The Middle Men
Torchwood Season 4 Episode 6
Miracle Day‘s hot streak continues as Torchwood continues to fight governmental horror.
The Review
The first two seasons of Torchwood were all about defending the Earth from aliens. It turns out the show is at its best when it’s defending Earth from itself. There have been no aliens, because the horrors here on Earth are bad enough. Rex and Esther barely escape the camp in California with their lives, the sniveling bureaucrat Colin Maloney trying to kill them both, muttering that he was just the guy in charge of setting everything up. Meanwhile, in Wales, Gwen tries to break her father out but gets a vicious scene early on confronting a doctor who knew full well that the Category 1 patients were being incinerated. If she couldn’t stop it, she could’ve at least not participated. Rhys heroically tries to break her father out, but when Gwen lands back in Los Angeles is told it was for nothing.
We get a break from Oswald, and instead are treated to Jack chasing down Phicorp’s COO through his young mistress. The message he has is that whoever is behind the Miracle goes far beyond Phicorp. The first scene is him asking an operating in Singapore to check in on a Phicorp property, and that operative promptly jumping off a building. The message here is that authoritarianism and governmental horror come through a string of the titular middle men, paper pushers who refuse to take a stand. Gwen takes a stand by setting off a massive explosion in Wales, and helping to broadcast the truth. Still, the White House Press Secretary defends the move, saying it’s what they’d do in the case of a pandemic. Yeah, it’s all hitting closer to home.
Miracle Day keeps finding ways to make the whole situation uglier and uglier, and revealing just how fucked up we all are.
9.5/10 I find myself continually captivated by Miracle Day. I’m starting to think RTD was rather ahead of its time.
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