‘Torchwood: Miracle Day’ Recap (Episode 9): The Bland Canyon

This week, Torchwood jumps ahead to explore how the world is coping with the Miracle after two more months have passed. Oh, wait. That’s not what happens? Right, we’re just told briefly about it but shown none of it. A voice on the radio (unless I’m mistaken, that’s creator/showrunner Russell T. Davies, isn’t it?) fills us in that there’s a recession. We know that more category ones are bing burned. But that’s all pushed to the sidelines, which is bizarre for this show. Now that things are getting really bad, this is when we stop looking at the global consequences of the miracle and begin to focus on the characters and the plot? And on the plot side of things, we’re still subjected to endless expository monologues.

These days Gwen’s back in Cardiff with Rhys. When she’s not breaking into drug stores to steal medication for her “category one” father, who lies hidden in her basement, she spends time with her daughter Anwen. She knows the police are having her house watched, and they pop in from time to time to search the place for her father and dole out threats. Meanwhile, Jack and Esther are in Scotland, where Esther tends to Jack’s gunshot wound. Rex is back with the CIA, trying to figure out what’s going on with these mysterious Families and being constantly thwarted by their mole in the CIA. Rex even pulls off some impressive nonsense about a pulp fiction author from the twenties, which leads to a murder weapon that might have DNA evidence linked to the Families, but to no avail.

Jilly, for her part, has kept busy doing unrewarding grunt work for the Families, massaging the translations of some foreign news broadcasts to keep incriminating evidence out of sight. Finally gets her big break, and she’s on her way to work for the Families in Shanghai, where she’ll finally see the mysterious “Blessing.” But she’s being watched by Oswald Danes, who notices she’s gone off the grid and all record of her existence has been erased. He brings this information to Gwen and Rhys in return for an audience with Jack. Gwen smacks him in the face with kitchenware, but Jack and Esther are called in nonetheless. Dring their pow-wow, Oswald lets them know about Jilly’s translation work, and this leads them to uncover the connection between the Blessing and Shanghai. Which we, the audience, already knew about. And it took us this long to get there.

But the big revelation is that Jilly was also covering up a connection between the Blessing and Buenos Aires. And while Rhys just happens to be playing with an inflatable globe for no readily apparent reason, he notices that Buenos Aires and Singapore are on exact opposite sides of the Earth. But then, at that exact moment the cops come back and use their fancy new thermal imaging smartphone app to uncover Gwen’s father and take him away. Do they not need special hardware for that? Anyway, now Gwen’s really upset and determined (was she not already?) and Rhys condescendingly points out the geographical oddity. There’s a connection running through the center of the earth between Shanghai and Buenos Aires; a circle with a line through it–the greek letter phi–Phicorp. Makes as much sense as anything else. So the team splits up, with Gwen, Jack and Oswald going to Shanghai and Oswald and Esther headed to Buenos Aires.

In Shanghai, Jilly has an awesomely awkward job interview, and then gets taken by a representative of the Families to see the Blessing. We finally get a look at the Blessing and what is it? Well, it’s a hole. A great big canyon. A crack in the world. I’ll bet it goes all the way through to Buenos Aires. Jilly is rapturously happy to see this hole for some reason. Meanwhile, as Jack, Gwen and Oswald arrive, Jacks’ gunshot wound opens and begins bleeding again. But the blood is drawn, as though magnetically, toward something… The Blessing!

I think the problem I have with this episode has less to do with any of the episode’s actual content and more to do with its placement. This simply doesn’t feel like the ninth episode of a ten-episode series. By this point in the game our team should know exactly what they’re up against. There should be villains with clear motivations that our heroes can confront. Instead, the closest thing we have to a villain, Oswald Danes, has joined the side of the heroes to confront the still nebulous “Blessing.” We don’t really know what that Blessing is, only where it’s located and what form it takes. It’s a hole in the world. Well, why wouldn’t it be? Do we really know more now than we did before? We don’t know where it came from, how long it’s been there, or what it wants (or if it’s even capable of “wanting” anything). We don’t know why or how it’s prevented everyone on earth from dying, or what kind of control it exerts over people, or what connection it has to these Families.

I’ve been pretty forgiving of Torchwood: Miracle Day up to this point, but the fact that the wheel-spinning has gone on this long is just starting to frustrate me. When we learned of Angelo’s involvement two weeks ago, it finally felt like the plot was going somewhere, but last week the only place it really led was to long scenes of exposition which essentially demonstrated that Angelo was never really involved to begin with, and was just another in a long series of tiny steps forward. The time for tiny steps has passed and we should be seeing huge leaps by now. This kind of storytelling might have worked fine in a five episode format like “Children of Earth,” but stretched across the ten episodes of “Miracle Day” it grows wearying.

Only in the last third of the episode do we see the protagonists taking proactive steps to address the problem, after watching eight weeks of information gathering and reacting to setbacks. It might be that next week the finale will give us something with a bit more dramatic substance and less expository wheel-spinning, in which case I’ll be pretty glad to see the story go somewhere. But I’m not sure whether it will make me feel much better about the long, circuitous route we took to get there.