‘When this old world starts getting
me down
And people are just too much for me
to face
I climb way up to the top of the
stairs
And all my cares just drift right
into space
On the roof, it's peaceful as can be
And there the world below can't
bother me.’ -
James Taylor
It’s the
anniversary of your wedding, and to many it should be the happiest time of your
life, still in that honeymoon period, when everything is joyous and the bubble
hasn’t burst yet, and you’re not bogged down with kids or a heavy mortgage, or
redundancies or long hours at work keeping you apart. Instead, you’re up on a roof contemplating
whether to jump or not!
Owen Harper
is coming to terms with life as the living dead. No longer able to eat, sleep or drink, he
also can’t shave, or shag! There’s no
purpose to his life any more, and to cap it all, his own boss has given his medical
job to Dr. Martha Jones, making him somewhat redundant. What hurts even more is that, while Martha
takes not only his job but also has a say in the daily goings on in the Hub,
Owen has been demoted to Coffee Boy, a role that even Ianto is unhappy about.
It’s all
too much. Gone are the days when he
could use his sarcasm, wit and tough attitude when riding shotgun with Jack bringing
in the most unsavoury of characters, now any strenuous exercise, any tussle
with another, any punching, cutting, trip, could render him incapable of
mending. So when you’re faced with the
burdens of your life, what do you do? – you run down the jetty and you throw
yourself into the cold Cardiff
Bay
However,
you do have one thing going for you – being dead, or the living dead, you’re
the ideal candidate to break into a house with a high level of security, walk
past the heat sensor equipment without setting off the alarms and locate an
alien piece of technology that is on the verge of causing some serious damage
to a large chunk of Cardiff. But the
device is not what they expect and the pulse it radiates is not the threat to
Earth or even Cardiff
Yet where
there’s a high, there’s an incredible low.
You’ve been
a doctor for a good portion of your life, in hospitals to working at
Torchwood. You were able to save people,
it gave you a kick, a fantastic buzz to find cures, discover diseases and fix
what was broken, only now, an old man is dying, his monitor is flashing
critical, and all he needs is a breath of air into his lungs….that you don’t
have.
A Day in
the Death written by Joseph Lidster is a heart wrenching, emotion packed
episode, that has you caring for not only Owen, who we’ve loved throughout the
series, but also the poor woman Maggie, played by Christine Bottomley, who lost
her husband on her wedding day, in a car accident. You feel her torment going through day after
day without the man that she loved by her side.
You question how you would feel in that situation and you choke up.
You feel
for Owen because coming back from the dead has knocked him sideways. He no longer feels the way he used to. All the things he took for granted are now
snatched away from him. His morning
routine, the lathering up for a shave, for whiskers that don’t grow, coffee
that won’t be drunk, a fridge full of food that won’t be eaten. Every single moment of every single day for
the rest of his life is just like a repetitious pile of crap, so much so that
all he can do is run, run so hard that ideally his lungs should explode but
they don’t, because everyone thinks that Owen Harper is doing OK…but he’s not!
Resources
©BBC
Torchwood 2006
A Day in
the Death
James
Taylor lyrics – Up on the Roof
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