Adrift

This episode is so difficult for me.

So. First off. The majority of this episode is genuinely fantastic and very good. Andy is perpetually great, and we see that while they are certainly doing better, Gwen and Rhys's issues haven't just magically disappeared after the wedding.

The entire plot of the episode revolving around a genuinely good mystery with genuinely emotional stakes... And with a genuinely chilling answer to the mystery. By all means, this should be one of the best episodes in the season.

But god. The conclusion ruins it all for me.

Gwen goes home, accepting that Jack and the mother are right and she shouldn't have told her in the first place...?

I have immense empathy for the mother. Because for all intents and purposes, I AM her, in reverse. I myself, take care of my mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer's. It's painful, it's messy. But I love her.

The idea that the families are kept from knowing about their loved ones being alive, and the reason presented at the end, that it would be too difficult for the loved ones, is meant to be seen as reasonable... is unacceptable to me. I come away from this episode seeing Torchwood as the villains. Well-meaning, but villains nonetheless.

However much empathy I have for the mother, I have even more for her son and all the other victims. They aren't going to be allowed to see their loved ones, because Torchwood has decided their loved ones would be better off? That is not, and should not, be their decision. Not every family member is going to be like his mother.

I'm all for bleak storylines and sad endings. I know Torchwood loves those. I don't expect them to turn this ending into a hopeful and happy one. But to tell the audience that Gwen was wrong and Jack is right? I despise everything about it.

Gwen was right to begin with. The one case not going well doesn't change that. And the fact that the episode has her change her mind and accept Jack's way of doing it, and paints it as a necessary evil, is horrible to me.

If it were up to Torchwood, I would never see my mother again. For all the strife and pain that would avoid, I would never choose it in a million years. So yeah. Maybe my vendetta against this episode is personal. But it genuinely makes me sick.

This episode sets up a really intriguing mystery, with the disappearance of Jonah and others that is somehow linked to Jack.

It's an interesting episode of Torchwood in that it seems to borrow from the format of Doctor-lite episodes in Doctor Who such as Turn Left and Flatline. In this case, it's Jack-lite with Gwen taking centre stage.

I really like the inclusion of PC Andy in this; he works so well for this story in that he demonstrates the human side, and we see through his eyes the possibility that Gwen has been hardened by her work for Torchwood and lost her human touch. It allows Gwen to go on a journey to prove Andy wrong, and show that she cares about the everyday person just as much as she did when she joined Torchwood. But then that is also her downfall, because her

attempt to help ends tragically unappreciated by Jonah's Mum.

The story also does a really good job at constantly making us question Jack. Why he is so dead set against Gwen investigating, why he turns up at the place that the GPS Ianto gave her leads to. We think of him as a hero, but now we really start to wonder if he is the good guy we have all been led to believe.

Adrift is a highlight of Torchwood's second series for sure.

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.

Torchwood does Lovecraftian horror. Horrific. Pessimistic. Makes me want to never have kids. Poor Gwen, Jesus Christ. 10/10 the exemplary Torchwood story I'd show somebody if they asked me what Torchwood was like.

Chibnall is a fantastic writer when he does adult drama so why he went the CBBC route with his era of Doctor Who (not 42 or The Stolen Earth/Cold Blood - those were great) is beyond me. It could have been dark and nuanced. The dude clearly understands how to sculpt 3-dimensional characters and tense interpersonal conflict so why were Graham and Ryan so generic, flat and unmemorable? Something isn't adding up here. I've loved the exploration of the team's relationship dynamics with each other in all of his episodes (yes including Cyberwoman) it's just so... incongruent with what 13's era became