Before I start, I would
like to thank Gary Russell for writing the excellent 'Torchwood: The
Encyclopaedia’ as this was my reference bible during the writing of this
article. And also for some little guidance from the man himself along with a
fellow fan ThetaSigmaLady on Twitter with regards to one of the gadgets I speak
of.
Introduction
Over the coming issues,
we shall be looking at the various alien gadgets and gizmos seen throughout the
four series of Torchwood that were used by the team and other characters in
each of the episodes.
We will look at
everything from Toshiko’s book scanner, to the contact lenses used both in
Children of Earth and Miracle Day. We'll look at them in as much detail as we
can manage and even look, where possible, at our own technologies that maybe
similar to those seen in Torchwood.
So for issue 02 we shall
start at the beginning. Episode 01 “Everything Changes.” And the very first
gadget is right at the start of the show.
The Resurrection
Gauntlet
The first thing we
notice about the gauntlet is that it looks like a piece of a knight’s armour
with its jointed fingers, held together with rivets and made for the right
hand. The metal looks to be nothing more special than the aforementioned
knight’s armour. But that’s where the similarities between the two end.
The gauntlet was thought
to have fallen through the rift around 1967 and into Cardiff Bay where it lay
at the bottom until it was dredged almost 40 years later by Torchwood Three and
at the time no one at Torchwood knew what it did. So Captain Jack Harkness had his weapons
expert and second in command, Suzie Costello (Indira Varma), do research and
experiments with the gauntlet to try and find out what exactly it did.
She discovered that this
piece of alien tech was able to bring back the recently deceased for a very
short time; the return to life really was very brief, only around 2 minutes,
and depended on both the experience and the empathy of the user. Suzie also
found that it was much more effective on recently deceased victims of violent
trauma. For the user to successfully use the gauntlet it seemed they needed a
certain amount of empathy and so not everyone was able to use it. Only Suzie
and Gwen seemed to be in tune with the gauntlet and manage to use it, everyone
else had tried and failed. We also see that it’s not just humans it works on,
as we do see Suzie bring a fly back to life and apparently she also did this
with goldfish.
Suzie became obsessed by
the gauntlet and wanted to see how far she could push it and if consistent
usage would improve the time. But she needed victims and there were not enough
forthcoming so she started killing. John Tucker (Rhys Swinburn), who we see at
the start of the episode, was her final victim. To do this she used another
item that was, apparently, found with the first gauntlet and named ‘Life Knife’
by Ianto Jones. This was an ornate and complex blade, with wing like blades
fixed to the side of the main part of the knife and was approximately 18 inches
long, from the top of the handle to the tip of the blade. (We will look at this
more closer when we look at the gadgets used in ‘They Keep Killing Suzie.’)
At the end of this
episode Suzie is found out and takes her own life in front of Jack, whom she’d
just shot in the head moments before, (which he’d recovered from), and PC Gwen
Cooper.
The first and right-hand
gauntlet could only be used by Suzie and Gwen, but when the left- hand gauntlet
was discovered by Jack in “Dead Man Walking” series 2, and retrieved from St
Mary’s church, after Jack had spoken to a mysterious girl who read Tarot and
informed Jack of the second gauntlets location. He was able to use it to bring
back Owen, who’d been killed by Aaron Copley (Alan Dale) at the Pharm. And once
again, Owen stayed alive, though more like an animation of himself than really
alive - Owen could speak and to all intents and purposes he was Owen, but he
wasn’t breathing and had no heartbeat. And worse still, he couldn’t heal. A
broken bone stayed a broken bone. Owen also became a conduit for a death-like
being, who used Owen to access our world in order to take souls and to bring
itself permanently back, just as it had back in 1479 through a child called
Faith. In the end, like Faith, it was Owen who destroyed Death when it tried to
feed off him, as it's 13th victim, but Owen had no life for Death to use.
Here’s something to
ponder on before we leave the Resurrection Gauntlet behind. Jack couldn’t use
the first, but he could the second and it was this gauntlets power that Death
used to come back from the darkness. Was it because of Jack that it was able to
create this easy root back? Jack, after all, is the man that doesn’t stay dead.
