Torchwood Episode 210 Recap: “From Out of the Rain”

As he talks, we get a flashback of the night travelers in their heyday, and it’s basically the same scene as at the opening of the episode. Except this time Pirelli talks more about Drusilla, who is apparently called “Pearl,” describing her to the crowd as the “nearest thing that you will ever see to a living mermaid … she’ll take your breath away.”

During this speech, we see her in front of her tank, and it occurs to me that for a water act, it’s pretty bizarre that she spends the whole episode wearing a wool knit hat. She makes these hokey arm gestures that are supposed to be sexy, and all the men in the crowd drool over her, each clearly wondering if she’s worth the extra cash for a post-show shag versus the comparatively reasonable fat lady pricing.

Back in the present, Jack and Ianto move on from bemoaning the death of the traveling show to crying over the death of the old Cardiff cinemas. Ianto says that except for The Electro, they’ve all been torn down or converted, like one that’s now a bar where girls get in free before 11. Which means that Gwen’s harpy friends from last week have probably set up camp there. Tosh interrupts to mention that she’s “registering the sea, inland, running through the center of town.”

In the center of town, we see a family out for a late-night car ride. Dad swerves to avoid hitting Pirelli and Dru, except there’s suddenly no one there. He says he thought he saw a ghost, and Mom, demonstrating the unique form of wifely support we typically see on American sit-coms, helpfully replies, “Don’t be stupid.” Then Pirelli’s face is right at her window and everybody in the car shrieks. Now who’s being stupid?

The Hub. Ianto and Jack are still talking about the death of cinema, and it’s starting to sound more and more like those late-night, stoner conversations people had in college where everything seemed, like, incredibly deep, you know? The most interesting thing about these scenes is that Ianto and Jack are now so in sync they finish each other’s sentences.

Together, they hypothesize that since cinema killed the travelers by taking away their audiences, they’re now getting some kind of revenge. Except it seems to me that film also was the only thing that enabled the travelers to be preserved and come back, so they shouldn’t be so pissed about it.

Plus, I’d think that if they really wanted to get revenge on movie audiences, they’d do something where the punishment fits the crime, like trapping people inside The Electro and making them watch Norbit for all eternity. Instead, they’re going around sucking people dry all over town, which, come to think of it, was something they were doing even before the movies put them out of business, so how does revenge even come into this?

Can I stop now? My head hurts.

Ianto and Jack join the others, and Gwen brings up the fact that Tosh claims to have heard the sea in the center of town. She’s got this skeptical tone of voice, which is astonishing to me given that only moments ago she similarly dissed Ianto’s claim about the film clip being different and was quickly proven wrong. Not to mention the fact that Tosh is way smarter and always right, and there’s no reason to suspect what she’s saying isn’t possible given all the other crazy stuff going on.

Tosh insists she was getting waves and seagulls and ocean smells, leading Jack to wonder what the travelers are up to now. Oy. Just how many supernatural associations are we to make with these travelers? We’ve already got them linked to creepy dead-of-night carnivals, old movie theaters, celluloid odors, dying breaths, and the rain. Now they’ve got to have some sort of oceanic connotation as well? What’s next? News that The Electro used to be a church that was built on sacred Indian burial ground?

Cut to an empty swimming pool with Dru sitting in the shallow end splashing herself with water from a puddle. Because an episode as awful as this one might as well rip off from a movie as terrible as Lady in the Water.

There’s candles all around, which raises a major pet peeve of mine. Whenever movies and TV shows have rooms full of lit candles, it looks really pretty and atmospheric, but all I can think about is all the work involved in buying all those candles, setting them up, and running around lighting them before they blow out. I just don’t buy that any actual human being would ever be bothered to do all that.

nd here it’s even more ludicrous. You mean to tell me that these two ghouls took time out from scaring carpoolers and sucking people dry to drop into an all-night Pier One and buy out their candle supply? And then shlepped them through town to the pool?

Dru sits next to Pirelli and invites him to smell and taste the water, so he proceeds to lick her arm. What’s with these two and the licking all the time? Was their traveling show the road company of Cats? Pirelli says they’ve got six people trapped so far, and he holds up the bad-breath flask to their ears so they can listen to the gasps. When he does, I notice that the flask looks uncannily like the bottle from I Dream of Jeannie. I know because I loved whenever they showed the inside of that bottle, since other than Rhoda’s apartment, Jeannie’s place was just about the grooviest pad on TV.

Dru asks if they can bring the others back to join them traveling again. Pirelli agrees but says they first need to get the rest of the film.