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WATCH ALONG | TORCHWOOD | 2x7 | Dead Man Walking

🕑 Added 2022-11-17 15:00:09 +0000 UTC
WATCH ALONG | TORCHWOOD | 2x7 | Dead Man Walking

Comments

Steven Cooper

This episode has never worked for me; not only is the plotting hopelessly incoherent (as you point out), but tonally it's all over the place. The weird young girl at the beginning pretty much *has* to be the "Faith" mentioned later, the one who died and was brought back to life -- otherwise that whole opening section means nothing at all and is totally unconnected with the rest of the story. But the episode never bothers to actually tell us so. And the script is full of stuff like that -- Martha's aging is an irrelevant bit of jeopardy which gets reversed at the end with absolutely no consequences for the character. It's just a "cool" sci-fi plot element being thrown in for its own sake, with no connection to the main story. It took a couple of viewings for me to catch it, but when Owen is possessed, the line he repeatedly growls is "Melenkurion abatha! Duroc minas mill khabaal!" Anyone who's read Stephen Donaldson's "Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" fantasy novels will immediately recognise this phrase. I suppose the intention was just some sort of in-joke (like Gwen's "I have a bad feeling about this"), and it's hardly going to bother the vast majority of viewers. But to those who've read Donaldson it's somewhat crass and distracting, since in the original it's an important, powerful invocation of law used by the good guys, and its misuse here for no good reason is another mark against the episode for me.


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