going off on how great his 'mask' is, when he gets to "just like real teeth, look at that!", Noodles goes for the jugular. Dude's like crazy quick, yo. Also, he's a much messier eater than any of those civilised Buffy vampires, there's blood going everywhere! Man, I'd hate to be the guy who had to clean that up. Wait, he just got eaten. Wait, that really doesn't do anything to change my point. The Torchwood guys suddenly come bursting out of the woodwork (not literally), Captain Jack rushes Gwen out of there while the others deal with Noodles.

Gwen follows his lead with gusto, running downstairs, then she slowmos her way out of the hospital looking suspiciously at all the patients and doctors, then clutches her knees outside and catches her breath. She spots Torchwood's black van speeding away, which was remarkably quick of them, and gets into her patrol car to go in pursuit, leaving her partner to stand on the pavement clutching his sandwich and shouting "Oi!" Long range aerial view of the car chase, and Gwen reports the Torchwood van's number plate back to base, where her colleague's done a search on Captain Jack Harkness; the only one on record is American, and disappeared off the face of the Earth in 1941. So that couldn't possibly be the guy! Torchwood van parks outside the Cardiff... Centre Of... Big Shiny Building. So, I don't know things. Sue me. Gwen does likewise, and shouts at them to stop. She's momentarily distracted by a security guy telling her she can't park there. She irritantly dismisses him with a "Police", he is hilariously all "I can see that, you still can't park there", and this brief loss of concentration is enough for Torchwood to slip out of her grasp, they've totally vanished. She gets back into her car, dejected, and her mood doesn't improve when she gets a call to tell her that the number plate she gave them does not, in fact, exist. Neither does it do so when her annoyed partner gets into the passenger seat and tells her "I have walked. I have bloody walked."

Outside the Big Shiny Building again, Gwen's trying to explain to her partner about Torchwood's disappearing act, that's getting nowhere, so she moves onto the porter that got attacked by Noodles, but apparently all hospital staff are totally present and correct, so that's not getting her much either. Partner pretty much just thinks she's going crazy, and offers to drive her home. Security camera watches them walk to the car.

Gwen arrives home, where Rhys is cooking dinner for her. Isn't he sweet! This relationship has no chance, dude. Sorry about that. Gwen apologises to him, because she has to work tonight. He protests "You should be off sick!" I assume because of the head stitches, not the going crazy. But anyway, he forgives her.

And then it turns out it was all a cunning ruse; she's not working at all, she's trying to find Torchwood! She goes back to the Big Shiny Building, where the security camera spies on her again as she watches a pizza guy riding by on his motorbike, which gives her an idea. She goes to the pizza place and asks the guy if anyone has ordered pizza in the name of "Captain Jack Harkness". Now, honestly, what kind of tosspot is going to tell people their rank when ORDERING PIZZA, Gwen? But there's no results for "J. Harkness", or just "Harkness" either, so Gwen decides to give up on this lead. Only, just as she's leaving, she decides she might as well try "Torchwood" too, and it turns out they're regular customers.

And so she walks back to the Big Shiny Building, carrying a couple of pizzas. She's greeted by a friendly chap in a suit, who would be Ianto, the stay on base guy, and thus far he's had even less screen presence than Tosh. She tells him the pizza is for a "Mr. Harkness" , he smirks a little when she looks away, and presses a button that reveals a secret passage in the wall. And, with some hesitation, she walks in, through the long tunnel with the flickering lights, and into Torchwood HQ. There's a big electrical gate, lots of flashing lights, and a hand in a jar. Which, I'll get into it in the recap of the next episode, since that's when it's more than just a background thing, but man, I don't know why it took me so long to figure out what was up with that. Suzie's doing some welding, and she's got a couple of computer screens behind her with blue stuff going on. Captain Jack walks forbodingly along the walkway above, down the stairs, and sits down at his desk, paying no attention to Gwen. Owen and Toshiko look at their screens and do the same. Gwen, looking extremely apprehensive, starts to walk slowly towards Jack, at which point Tosh can no longer contain her laughter, and Owen soon joins her. "I'm sorry!" he cries, "I can't do this! I'm rubbish, I give up!" Tosh claims that he started her off. Owen wonders at the fact that she brought pizza, Jack tells him "Come on! She was gonna say 'here's your pizza', and then I was gonna say 'how much?' and she says ooh, whatever '20 quid', and I say 'I don't have any money'... I was working on a punchline, hadn't quite got there, but it would have been funny." It's all pretty hilarious.
Gwen's like "I think I'd better go," Jack tells her there well beyond that, Gwen is surprised to learn they've been watching her whole journey here, Jack adds "before we go any further, who the hell orders pizza under the name of 'Torchwood'?" Hah! Owen embarrassedly owns up to it. Gwen asks about the porter that Noodles attacked, Jack tells her he's dead. Gwen is confused; "there's no one gone missing", Tosh explains how they changed around work schedules and planted a flase witness and the like so no one will suspect the truth when his body gets pulled out at the docks a few days later. Gwen's a little hung up on this whole covering up murder business, Tosh shrugs "It's my job". Gwen asks about John Tucker, the dead guy she saw them talking to the other night, Jack smiles and asks what exactly it is she saw. "You revived him." Jack tells her no. "You resuscitated him." No. "You brought him back to life." Bingo! That is some serious hair-splitting. You should try out this recapping gig, Captain Jack. Gwen asks what Torchwood actually is, Jack just tells her "This is Torchwood", and gestures around the room. Gwen's hit by some sudden paranoia, and reminds him that she's police, so "you can't do anything". Like, say, alter work schedules, plant false witnesses, have your body turn up at the docks a few days later? Right. Jack's slightly amused, and decides to take her to see Noodles. Gwen, once again, has much trepidation so she just stands there until Suzie tells her to follow Jack.

