Torchwood Episode 207 Recap: “Dead Man Walking”

Jail cell. Owen kicks the door, and Jack advises him to stop, because he might break an ankle and have to add a wheelchair to his problem. Make that problems plural because Owen’s stomach starts making this horrific gurgling sound. Owen explains that since his digestive system shut down, he can’t process what he drank. So he positions himself upside down to line up his esophagus and … SPEW! A torrent of projectile vomit jetstreams across the cell, missing Jack’s feet by inches.

Then Owen starts farting, another delightful side effect of death, and Jack is ready to claw his way out of there if necessary. And yet, knowing what we know about John Barrowman’s love of scatological humor, I suspect he’s somehow behind this whole scene.

Owen starts waxing nostalgic about how much he’ll miss farting and sex. And farting during sex, which is an experience Tosh will sadly now have to miss out on. Lucky girl.

Jack: Only in suffering do we recognize beauty.
Owen: Yeah, yeah. Who said that?
Jack: Proust.
Owen: You’ve read Proust?
Jack: Yeah. Well, no. We dated for a while. He was really immature.

Eh. I’m more impressed by Jack’s having dated Christopher Isherwood. I can’t imagine it would be much fun dating a guy like Proust, who would probably talk about himself for hours remembering some minor incident from when he was four. I’d be like, “Yeah, yeah. I get it. That was one tasty cookie. Can we just go f**k now?”

Jack and Owen have a little debate over who does it suck more to be: Jack, who’s immortal but takes so much in life for granted? Or Owen, who might soon be losing it all? Then Jack ruins all the good will I felt earlier by saying the real reason he brought Owen back wasn’t for the alarm code, it was because, “I wasn’t ready to give up on you.” Bleh. Now I might spew across the room.

Jack decides it’s time for them to go home, and calls for an officer, providing his special Torchwood get out of jail free code.

The Hub. Gwen tells Tosh that Jack called in and is on his way back with Owen. Tosh is concerned that Owen might not be himself. She explains that she’d wondered if Owen had talked to anyone about what she’d said to him earlier, so she checked out the CCTV. Gwen calls this “a bit like stalking,” which she would know about given she spent the entire pilot episode stalking Jack. Tosh says she now wishes she hadn’t, and shows them what she found. It’s footage of ink-eyed Owen hissing Exorcist dialogue.

Outside the jail, Jack and Owen are suddenly surrounded by Weevils. Jack thinks they’re after him because he stole the glove from them. He sends Owen ahead, and turns to face the Weevils spreading his arms with this cocksure grin that’s total Tom Cruise. Maybe he’s hoping to distract the Weevils with a diatribe about his right to total privacy unless he’s trying to get people to fork over $12 to see him in his latest Mission Impossible suckfest. Instead, he does the next most sensible thing and runs.

Jack and Owen head, naturally, to an empty parking garage, where they’re met by more Weevils. They try to run from them, split up for a while, and then run some more, but they can’t shake them. Not having seen the movie Scream, they continue heading upstairs instead of down and out, and are eventually trapped on the roof. Jack tells Owen to stand behind him and holds up his gun defensively. But to his surprise, the crowd of Weevils approach and then start bowing before an ink-eyed, Exorcist-ranting Owen.

Meanwhile, back at the Hub, Tosh says they need to find out what ink-eyed Owen was saying. She gets Ianto to retrieve a translating device from the safe. Compared to the Hitchhiker Guide’s way cooler Babelfish, I’m not impressed by this, yet another iPhone-like scanner device. You’d think by now Tosh would have harnessed the technology of the world’s couch potatoes and developed a single universal scanner thingie.

She attaches the device to the computer and plays the Owen clip, and it runs through various languages — Pig Latin, Ubby Dubby, Parseltongue — and finally translates his speech as “I shall walk the Earth and my hunger shall know no bounds.”

Gwen, always quick to point out the obvious in the hope it will make her seem in charge, says, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Jack says, “You don’t know the half of it,” and ushers Owen in.