So, Torchwood, eh? The tormented older brother of the irrepressibly cheery (except, you know, when it’s not) Doctor Who. You should probably know that I watched the first episode of series one and decided there and then that I wouldn’t waste my time on the rest of the series – it was all too considered: right, we’ll have some sex here, a bit of violence there, and swearing. Lots of lovely swearing. You could almost here a little work placement girl asking ‘and what about the story… or the characters?’ Oh we’ll come to that later!

But it seemed they never really did. Having said all this, I did feel like I was missing out slightly, and so I took it up again this series. And, as I suspected, it wasn’t nearly so bad as I’d made it out to be in my own head. It’s terribly flawed, of course, but it’s still worth watching.

That doesn’t mean that I didn’t approach this particular episode with some trepidation, however. Why? Well remember that awful, awful Daleks in Manhatten two-parter? (Of course you do, its etched onto the brain of every Doctor Who fan) It was written by Helen Raynor and, guess what, so’s this. Oh dear.

Before we get into a critique, let’s do the plot…

The episode opens with clipped accents and characters called Gerald. Toto, I don’t think we’re in 21st century Wales anymore – nope, there’s the caption, we’re in First World War Wales, St Telio’s General Hospital to be exact. There have been sightings of ghosts in the hospital, but Gerald and the nurse look surprisingly unfazed when Tosh and a man called Tommy appear in front of them, telling them to “take” the Tommy who is lying in a hospital bed just a few metres away. The reason they’re unfazed, and the reason they know what “take” really means, is that Gerald is a member of Torchwood.

Cut to the present and we find that when Tommy was taken, he was cryogenically frozen, to be woken up every year – just to check he’s still working – until he’s needed to save the world. Because, it turns out, a slice of 1918 and a slice of some future time are bashing into each other. I don’t remember *exactly* what that means, if course, but it’s your run of the mill, end of the world stuff basically.

Tommy, I should point out, is remarkably chipper about the whole thing – “1968 was great – all the girls were wearing mini-skirts, it was like all my Christmases had come at once!” He’s also chipper because he and Tosh have a bond. They go out for a drink, flirt shamelessly but, it has to be said, rather touchingly, and as it becomes clear that that slice of future time is, surprise surprise, now, they spend the night together before Tommy has to go back to 1918 and thus ‘stitch’ time back together.

Which he does. With remarkably little hiccup or drama. He forgets to activate this key thing he has to do the ‘stitching’ (because, fair enough, back in 1918 he’s still suffering with shell-shock), but that’s resolved fairly quickly. In fact, *everything* was resolved fairly quickly, and that’s entirely the problem. Just as with Daleks In Manhatten, it’s not the dialogue that’s the problem, but the very story itself. There were no twists or turns of any kind, no surprises at all – we’d essentially seen the climax right at the very start. And while Tosh and Tommy’s relationship was rather sweet, their parting was still oddly unemotional.

There were some nice little touches, such as the ghosts that the nursing staff had seen turning out to be Gwen and Jack – two times bashing into each other, you see – and the fact that every time Tommy wakes up there seems to be another war on. But it just wasn’t quite enough to satisfy – the emotional heart of the story didn’t hit home nearly as hard as it could and should have done.