As she does so, she tries to get a better answer out of him than "This is Torchwood", but is rather distracted when she notices a pterodactyl swooping around high above. And, yes, it did sing. In a manner of speaking. Jack continues to be evasive, and leads her to the glass cage, where Noodles is skulking around, and also sporting a pretty nifty leather jacket. Dude's got style. Jack exposits some about Noodles and his species; they call them Weevils, there's a couple of hundred of them living in the sewers, but every so often one of them goes rogue, comes to the surface and starts attacking humans. And apparently the Hellmou... sorry, Rift is exerting its infleunce, because that's starting to happen more often. He also tells her it's alien, and gives a stool to sit on and some staring time to let this sink in.

Back in the main room, Jack introduces Gwen to everyone, but we've got that done already, so I'll skip it. GWen still rather overwhelmed by it all, so, right now, she's really not doing too well in the test. Which, of course, has been going on since the start of the episode. Don't worry, she'll get there eventually. Right now, she's back to the paranoia, because she shouldn't know this, it's classified ("Way beyond classified," Jack helpfully corrects. Whatever that means.), so clearly they're going to do something horrible to her. So, turns out the horrible thing that's going to happen to her is... Jack taking her out for drinks. Now, I'm no squealing fangirl, but that's not very horrible at all, really, is it? But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. Gwen comments that she's getting tired of following Jack, he let's out some of his flair that's been amazingly restrained thus far; "No you're not. And you never will." Squee and all that, I suppose. They step onto a paving slab, which lifts them up to the street outside and slots in leaving no sign of anything suspicious. Gwen wonders how come people don't see it there, Jack explains about its Somebody Else's Problem field. He calls it a "perception filter", but it's the exact same thing. Gwen asks how it works; Jack doesn't know, just that it does, though he can hazard a good technobabble. Gwen also points out that when the lift's coming up, "there's a bloody big hole in the floor", so don't people fall in? Jack rolls his eyes, "That is so Welsh. I show you something fantastic, you find fault." Gwen gives a funny little outraged look at him, then back at the lift, and Jack moves on to the next leg of the journey.

Which would be the drinks I mentioned earlier. Gwen's chugging her beer at a rather rapid speed, maybe to try to help her take all this in, maybe just because she's Welsh. She's about to go off on more questioning, but Jack interrupts her to complain about how people still can't accept the truth of extraterrestrial life; apparently Doomsday and The Christmas Invasion are being written off as mass hallucinations caused by hallucinogenic drugs in the water supply. That's... incredibly ridiculous, but hey, I watched Buffy for years. You learn to live with this stuff. Speaking of, Jack and Gwen have an extremely Whedonesque conversation here:

Gwen: So, you catch aliens?
Jack: Yes.
Gwen: You catch aliens for a living.
Jack: Yes, we do.
Gwen: You're an alien catcher.
Jack: Yes, I am.
Gwen: Caught any good aliens?

The topic of conversation, as it so often does, turns to Captain Jack Harkness himself; Gwen tells him she did a search, and the only Captain Jack Harkness on record disappeared in 1941. Jack gets all cute with a "Well, that couldn't be me. ...Could it?" Gwen doesn't know what to say to this, so Jack fills up the impending awkward silence with some exposition; "We don't just catch aliens, we scavenge the stuff they leave behind, find ways to use it, arming the human race for the future. The 21st century is when it all changes." And, furthermore, Torchwood stays separate from the governement, because if this stuff fell into the wrong hands, it could be used for evil! Gwen's worried about how she can be sure that Torchwood aren't the wrong hands themselves, Jack tells her that all alien technology stays on the base, no one can take anything outside.

