It seems like a lot of people either love this one or hate it - I'm sort of on the fence. I do think it was well done in many respects, but it was also incredibly disturbing and really a bit over-the-top in the amount of violence and gore, and had an overall un-Torchwood-like feel to it. It really felt more like a slasher movie than anything.
But on thinking about it more, once I recovered from the general horror of it, I realized that in a way it does fit in, and make a very important point - that the scariest and most repellent monsters they've had to deal with thus far, the hardest to understand, and the ones that have had the most traumatizing emotional effects, particularly on Gwen, are not aliens but human beings.
The Torchwood staff often seem jaded, like they've seen everything and nothing can shock them any more, but they all seem to assume right up until near the end that what's happening has to be the work of aliens or extradimensional creatures of some sort - the unspoken assumption is that human beings couldn't possibly do something like this. And yet they did...
I also thought the depiction of Gwen getting shot was extremely realistic, to an extent rarely seen in movies or TV. Too often it seems like getting non-fatally shot is almost shrugged off by fictional characters, or else glossed over so that you see them get hit, and then the next time you see them it's in the hospital. I don't think I've ever seen a depiction of the sort of raw pain that scene showed that hit that hard... It made me aware of just how sanitized even a lot of fairly violent shows are by contrast, in the way they don't really convey what the experience of getting shot would really be like.
I guess on the whole, I respect what they did with this episode, even though I don't think I would ever want to see it again.
But on thinking about it more, once I recovered from the general horror of it, I realized that in a way it does fit in, and make a very important point - that the scariest and most repellent monsters they've had to deal with thus far, the hardest to understand, and the ones that have had the most traumatizing emotional effects, particularly on Gwen, are not aliens but human beings.
The Torchwood staff often seem jaded, like they've seen everything and nothing can shock them any more, but they all seem to assume right up until near the end that what's happening has to be the work of aliens or extradimensional creatures of some sort - the unspoken assumption is that human beings couldn't possibly do something like this. And yet they did...
I also thought the depiction of Gwen getting shot was extremely realistic, to an extent rarely seen in movies or TV. Too often it seems like getting non-fatally shot is almost shrugged off by fictional characters, or else glossed over so that you see them get hit, and then the next time you see them it's in the hospital. I don't think I've ever seen a depiction of the sort of raw pain that scene showed that hit that hard... It made me aware of just how sanitized even a lot of fairly violent shows are by contrast, in the way they don't really convey what the experience of getting shot would really be like.
I guess on the whole, I respect what they did with this episode, even though I don't think I would ever want to see it again.