Today's recording is the next episode of Torchwood - Greeks Bearing Gifts which I didn't keep (or possibly even record) from its Sunday BBC Three premiere.
It starts, unusually, with a flashback to Cardiff 1812. A young woman called Mary is leading an army officer into the woods, and I bet they're not picking mushrooms. She's played by Daniela Denby-Ashe off of My Family. I wondered if the man might be Captain Jack, but no. She makes a joke about her name - "Mary, like the virgin" and he slaps her across the face twice. She runs away into the woods. She sees a bright light in the distance and runs towards it. The man follows, sees the light, but the light disappears. He finds Mary just standing there. He draws his gun asks her "Do Whores have prayers?" and she smiles, then he shoots her.
Cut to today. The Torchwood team arrive on a large building site, where something is taped off by the police. As they enter a tent, the camera pans to find a woman watching them who bears a striking resemblance to Mary.
In the tent there's a dead body. Owen reckons it's a woman's body, shot in the chest. Toshiko estimates by the depth she must have died around 196 years ago. Owen and Gwen are still flirting, and Tosh is getting upset about that.
Tosh goes to a bar, that famously welcoming place for lonely people who are a bit introverted. But she's in luck as she's greeted by none other than Mary, who first pretends she's trying to avoid a man hitting on her, but fairly soon admits she knows who Tosh is, and also all about Torchwood. She says she's part of a community of scavengers and collectors, who look out for alien artefacts. She also smokes, which threw me, so I checked, and smoking wasn't actually banned in public places until July 2007. Still, I wonder if the smoking isn't a way of villain-coding her, like Buffy used to do.
Mary gives Tosh a pendant, and as soon as she puts it on, she can hear the thoughts of everyone in the bar. And nobody has happy thoughts. My wife wondered why nobody ever just has music running through their heads (well she is a musician) but it's a good point.
She wears the pendant when she returns to work, and so hears all the unsavoury thoughts of her coworkers. Or just upsetting when it comes to Ianto. "There isn't an inch of me that doesn't hurt."
She doesn't tell her colleagues about the pendant, and heads home where Mary is waiting for her. It doesn't take long for them to be smooching, but since Mary is the first person to pay any real positive attention to her this whole series, I'm not surprised.
Mary encourages Tosh to take the pendant out into the city and listen to people. At last we get something that's not depressing as this chap thinks "Ah, Mr Bond, I've been expecting you."
But, just like in the Buffy episode where she can hear thoughts, Tosh hears someone planning to kill some people. She follows him, and luckily he leaves his front door open when he goes in and brings out his shotgun. Even luckier, he had a golf club lying around that Tosh could use to knock him out. Although she's lucky she didn't kill him.
Mary asks Tosh about the piece of hardware they took from the dig site where the body was found. She goes back to the Hub, and Jack asks her about her recent stint as a hero, stopping the man killing his family. Is it OK if I compliment John Barrowman on his acting, because he's really good in this role, mostly through his effortless charm. Tosh tries to find out about the device, but Jack isn't saying anything, and the pendant doesn't work on him.
Tosh tells Mary she's going to give the pendant to the team, and Mary reveals why she shouldn't. She's an alien. She tells Tosh about how regimented her planet was. "My world was savage. Enforced worship in temples the size of cities, execution squads roaming the streets. Dissent of any kind meant death... or transportation, to what they'd call a feral outpost." The machine is a transporter and she needs it to get back home.
Meanwhile Owen has found that the dead body didn't die of a gunshot wound, but by having its heart ripped out. He looks for similar attacks, and finds a whole string of such attacks going back years.
Mary persuades Tosh to let her into the hub to get the transporter. But Jack was expecting them. Tosh tells him that Mary was a political prisoner, exiled to Earth. Jack tells her that's half right - but the transporter brought two people, the prisoner and the guard. Mary killed the guard, then possessed the Mary we saw in the opening, then when the soldier shot her, she pulled his heart out to feed on it, and that's what she's been doing ever since.
Mary grabs Tosh, and demands the transporter.
Jack gives her the transporter, but he's reprogrammed it, and it transports her into the heart of the sun.
"It's funny. Such a small thing. It could be the most powerful piece of technology we've ever found. It could tear down governments, wipe out armies. What do we do with it?" "Your call." Tosh crushes the pendant under her heel.
Media Centre Description: Science fiction and crime drama series dealing with the machinations and activities of the fictional Torchwood Institute in Cardiff. Toshiko is given an alien pendant which enables her to hear other people's thoughts.
Recorded from BBC TWO on Wednesday 29th November 2006 21:00
BBC Genome: BBC TWO Wednesday 29th November 2006 21:00
Now, I haven't bothered mentioning the many multiple copies I seem to have of some recordings, as it's usually just my own casual digital hoarding, but there's a slightly odd thing I noticed about the two recordings I've got of this episode. One of them is marked as "edit" in the filename, the other isn't, and yet the "edit" version is 19 seconds longer than the one that isn't. The "edit" actually has the full BBC Two ident and intro, which is what takes up the time. It's this one.
But the other file, which doesn't have the full intro, has two or three frames extra at the end. This is all it has, just enough to recognise a very young Gareth Malone about to play a note for a schoolchild. I'm going to assume this was his first TV appearance.
I'm not sure any of this qualifies as "interesting" but I thought it was a little unusual.
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