Cue, of course, a montage of Torchwood members at home, with alien technology they've taken off the base; Tosh has what appears to be a belt buckle for a Transformer, Owen has some kind of glowy perfume, Suzie has the Glove.

Gwen asks how the hell exactly Torchwood ended up in Cardiff; they're Torchwood 3, Torchwood 1 was the one in London, destroyed on Doomsday, Torchwood 2 is a strange man in an office in Glasgow. Oh, and there's the Rift, of course. Gwen tries to get more personal dirt on Jack; "Where are you from?", he just tells her "Oh, lots of places" which means nothing at all, of course. Gwen suggests that she could be Torchwood's liason with the police, Jack corrects her misconception; they weren't talking to John Tucker to solve the crime, they were testing the Glove. "We need murder victims, simple as that. The Glove only works on the recently deceased, and the more violent the trauma, the stronger the resurrection." That is some pretty excellent foreshadowing, really. Kudos. Gwen's a little angry that he doesn't care about how useful this could be to the police, Jack decides it's high time to bring up an old topic of conversation; drugs in the water supply. Like, say, the amnesia pills he slipped in her drink? "With a touch of denial, and a dash of retcon." Ha, retcon. Cute. When she wakes up in the morning, Gwen will have forgotten everything. Gwen, get youself some caffeine, stat! But man, Jack prepared for that too; there's sedative mixed in there too. So, everything up to here was practice. The test begins now.

We'll take a look at how she does in a second, but first, let's get back to the other Torchwood guys for some extremely cursory character development. Owen's at a bar, sees a girl who takes his fancy, offers to buy her a drink. She tells him she's good, thanks, and is reasonably clear with the message that she's not interested... until he sprays his alien perfume on himself, and suddenly she's all over him, with the making out and "You're coming home with me, you are. Right now!" So, Owen's cursory character development is that he's a date rapist, basically. I really do not like the way this is played for laughs.

Back with Gwen she's scored points early on by not giving up that easily; she dashes home and goes straight to her computer to start typing up the Cliff's notes version of her day. "Captain Jack Harkness in charge, commander? NB THIS IS TORCHWOOD 3" and so on.

At her house, Tosh runs Optimus Prime's belt buckle along the spine of her copy of A Tale Of Two Cities, and brings it over to her laptop, where it scans every page of the book onto the screen almost instantly. That seems like a device with extremely limited actual use.

In her kitchen, Suzie uses the Glove to bring a fly back to life, and stares in... fear? Wonder? A mix of the two? PERHAPS.

Gwen keyboard babbles some more, but she's having trouble keeping her eyes open, and she's starting to make typos.

In the street, the girl's boyfriend has caught up with her running off with Owen, and is rather angry, obviously. To resolve the situation, Owen uses his magic perfume on the boyfriend and makes out with him too. See, HoYay! That makes everything OK! Fuck off.

Back to Gwen's diary, "TORCHWOOD READ THISA!!! they mad eyou amnesia". She adds one final "TORCHWOOD REMEMBER IT CAPTAIN JACK" but then, over in Torchwood HQ, Ianto quite easily hacks into her system and deletes the whole semi-coherent thing. And Gwen gives into the sedative and falls asleep.

Next day (There's another!). Jack's standing on top of a huge builing that's shaped like the Mitsubishi logo. Who knows how he got up there, or what he's doing. But, you know, it looks cool. That's good enough for me.

Rhys brings Gwen a mug of tea where she's fallen asleep at her keyboard and asks if she was out drinking last night. Gwen blinks a few times and vaguely says "No... What time is it?" Rhys chastises her gently because she told him she was working last night. Gwen tells him she was working, he asks why she fell asleep there then, she confusedly tells him she was typing. Rhys asks who she was out with, "Diane?" And here comes the dash of retcon, Gwen shrugs "Must have been, yeah."

At work, the colleague she tasked with looking up Captain Jack, who may or may not be the aforementioned Diane, asks Gwen if she had any luck tracking him down. Gwen doesn't know what she's talking about, MaybeDiane rolls her eyes at her for wasting her time. And at this point I notice that there's only about ten minutes left in the episode and so far it's been pretty much entirely setup, and yet I don't have a problem with that. It's good setup.

In the office, Gwen sees a picture of the murder weapon the forensics guys have worked out and drawn up; it's a kind of shark tooth shaped blade with two little fins sticking out the side of it. Gwen looks as if she's seen it before, but she can't work out where. Probably because that's exactly what's happening.

Outside while her partner babbles on and on about something drowned out by the music, Gwen tries to work out where she's seen the knife before, but no dice.

