Torchwood Episode 213 Recap: “Exit Wounds”

Torchwood, 1901, where everything’s tinted a lovely shade of amber to make sure we understand we’re in a flashback to ye olden times. Alice Guppy tells some heretofore-unseen Torchwood underling of the male persuasion about some signal she’s been picking up for days, and explains she’s figured out how to use some old-timey scannery-thing to track it.

We see the two of them following clicks from her scanner to an open field, and she’s so giggly and excited you’d think she’d been told where to dig up a still-living, still-buxom warrior princess named Xena. Imagine her disappointment when they dig and it’s just Jack.

Back at their olden Hub, Alice and friend question Jack, who for a guy who’s been buried for a couple of thousand years is looking amazingly good. Because there’s barely a speck of dirt on him or his completely unworn, unfaded clothes to indicate he’d ever been in the ground, other than a few artfully applied smudges on his face that make him look like a chorus boy in Les Miz.

And those famous 51st-century pheromones must be working their magic, given no one else is holding their noses around a guy who’s been sweating underground in his overcoat for 1,874 years.

Alice and friend aren’t buying Jack’s story, but he doesn’t care, trying to explain the problematic logistics of time travel. If I’m following this correctly, he’s worried that, having gone back in time, he might now meet up with himself, and if he does, then the universe will implode under the weight of so much Jack-awesomeness. Or something. Whatever. The point is that he insists they freeze him in the Torchwood morgue and set him to defrost in another 107 years.

Which brings us to the present day, and the tender reunion between a freezer-burned Jack and a still-piping-hot Gray. Jack tells Gray that since he’s forgiven him, it might be nice for ’lil bro to do the same. But Gray’s having none of it, saying that everything he suffered was because of Jack, and that his only strength comes from his hatred of him.

Gray: I begrudge you everything. I want to rip it all from you, to leave you screaming in the dark. I will never absolve you. All of it, it’s your fault.

Boy, that guy can hold a grudge! Boo hoo, your brother sucked at babysitting and you had to miss the big game or your childhood or whatever, just get over it already. Sure you were tortured for millennia, but at least you avoided high school, which for many of us amounts to the same thing. Now you’ve got your whole life ahead of you and, hello, have you looked in a mirror? You’re a total hottie! Go out and enjoy it!

But Jack knows there’s never going to be any getting over this with Gray. He tearfully goes to embrace him, then whispers, “Sorry,” as he pulls an Alice Guppy-maneuver, chloroforming Gray into unconsciousness. Then he holds him in his arm pieta-style and gently rocks him.

In the lab, Tosh manages to slump toward her scanner and uses it to get back in touch with Owen at the nuclear plant. She’s obviously still in pain, but when Owen asks her if everything’s all right, she’s all, oh, it’s nothing, this is just a flesh wound, and proceeds to inject herself in the leg with more painkillers. How tough-ass is that? And all that time wasted with her stuck behind a computer and Gwen doing the footwork when Tosh could so kick her ass or anybody else’s.

Tosh checks a handy nearby Exposition Explaininator which blinks “Meltdown,” and tells Owen that the meltdown’s already too far along to be stopped. Owen insists there’s got to be something they can do, because there always is, which from what we’ve seen on this show, is pretty much 100% true.

Tosh technobabbles a plan, something having to do with putting the building in lockdown so the meltdown can be contained, and using a time-delay program to give Owen a chance to get out first. Owen tells her to make it so.

Meanwhile, in the vaults, Spike produces some scanner thing from out of his ass, and uses it to send out an all-purpose Weevil recall signal, sending all the street-side Weevil packs back down into the sewers.

Jack, having finished chloroforming his brother, walks through the vaults, and hears Gwen call out to him. He uses his wristband to unlock the cells, and Gwen bolts through the door and barrels toward him, making sure she’s the first one to grab Jack in a suffocating embrace before his actual boyfriend can get anywhere near him.

Ianto manages to make it to Jack’s other side, and Jack embraces both of them. Spike sees this and makes a comment about “the queue for the hugs,” and if he’s impressed by this, he should have seen the queue for hand jobs back in Jack’s carnival days. Jack thanks him for the transmitter ring, and Spike says it was the least he could do.

Of course, throughout this little lovefest, Tosh is bleeding out upstairs, and while obviously none of them know that, it still might have been nice for one of them to maybe remember that moments ago she was alone in the Hub with a murderous psycho bent on revenge and maybe think to check up on her.