Torchwood Episode 212 Recap: “Fragments”

Jack sees a few dead bodies on the floor, and I’m guessing they’re people who were watching the New Year’s Rockin’ Eve special and decided to put themselves out of their misery through a mass suicide. But one guy, who Jack calls “Alex,” is still alive. He tells Jack that he’s the one who killed the others, and he opens his hand and shows what looks to me like the pendant Tosh got from her psycho-hose-beast girlfriend in “Greeks Bearing Gifts.”

Alex tells him the pendant showed him what’s coming, that in the 21st-centuy, “everything changes” but none of them are ready for the coming storm. I like how this inverts the more positive spin Jack typically gives that “everything changes” line in the opening; given what we’ve seen so far of the 21st-centuy, I’m more inclined to see things Alex’s way.

Alex says his murdering the others was a simple case of “mercy killing.” If my boss is reading this, please know that if you ever suspect bad things are coming to our office, I’ll be happy with a nice severance package and my remaining vacation days instead of being butchered. Thanks.

Alex also offers up Torchwood to Jack, as a reward for his century of service, and instructs him to “give this place purpose, before it’s too late.” Then he blows his own brains out, obviously wanting to make sure he died before Carson Daly’s New Year’s special came on.

In the present, Jack gasps back to life in the rubble. Rhys and Gwen pull him out, with Rhys a bit freaked out to see Jack’s “now he’s dead, now he’s not” party trick. They wonder where Tosh is, and in another part of the building, we see just her hand and head under a heavy slab of concrete. She screams, and then her life starts flashing …

Tosh’s Back-story or “La Femme Toshika”

Five years earlier. Tosh is working as some kind of secretary, and she looks more mousy than we’ve ever seen her. For the first time I can think of on this show, Naoko Mori really looks like the character she used to play on AbFab.

I remember when, mid-season-one, someone told me that the actress who plays Tosh used to be Saffy’s dweebie best friend, and I was utterly floored to make that connection. Much like when my partner reminded me that we’d actually seen John Barrowman in the flesh once, years ago in a Stephen Sondheim revue starring, of all people, Carol Burnett, which I now consider one of my all-time great achievements as an audience member, right up there with when I saw Julie Andrews in another Sondheim revue and got to hear her say the word “f*ck.” Can you top that? Didn’t think so.

Tosh’s boss is on his way out and comments on her being all work and no play. She wishes him a good evening, and he says, “I doubt it,” and someone should really tell him that nothing makes bosses less appealing in the eyes of the peons who work for them than complaining about their own lives when said peons are slaving away at a fraction of their over-inflated salaries. And if my own boss is reading this, I of course don’t mean you, ha ha ha, it’s all just in good fun!

The boss is barely out the door when Tosh goes into Sydney Bristow mode, grabbing a key, breaking into his office, and using his computer to access some code. Then she deftly maneuvers herself through the building out of sight of surveillance cameras, and uses the code to enter a locked storage facility.

Given all the security surrounding this room, it’s absolutely unfathomable to me that the files are kept in — I kid you not — rows upon rows of shopping bags, each one neatly tied with a bow looking as pretty and fussy as a party favor. Who designed this security system anyway, Martha Stewart?

Tosh unties a specific bag and pulls out a blueprint depicting some device. Then she Sydney Bristows it out of the building, where a sign outside informs us it’s a research facility associated with the Ministry of Defense.

Home alone, she proceeds to use the blueprint to build her own version of the device, leading me to think the big revelation of Tosh’s back-story is that she’s the Unabomber.

She brings the completed device to a door in a dark alley, and tells the thug who answers that she’s “got it.” He ushers her inside, where she’s brought to meet a woman who we instantly recognize as evil because she’s wearing all black and has evil-looking hair. Plus she’s wearing the same dark, heavy eyeglass frames as Mr. Peabody from the old Bullwinkle show.