He knows what’s beyond life. And because the first gauntlet seemed different
from the second, this may account for why Jack couldn’t use it. But then again,
it was a priest who used it, back in 1479, to bring back Faith...who knows?
One of the other major
differences between the two gauntlets is this one doesn't create a permanent
symbiotic link between user and victim. That's not to say it didn't work in a
similar way to the first, using some of the users life to initially resurrect
the victim; something Jack has in abundance.
What Do We Have On
Earth?
When I try to think of
something that returns someone from the dead, the nearest I can get is a
defibrillator that is used by doctors and paramedics. Though in reality, and
unlike in TV and movies, it is not used to re-start the heart when it ‘flat
lines.’ When that happens CPR has to be
used in order to get the heart going again, along with other things such as drugs
and direct heart massage.
The reality is that a
defibrillator is used when a heart fibrillates, meaning it’s out of it’s normal
rhythm. The electrical jolt of the defibrillator knocks it back into rhythm.
The Cologne
This episode is the only
time we see this alien gizmo. This spray
consists of an alien pheromone that makes the user instantly attractive to
anyone close by. To look at it looks no different to a bottle of spray perfume.
But when sprayed, the sprayed mist sparkles with lights, which does make us
wonder if it maybe is huon based. As I said the user will attract ANYONE. So if
they are male and straight, they are just as likely to attract another male, as
a woman. And they may well be straight too. It seems to cut away all boundaries
of sexuality.
In “Everything Changes”
we see Owen use it when he goes out for the night looking for a date. He chats
up a woman at the bar, without success. So he resorts to the spray, at which
point she is instantly attracted to him and all she wants to have sex with
Owen. But it backfires because she has a boyfriend. To save himself from a
beating Owen sprays himself again and now the boyfriend is also instantly
attracted to Owen and thinking the same things as his girlfriend. After a quick
snog from the guy Owen makes a hasty retreat.
But how does it work?
Maybe it some how scans the person you are standing near and reproduces the
pheromone it now knows instantly attracts that person and so changes the users
own pheromones to match it.
What Do We Have On Earth?
If there was any kind of
earth equivalent it would have to be something like the Lynx deodorant ads
where the spray is so amazing it will draw any woman from her partner to the
one who is wearing the Lynx. But that’s all fantasy and good advertising.
Reader
We see Toshiko use this
in a cut scene that is interspersed with Jack telling Gwen about Torchwood. We
see Tosh take the Reader to her book shelf and hold it against the spine of A
Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. She then takes the scanner and holds it
against the edge of the monitor of her computer, not the CPU as we would
expect. There the Reader downloads the book, seemingly, directly to the monitor
and the pages of the book unfurl before Tosh's, and our, very eyes.
So now I am finding
myself wondering how it worked. Getting my Toshiko hat on here. Well we're
never going to truly know the answer, but we can muse over it anyway. Maybe one
way is through sonic waves that bounce back different signals to the device
depending on what it hits. So blank paper would give off a different signal to
that of lettering. Or maybe a kind of reflective light that penetrates the
paper and the light reflected back is again different depending what it
encounters.
I shall leave you all to
surmise how you think it may work.
And finally, the eagle
eyed Woodies amongst you will, as series one progressed, have noticed something
and I must confess that until I was reminded, I had forgotten a slight detail
about this Reader scanner. It, or what LOOKS like the Reader, makes an appearance in episode 04,
"Cyberwoman" where you see Tosh with a Lockbreaker that looks
uncannily like the Reader in episode 01. The reason being is that it is
thought, by Torchwood, that they share the same alien origins..,OR the props department loved their work so much they used it again
and just hoped we wouldn't notice or we'd think the previous explanation I
gave.
What Do We Have On
Earth?
The closest technology
we have to such a thing is more of a combination of two different technologies.
The scanner, either flatbed or hand scanner. And the Kindle, which is a
computerised book reading device. As you know, you buy and download a book and
read it on a small flat screen device. You can also download software that does
the same thing for your phone, PC, and tablet. But, as of yet, we don’t have a
device that can be held to the outside of a book, scans it and transfers to
your computer……yet!
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