Torchwood – The Monthly Adventures

#038. Iceberg ~ 10/10

◆ An Introduction

‘Fragments’ will forever be one of the most important episodes of the show because it gave each member an origin story, one that showed how utterly broken their lives were prior to joining Torchwood Three.

The show had always presented Owen as a habitual womaniser and a narcissistic genius. He spent the entire first series being the most unlikeable character of the team, but we saw a glimmer of something more when he fell in love with Diane.

But it was ‘Fragments’ that completely changed my perception of the character, when you realise how much he’d actually lost. His fiancée had been mistakenly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, but how could any medical professional have known that an alien parasite had attached itself to her brain? It killed her, and that broke Owen completely.

Eighteen months after her funeral, and an old university mate has made contact. There’s a patient she needs help with. One who is convinced that she is talking to her dead sister…

◆ Publisher’s Summary

Dr Owen Harper’s called to the hospital. There’s a ward full of remarkable coma patients and more are coming in. Each patient came in with a dead relative as their imaginary friend.

Has Owen really discovered a bridge between the living and the dead?

◆ Owen Harper

Following the death of his fiancée at the hands of an alien brain parasite, Owen was recruited into the ranks of Torchwood Three, but that trauma still remained. It became the basis of the womanising narcissist we saw on the show: a broken man trying to drown out the rest of the world with endless hookups. ‘Iceberg’ takes place eighteen months after said traumatic event, and Owen is clearly just throwing himself into the new job and trying to move away from his old life. The writing for our broken medic is absolutely fantastic. Quite the achievement, considering that this was Grace Knight’s Torchwood debut.

Burn Gorman has always been an incredible actor, but he really gives his all to the material here. He bounces nicely off of Maya Saroya too, making the long-standing friendship between Owen and Amira all the more believable.

There was a rumour after Owen left that he got head-hunted to work in research; cutting edge, maybe even secret. Amira pretty much got him through his cardio placement. He thinks there is nothing worse than a deserted hospital, as it feels like something out of 28 Days Later. Owen had to cut Amira off, because Katie died and he had to become the sort of person who couldn’t feel it. Upon discovering that Amira passed away in a cycling accident, only six months after he joined Torchwood, he is furious at the thing impersonating her.

◆ Story Recap

Eighteen months have passed since Owen was recruited into the ranks of Torchwood. His fiancée had perished due to an alien parasite living inside her brain. He practically cut all ties with his old life: he became a broken man, trying to drown out the world with endless hookups and one night stands. Then, one morning, he receives a phone call from one of his old university friends.

One of the coma patients at the hospital keeps waking up to have a full-blown conversation with her dead sister, and Dr Amira Hussein is no closer to finding a diagnosis.

Something is very wrong at this hospital. Owen hasn’t seen anybody else walking around, yet the staff car park is full to bursting. The other wards seem to be unusually quiet as well. Then there’s Amira: someone he has been friends with since university, and who appears to have regressed to the way she was when they first met…

◆ The Memory Cheats

Spores were beings that extracted the memories of an individual from two hosts, becoming a replica of a real person before embarking on their own lives. The hosts would lose their memories before falling comatose and, eventually, dying.

To this end, the Spores descended on the Queen Victoria Hospital, with one taking on the form of Dr Amira Hussein using the memories of Amira’s mother. To complete the process, she summoned Owen, who realised what was happening and used a mind-reading device to cut off his delta waves, stopping “Amira”.

Certainly an interesting concept for a villain, especially if they take on the image of someone deceased. The realisation that your friend is long since dead, and this mental parasite has assumed their identity. That’s a horrifying thought.

◆ Sound Design

Everybody appears to have vanished from the Queen Victoria Hospital, despite the staff car park being absolutely packed. This means that all is pretty quiet on the sound design front, aside from the bleeping of ECG monitors.

◆ Conclusion

“I was always my mother’s daughter, and now I’m yours too.”

A coma patient keeps waking up to have a full-blown conversation with her dead sister, and Dr Amira Hussein is no closer to finding a diagnosis. Owen arrives to help out his old university mate, but he soon realises that nearly everyone in the hospital is either dead or in a vegetative state. Just what is going on here?

The expectation is that Owen-centric stories will be incredibly graphic and morally grey, but Grace Knight offers us something different with her debut Torchwood script.

The writing for our broken medic is simply fantastic. This episode takes place only eighteen months into Owen’s Torchwood career, and he is still very much reeling from the death of his fiancée. Burn Gorman also delivers one of his finest performances on audio, and he has great on-air chemistry with Maya Saroya.

Featuring a mystery that beautifully unfolds as the story progresses, ‘Iceberg’ was genuinely quite phenomenal. I look forward to seeing Knight’s name on a future Torchwood release.