Tony kills Suzie.
Everyone else seems to be doing it.
Suzie Costello is the
avatar of a whole different Torchwood to the one we know. She’s a valued member
of an earlier version, a version that would have made just as good TV, but
would have been different. We knew her only briefly in Everything Changes, and she
was revealed to have gone down a dark, addictive and ultimately murderous path.
While that might seem to make her a lost soul, an always-baddie, it’s worth
remembering that at some point in the first two series, Ianto’s revealed to be
hiding a half-converted Cyberman in the basement, both Gwen and Tosh get with the
alien-snogging, compromising their judgment, Jack’s revealed to be running a
Victorian asylum for Rift-victims, and Owen becomes technically-dead-but-still-walking-about-for-no-good-reason
King of the Weevils, so it’s not as though any one of the Torchwood team we
know is exactly in a position to throw particularly big stones.
This is the episode that
shows us Suzie Costello, who she was, who she is. And what we see is complex,
weak, flawed and still murderous, but also clever, ruthless and single-minded.
It also shows us at least a potential reason why Suzie, who ‘always kept
herself to herself,’ might have been all those things, and gone off the rails
of Torchwood’s moral but murky mission.
When an apparent maniac
starts murdering people and writing messages for Torchwood in their blood, the
team are called in, partly on the assumption that the killer has a bee in their
bonnet for our Hubdwellers, and partly, we suspect, because the local Force, in
the person of Detective Kathy Swanson (Yasmin Bannerman), wants to stick it to
the smug, strutting alien-wranglers who think they own the city.
What complicates matters
beyond the standard ‘serial killer with a grudge’ baseline of the episode is
the traces of retcon found at the scene – suddenly a serial killer could have been
driven to kill by the very fact that they’ve been retconned by Torchwood. Given
that Torchwood has retconned at least a couple of thousand people, the question
is raised: is everyone they’ve retconned about to go psycho killer on
Cardiff’s ass?
Honestly, as a conceit,
this is pretty much the high point of Paul Tomalin and Dan McCulloch’s script.
From there, we’re quickly back in the business of using the Resurrection
Gauntlet from Episode 1 to try and interrogate the dead victims about their
killer. When none of the team have a talent for using the Gauntlet except
new-girl Gwen (it works on an empathic principle, and it’s not too big a leap
to say that everyone else in Torchwood is far too wrapped up in their own
problems to extend that much empathy), we have ourselves the beginning of a
ball game, Gwen having replaced Suzie in the team. When it turns out that the
killer, the victims, and Suzie all had a point of connection, the final strand
of the set-up is delivered. Gwen uses the Gauntlet on Suzie herself, and Suzie
Costello comes back from the dead.
Except here’s the thing:
most of the people the Gauntlet resurrects have two minutes, maximum, back in
the world of the living. Suzie…just won’t stop. She just won’t die again, no
matter what the team throw at her.
This is how we get our
chance to explore the nature of Suzie Costello rather more than we did in her
first outing as a Torchwood agent. To be absolutely honest, Dead Suzie is
rather hard work for an audience used to Gwen’s combination of arse-kicking and
heart-breaking compassion. She’s more spiky, more sharp-edged, and as the
episode unfolds, we learn of a plot that goes back before her murderous stint
with the Resurrection Gauntlet, meaning Suzie was a bad lot before she took up
killing people. Putting the Hub into lockdown with a linguistic code, while
persuading Gwen to drive her out of Cardiff, at first seems like a reasonable
plan, but when we find out what her escape has all been about, it’s supposed to
add a degree of explanation to Suzie’s character – her sense of never having
been good enough. Because Suzie has two more murders to commit, one inevitable
by the very nature of her survival past the point of death, the Newtonian
principle of every action having an equal and opposite reaction elegantly
deployed to show us why she can’t now be killed no matter what the team do to
her, and the other purely personal. The personal one never goes into detail,
never shows us exactly what demons lurk in Suzie Costello’s past, but that
there are demons we feel certain, because the personal murder is in a
whole different league to all her other killings. Her new knowledge of the
darkness that lies on the other side of death, and the thing that’s moving in
the darkness, adds both piquancy to her final murder and desperation to her
determination to stay alive now she’s returned to the human world. Certainly,
Indira Varma plays Suzie’s desperation convincingly – if you knew for certain
what was waiting for you when you died, and that it wasn’t the ‘nursery school’
version of an afterlife that Gwen espouses, all bright light and loved ones,
but simply darkness and the thing that moves within it, then simply knowing
‘the right thing to do’ would never be enough to make you give up the light of
a human existence. But as a plot, it’s absolutely barking mad – the lengths Suzie
goes to simply to dose and program the killer that gets Torchwood’s attention,
months after she has killed herself, and the idea that she was thinking that
far ahead and in that deranged a manner for the two years before she started
Gauntletting people, is absurd if you subject it to any of the realistic
analysis to which Torchwood normally stands up. And once you realise that, the
premise of the episode more or less collapses, and it sits there being more or
less what it is – an excuse to see more of Suzie Costello, and to show us the
very important differences between Suzie and Gwen, with Gwen coming out very
much on top as far as the viewer is concerned.
So as episodes go, it
dissolves into senselessness, and the underpinnings of its premise are lain
bare to all and sundry, but if you give it a pass on that fact, They Keep
Killing Suzie still delivers hooks, creeping depth of characterisation and some
highly effective threat for Gwen, inasmuch as she becomes a walking
illustration of the idea that ‘no good deed goes unpunished.’ It’s her
kindness, her empathy with Suzie that first connects the two, and it’s that
connection that allows Suzie to play her, very nearly to the point of death. Suzie
comes out of this episode much darker than she was when she was simply
murdering people out of a drive to use the Gauntlet and unlock its mysteries.
Here, she’s a character who – unknown to us when we first meet her – was
planning murders-by-proxy long in advance of her obsession with the Gauntlet
taking hold, and having been to the only afterlife of which she’s aware, comes
back more ruthless than ever, willing to send both someone who wronged her, and
the innocent that is Gwen, into the darkness in order to escape it herself.
While not the most
technically accomplished episode of Torchwood ever filmed, They Keep Killing Suzie
shows the nature of the job of being Torchwood very well – everyone too wound
up in themselves to have ever really asked Suzie about her life and her need to
talk; over-reliance on retcon to solve the inconvenient problems involved in
the general public seeing what they do; the belief that things are dealt with,
only to have them come back and bite them; and most specifically, the arrogance
of a Torchwood that thinks it’s untouchable – Suzie was one of them, and she
turned against them, so she had to be dealt with, but apart from her, this team
has been dealing with aliens and Rift activity for some years, and there’s that
sense of swagger about them that Detective Swanson mentions. At the very end of
her second life, Suzie warns Jack that that’s about to change – that
something’s moving in the dark, coming to get them. Coming to get him
in particular.
And when it arrives, Torchwood
and the world will never be the same again.
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