Stupid Things About Torchwood: Week 9

Really? It's almost over? Oh, thank god.

Okay, so, stupid things this week...

What's that? Two months have passed? Isn't it a little late in the show for this kind of narrative device? You know, it's only here, nine weeks in, that it becomes clear that this show has been lacking a ticking clock for its entire running time. Given the nature of the threat, it always seemed like the team had all the time in the world to deal with it. Jumping forward sixty days just drives that point home.


Redhead's just living under her own name, doing a job in the city? Shouldn't she be arrested for murdering that CIA agent that time? Why did that happen again?

Gwen is now hiding her father in the basement, Anne Frank-style.

If you want to keep the government stormtroopers, who, despite the fact that the world's governments are on the brink of collapse (why is that, exactly?), have the time and resources to hunt down every single loose corpse, from finding your dead father, why are you keeping him in the basement of his actual home? When literally anywhere else on the planet would be a better hiding place?

Hold on, Rhys broke the dad out of a government facility (there were witnesses!) and Gwen went around the camp, telling people her name before committing an act of terrorism against the country. Why are they just allowed to live in their home, unmolested? Maybe people thought the camps were improper - that doesn't give her a legal right to blow them (and probably some people) up.

So 'The Blessing' shows you a thing, and then maybe you die. I suppose that's why the Chinese spy killed himself. Here's the thing about that, though - turns out the Blessing is three hundred feet underground, and the only way to get there is through an elevator we have to assume is guarded 24 hours a day.

How did he see it?

Try to imagine an episode of 24 in which one of their agents was murdered because their cover was compromised - not hard, because that happened a lot. Okay, now imagine that the members of the CTU office weren't particularly concerned about the dead agent, and took absolutely no steps over the next two months to try and find the mole who was endangering their operations. You've just imagined the CIA, as depicted in Torchwood: Miracle Day.

Rex is so concerned about the mole that he travels to Buenos Aires under an assumed name. But then, because he needed to get a super-secret weapon down there, he has to go to the embassy to sign for it, since it was sent in a diplomatic pouch. He's trusting, of course, that moles won't be keeping an eye on worldwide mentions of his name. Because he's an idiot.

Say, what was the secret weapon that was so hard to move?

A bunch of Jack's blood. Wait, if he was just moving blood, couldn't he have been traveling undercover as a medical research courier, thus offering an explanation for it? It's not like blood is a controlled substance the way uranium is.

Also, how did he get all of Jack's blood? Esther had been drawing it from him (for no reason) over the course of his convalescence in the UK. Here it is in a fridge in Scotland.

How did Rex (who was 5000 miles away) get it? Can this show literally not keep track of its continuity from scene to scene?

Finally, Bill Pullman shows up in Cardiff. And no one murders him. Despite Rhys offering to murder him. They act like it's a literal impossibility that anyone murder him.

Why? Do you have any idea how many people these team members have killed? Spoiler alert: It's a lot. So why not kill Bill Pullman? Literally no reason for this is offered.

Oh, and the blood? Turns out it's magnetically attracted to the the Blessing. Which is all well and good, but they had no way of knowing that Jack's blood was important, and no reason to bring it with them. The characters did it because the writers needed them to have the blood in South America. Which is essentially the definition of bad writing.