N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
When Max begins beating his fists against the door whenever anyone mentions Torchwood, I turned to my son and said ‘Well, we’ve all felt that way.”
“Torchwood walks all over this city like you own it.”
Swanson, They Keep Killing Suzie
In fairness, They Keep Killing Suzie starts pretty well. The Resurrection Gauntlet was one of the better elements of the series opener, so it was always going to be worth a revisit, and, as I mentioned at the time, Indira Varma’s Suzie was for me the most interesting of the Torchwood team so, again, it’s good to see her back for another episode.
It’s only when the whole thing is revealed to be some sort of back-up Trojan horse type plan for Suzie to escape death that things start to fall apart. (Although, in truth, I did start to worry when they began to trust the Suzie zombie.)
There may well have been no iPhones back in 2006, but there was a mobile Internet and you’d have thought, of all people, the Torchwood team would have a phone that could access it. Perhaps it didn’t occur to them to look up Emily Dickinson’s poetry on Project Gutenberg or get the ISBN number from Amazon?
Or at least asked DI Swanson to Google it or Ask Jeeves!
Or maybe they’d blown the budget on branded basketball hoops and ear muffs?
Still, in the early part of the episode at least, there’s a lot of promise amid some genuine drama. Indeed, promise and potential seems to be the story of Torchwood. That — and an amusing approach to top secrecy!
Speaking of which, after They Keep Killing Suzie, you can add cardboard storage boxes to the list of Torchwood-branded merch.