Hang the bunting! Dance a bit! The miraculous has happened, with Torchwood creating its own storyline. And it’s not that bad a one at that. Jack has been keeping a secret location in the Bristol channel for people that the rift hath – sorry, has – taken away and returned in a not-quite-mentally-all-there state. Gwen discovers this after one 15-year-old boy goes missing. Quite why the police liaison officer didn’t notice that the scores of people going AWOL might be connected to her big sci-fi secret would be a pertinent point, had we not previously established that Gwen isn’t the sharpest leek in the box.
While Gwen continues in her shouty rut we meet Nikki, whose son went missing at the start of the episode. She sets up a missing persons group (or rather a missing persons’ relatives group, otherwise she would have been rather light on numbers) and then it turns out that loads of people have left Cardiff.
Gwen, obviously unable to solve this mystery alone, gets a clue from Ianto. Actually, it wasn’t so much a clue so much as the precise solution to her problem in an envelope in GPS form to an island. Even then, the dozy mare needed a policeman to commandeer a boat. I don’t know why she needed Andy – perhaps just in case she felt like she needed to yell at someone.
Jack’s hidden facility threw up more questions than it could possibly solve. How are people returned by the rift from wherever they’ve been flung? What precisely was Jonah doing for forty years? How many have died from wherever they’ve gone?
More pertinent to this particular plot, why was Jack keeping this a secret to himself? There’s no particular reason to keep the rest of the institute out of the loop about the institution. They could even do visits. Owen could run a weekly line dancing class. Tosh could do magic tricks. Jack and Ianto could let inmates walk in on them having vigorous sex and then act all smug about it.
Now we’ve got the facility it could certainly prove a nice secondary location to the increasingly dull basement. I suspect it’ll only be a matter of time before one of the people that everyone assumes is somewhat unhinged turns out to be babbling a prophecy. Torchwood has had one original plot this season. We wouldn’t want anyone to strain themselves.