At home, same thing with Rhys, only now she gets a flash of sparks flying, like, say, from someone welding something, perhaps.

In bed, she's again having trouble sleeping, and she sees a flash of the actual blade this time, so she goes downstairs to draw it on the back of an envelope. I have no clue how that is supposed to help anything, but anyway, in doing this, she notices that she's written "Remember" on a leaflet for the Big Shiny Building (AKA Wales Millenium Centre, apparently), because Ianto's hacking can't erase everything. This little backup plan earns her more points in the test, of course. Gwen stares at this and then decides to go pay a visit to the Big Shiny Wales Millenium Centre. 8 minutes to go! Here comes the payoff.

WMC. Someone's standing in the shadows. Gwen approaches catiously, the figure steps out. It's Suzie. She tells Gwen she was right that they ought to liase with the police, but she was the only one who bothered, then she pulls out the shark tooth blade. It's pretty kick-ass, really. Gwen's all 'oh crap' and starts "I'm arresting you for... how do I know you?" Suzie exposits a little that one specific image can throw off the amnesia, "if you're clever. He said you were good." She kind of looks on the verge of tears here, as she tells Gwen the blade is no good, "you'll put up a fight", so she roots around in her bag for something else, and absent-mindedly apologises when it takes her a while to find it, which is pretty funny, when you think about it. Gwen, trained police officer, lest we forget, just stands there gawping as Suzie pulls a gun on her. She frantically tells Suzie to put the gun down, as Suzie's ranting about how Gwen's the only one in public who could make the link. "Torchwood will find out by morning, but I'll be gone by then. What am I going to do? I love this job, I really do!" And once you take this job, you can't just go back to normal life. I'll turn to my man Jarvis on this one; We were brought up on the space race/Now you expect us to clen toilets/When you've seen how big the world is/How can you make do with this?. It's the Companion's lament. But Suzie doesn't get to go there; she went too far in, she forgot to be human. I get the feeling that's going to be something of a theme in this season. For Gwen and the slower viewers, Suzie lays it out in simple terms, but it's not so expositive as to really annoy. Using the glove to talk to the dead guy wasn't about talking to the dead guy, it was about using the glove, Gwen and Jack had that conversation earlier. But one step further than even Jack went, if you get better with the glove by using it more, and you need a fresh murder to use it, what do you do? And, speaking of Jack, he's been quietly flying up on his imperceptible lift while Suzie's been ranting. And she does rant a lot, it's well acted, I'm not complaining or anything, but man, does she go on.

Anyway, while the others are all "swanning about", she's been really working. "And that's why the [SEP field] isn't going to work on me!" she cries, and turns and shoots Jack straight in the forehead. Well, that's going to hurt in the morning. Gwen is pretty shocked, seeing as how her memory of it all is still extremely hazy, so she's just seen a guy she recognise but can't place appear out of nowhere and get killed. That's going to affect you. Suzie turns the gun on Gwen, tells her she's sorry, but she has to do this. Only Jack gets up again, bullet hole in his head healing up like he's a Texas cheerleader, and he tells Suzie to put down the gun. Suzie realises there's no getting away from it, so she puts the gun to her chin and shoots herself in the head. Gwen just does not know what the fuck. She cries, still rather in shock, and haltingly tells Captain Jack "I remember."

Torchwood Hub. Ianto locks the shark tooth blade and the Glove in a safe. Owen and Tosh wordlessly hand in their stolen goods. Jack zips up the body bag and slides Suzie into the wall, walks away through the lonely halls.

On top of the building, Gwen mentions that Jack didn't tell Owen and Tosh about his unbreakable cheerleader act. "You didn't tell them either. You followed my lead. Keep doing that, you might just get through this." So yeah, she's passed the test. "I can't die," Jack tells her. Gwen gives that a hilariously exhausted "OK." Jack is very much not joking. He angstily explains how he was killed, and then brought back to life, "And ever since then, I can't die. One day I'll find a doctor, the right sort of doctor ((I'm going to assume you don't need any help with that one)), and maybe he can explain it, but until then..." He tells Gwen it'd freak people out a little, so it's probably best to stay quiet about it, she pointedly says "It doesn't matter, you'll only wipe my memory again." Jack asks why he'd do that, Gwen's like "Why wouldn't you?" Jack tells her Torchwood has a job going spare, which sort of implies they wouldn't if Suzie was still around which... either he knew about her thing from the start, in which case, why did he not do something about it sooner, or he is kind of lying, because clearly he's been trying to bring Gwen in since the start of the episode. But anyway, she accepts the offer, and we zoom away to a big Cardiff aerial view, and a pterodactyl soars across the screen, because that's cool, I guess. All in all, a pretty excellent way to begin.