Tony picks apart a meeting of two favourites.
Hoorah, hooray, Martha
Jones returns to the world of Torchwood!
That’s the capsule review
out of the way. Now let’s go a little deeper.
Martha Jones –
London-raised medical student, universal time traveller, one-time lovesick
puppy and rebound reject, since then getting her life well and truly back on
track, first with assignments at Torchwood and then with UNIT – has always
needed a bit of explanation in terms of her relationship with Gwen Cooper,
Valleys copper turned gun-toting world defender and one of Torchwood’s finest.
On the surface, it feels like they’d have little in common, but on screen, they
developed an interesting chemistry, a friendship born of the experience of
modern women doing things that, even a generation ago, would have raised the eyebrows
of a disapproving patriarchy, saving the world themselves, rather than being
saved. Using their brains and their nous (and in Gwen’s case, free from the
pacifist expectations of the Doctor, occasionally a big world-buggering gun) to
get by in different organizations with different cultures and ways of doing
things.
Those differences are
crucial in Torchwood – Dissected. In fact they’re our starting point for
the drama. At the end of a very long day of bodies and post-mortems, with her
surprise leaving party being planned for half an hour or so from now, Martha
Jones opens the door to a UNIT base and finds Gwen Cooper of Torchwood on her
doorstep, with a body in the back of her car.
Never let it be said that
Valleys girls ever turn up empty handed to a party.
Gwen has a corpse that
doesn’t feel right, somehow, and she needs Martha to give it the
once-over before she can let it lie. As you’d suspect of Gwen and Torchwood,
that’s mostly true and partly a blatant falsehood. As you’d expect of Martha,
she knows as much and lulls Gwen into a false sense of security.
The relationship between
the two is initially quite spiky and frosty, and it only really thaws out once
the two have faced a particular peril together. Much of the episode
re-introduces us to the two and how they work together, but adds a new
dimension of Martha’s dissatisfaction with the life of a UNIT operative,
schlepping around the world, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, but yet
inherently fairly scornful of the occasional
shoot-first-reanimate-the-corpse-ask-questions-later style of Torchwood. Even
in this release, Gwen has a scanner the use of which Martha has to explain to
her, because Gwen has just grabbed it and gone without performing the necessary
calibrations.
In particular in this episode,
they face the consequences of a dead body that seems decidedly eager to please.
While not being entirely as grim as that sounds, it is at least 90%
as grim as it sounds, and if you’re not a fan of mouths full of maggots…well,
consider this your trigger warning before you go in, cos yaaaargh!
While the main thread of
the story is a kind of Mr and Mrs Smith style dance of who trusts whom first,
why and how, especially when you have a body that may not be a body and the
words ‘chameleon tech’ in your ear from early on, there’s a point where the
two, for all their differences of approach and intention, come back together
after quite a while, seeming slights explained, seeming manipulations overcome,
and you begin to see how cool the world of Jones and Cooper could be – imagine
these two on the run together, or setting up a private world-saving agency with
the best of Torchwood’s instincts and the best of UNIT’s methods working in
harmony, and something deep in your brain screams ‘Shut up and take my money!
No, no, all of it! Take it now!’
We may be a little way
from quite that dream scenario, but by the end of this story, Martha’s future,
which seemed unfocused at the start as she prepared to leave UNIT, has many new
opportunities, and some of those certainly include more work alongside Gwen or
other Torchwood members. Her future might not be full-on Torchwood-based yet –
Martha actually has more of an above-board core in her way of operating than
perhaps would fit with the day-to-day, job-done-at-all-costs ethos of Jack
Harkness’ Torchwood. This is the woman who toppled the victorious Master not
with a clever gun, after all, but with an inspiring story, a vision of hope, of
brightness, of salvation based on positive energy, rather than with a bullet to
the head. First, do no harm, the Hippocratic oath of healers is keen to remind
her, somewhat in conflict with the Torchwood way. But through the battles of
this story, both with Gwen and with the body that may or may not be a body
(though if we’re honest, the idea of it being just a body never really
flies. This is Torchwood, after all), Martha gains a degree of new perspective
on herself, on the world, on the threats that challenge it and on the ways by
which they can be fought. There’s an opportunity here for Martha to discover or
rediscover herself for a new stage in her development. Just as travelling with
the Doctor initially opened her eyes to a universe of possibilities and showed
her she was second best to nobody, saving the world in her own signature style,
so Dissected, while a much tighter, inherently smaller voyage of
discovery, sets Martha’s uncertain, somewhat disillusioned feet at a new
crossroads. We all know where we hope she chooses to go from here, but a
straight jump to full-on Torchwood might not only be tricky in terms of that
tattered flag we call canon, but also might not be the right move for Martha –
at least not yet. If it happens to take a fairly long run of one-off releases
to pull Martha more and more into the Torchwood orbit…it’s probably fair to say
that Torchwood fans everywhere would be entirely delighted to hear them. Then,
once Gwen eventually leaves Torchwood, maybe there’d be room for that private
oddness-investigating business in that continuity-window. Jones and Cooper: The
Correctors…
Bottom line, what Tim Foley’s
delivered in Torchwood - Dissected is an hour of mostly character-based
drama, allowing for two very different people with some distance and some
grudge between them to find a way back to what they like and enjoy in each
other, in spite of their divergent strategies. Gwen learns from Martha’s new,
grown-up, UNIT-appropriate and methodical approach, Martha remembers the power
of doing things the instinctive, intuitive Torchwood way. At the end of the
story, the two women have reminded themselves and each other that in many ways,
they’re each better than the sum of their organizational approaches – and
that’s a reminder that’ll have you punching the air and begging for more.
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