Wake up, little Suzie

Last week's episode of "Torchwood" was actually quite good. Heavens, don't I sound surprised?

The Torchwood team are called in by the police to investigate a series of murders in Cardiff. To aid their investigations, the team decide to use the "resurrection glove", a rather nifty gadget (first seen in "Everything Changes") which has the power to bring dead people back to life, at least temporarily, and so enables them to question the actual murder victims. Handy, that. (Geddit?) In an attempt to get closer to the real killer, Jack makes the decision to resurrect Suzie, the former team member who turned traitor in the first episode (boo! hiss!) and who also ended up very dead, for her sins. Was this really such a wise idea? As it eventually turns out ... no. It transpires that Suzie had cooked up an elaborate plan, before her "death", that will trick her former team members into bringing her back to life (a bit too elaborate to be true - just how did she plan all of it?) A sly madam nevertheless.

Indira Varma, who played the resurrected Suzie, was an excellent villain. Whilst manipulative and purely out for herself, you couldn't help feeling sorry for her, such was her desire to be given a second chance at life, and this made the character so interestingly flawed - she wasn't your average black and white "baddie", but actually rather tragic. The car/conversation scenes with her and Gwen, as they talk of the afterlife and "the darkness" Suzie experienced when she was dead, contained some good dialogue. However when we find out that Suzie has been feeding off Gwen's life force in order to keep alive, her scheming, selfish side quickly comes to the fore. Meanwhile, Jack and co, having cottoned on to Suzie's game, give pursuit, and there's palatable tension as we wonder if they will catch up with her and Gwen in time. The final show-down by the sea front was quite gripping and ominous too, as Suzie tells Jack that the something she saw moving in "the darkness" is now coming for him ...

Other comments: Thankfully there wasn't any Toad-face / Gwen jiggy-jiggy going on in this episode (although the perceptive Suzie realised they'd been sh*gging). I thought Gwen was a bit naive to believe Suzie so easily given her previous track record, but then she's a bit of a trusting sort. And the comment about the resurrection glove being part of a pair paved the way for more back-from-the-dead stories. It was also good to see Jasmin Bannerman, a decent actress, cast as the Detective Inspector (she played Jabe, the tree queen in the 2005 Dr Who story "The End of The World").

So whilst a bit weak on the plot side, this was an enjoyable character piece. But the fact that I found Suzie the most interesting of the bunch doesn't say much about the rest of them, does it?

(Image reproduced from time-and-space.co.uk)