Torchwood Episode 213 Recap: “Exit Wounds”

Hot grown-up Gray describes to shackle-Jack what happened to him after he was abducted by the Sand People …

Gray: Those creatures lived to torture. They kept us just on the verge of life. I’d lie there, hemmed in by corpses, praying to become one. Because you let go of my hand, remember? … I believed you’d come, but you never did. How long before you gave up? Months? Years? Decades?

Gray gets all up in Jack’s face, and is it wrong that part of me is hoping they’ll start making out? Like maybe Spike can announce a big revelation about how, when he found Gray, he also learned that he and Jack aren’t actually brothers, so they should feel free to lock lips at any time? The only problem with this little fantasy is that Gray sounds uncannily like Jack, making me think either this actor’s an incredible mimic or Barrowman dubbed all his lines.

The other unfortunate thing about all this is Gray’s costume — a big puffy suit that makes him look like he stepped out of a Devo video. Would it have been so terrible for him to have been imprisoned in a skin-tight spacesuit or, even better, a loin cloth? Memo to Torchwood production: learn to cater a little more to your audience’s interests, OK?

Gray tells Jack that he wants him to suffer, explaining that they’re currently standing in what will one day be Cardiff, and he plans on having the city’s foundations built on Jack’s grave. “Each time you revive with a throat full of earth,” he says, “each time it chokes you afresh and you thrash on the edge of death, you think of me.” Quite the morose poet, our Gray. In different circumstances, he could have been a heck of a grunge rocker.

Then Spike, in a surprising although utterly useless display of conscience, tries to intervene. Although it’s intervening in the way Willy Wonka feebly says, “No, wait, stop,” while watching Augustus Gloop lean over the chocolate river. Ignoring Spike, Gray pushes Jack into an open grave and orders Spike to start filling it. Spike refuses, but Gray threatens to set off the wrist detonator.

Spike moves toward the grave, but before he starts with the digging, he looks meaningfully down at Jack, takes a ring from his finger, kisses it, and tosses it into the grave. Not being too swift on the uptake must be in the family genes, because Gray doesn’t find this at all suspicious and believes Spike’s claim that it’s a mere sentimental token.

Spike starts shoveling in the dirt, and you know Barrowman’s really committed to his art in this scene because he actually allows the clumps of soil to obscure his face.

The Hub, present day. There’s a flash of light, and Gray emerges from it into the vault, right next to a cell full of Weevils. Even they think he’s hot.

Meanwhile, back at the police station, Gwen, after sending out the Keystone Koppers on their harrowing door-to-door mission, has gone to sulk by herself in a corner. Rhys finds her and tries to assure her everything will be fine. She worries that she’s not up to all this drama, and he assures her that she’s a “bloody hero,” both to the coppers she addressed and to him.

Smiling, she says, “Will you marry me again?” and he smiles back, not realizing she means marry again in the sense that she’s planning on divorcing him, sleeping with Andy and possibly Banana Boat, and then slipping Rhys a double-dose of Retcon so he’ll consider taking her back.

Gwen then gets word via coms from Tosh, who is out with Ianto heading to the Turnmill nuclear plant. Tosh informs Gwen that she got a rift alert from inside the Hub, and since it’s a pattern that mirrors when Jack disappeared, someone should really check it out.