I hate to go against the grain here, but this is not an episode I've ever really enjoyed. It just sets up this possibility of Jack being up to no good without any intention of following through.

There's some decent work with Gwen's character here and I like how this boils down to people being victims of the Rift. On the one hand, I do really appreciate the time taken to show the real consequences of the Cardiff Rift, which is otherwise just a convenient means to justify weird stuff happening all the time to Torchwood. On the other hand, I feel like this episode just suffers a bit from execution. I don't really care for the production and lighting of Adrift. Everything is so dark and moody it doesn't really position us nicely for the big heavy hitters of Fragments and Exit Wounds as well as I feel it should have. Mainly - it doesn't feel like Tosh or Owen have much to do here, and now might have been a good time for their characters to shine a bit knowing what was around the corner. Or maybe it was better to lull us into a sense of normalcy just before things hit the fan. I don't know, I'm not an expert, but I do know that I found this story kind of bummed me out and basically reached the threshold of my patience when it came to this series. If it weren't for Fragments and Exit Wounds, I could very well have given up on the series on first watch, and it is a bit of a miracle I hadn't earlier.

Lastly, I do feel as though this is another example of Torchwood's bad habits - trying to be mature, dark, and edgy, but not quite having the sense of quality in the writing to back it up. In a lot of ways it feels like Chibnall just wasn't the person for this job, in my opinion, but episodes like this and the two that would follow do show it was possible for him to at least push the boundaries of Who a bit, so I will give him credit for that, at least.