Original Transmission
23rd Jan 2008
Cast Captain Jack Harkness John Barrowman
Crew Written by James Moran
Plot Outline from Wikipedia. Two burglars break into a flat owned by a woman called Beth and her husband. There’s a struggle, with the burglars saying they are sorry, and a flash of light. Soon Torchwood are on the scene investigating the grisly fate suffered by the burglars. Beth cannot remember events and is taken into custody by Torchwood, who suspect she is not of this earth. When they take her to a cell, she passes a Weevil and it cowers in her presence. Captain Jack, after flirting with Ianto, decides to take drastic measures and subject Beth to a mind probe. Despite no initial reaction, the probe eventually uncovers alien technology buried under the skin of her right forearm. It emerges that she is an alien ‘sleeper agent’, yet to be activated and oblivious to her real identity, having been given memory implants.
Around Cardiff, other sleeper agents are suddenly activated, with their right arms transforming into bayonet-like weapons. They carry out a series of suicide bombings at key locations, paving the way for their leader - a former doting husband - to head for a base containing nuclear warheads.
Beth manages to escape and is found with her ailing husband in hospital. She is struggling to remain human but instinctively stabs her husband in his bed, killing him.Captain Jack manages to find the leading sleeper agent at an army base moments before the agent can detonate the nuclear weapons that are held within. Jack is stabbed in the process and the agent warns him that there are others of his kind on Earth before blowing himself up. Jack, Gwen and Beth barely escape from the explosion. Back at Torchwood, Beth tells Gwen she cannot live knowning that one day she will not be herself anymore. She uses the weapon in her arm to threaten Gwen, forcing the others to shoot and kill her. Beth uses her last piece of humanity to kill herself. The episode ends with Gwen telling Jack that if more
agents come, Torchwood is prepared against them.
Analysis by Cuisle Sleeper started off with violent death, ended in violent death. There was violent death all the way through. It was a violent story. The pre-watershed version should be about fifteen minutes long and incomprehensible! For post watershed it was absolutely gripping stuff from the start. The action slowed a bit as they questioned Beth, but the dialogue kept on going. The little scene between Jack and Ianto when Ianto talked about shivers down his spine reminded us that there was something going on between those two, but there wasn’t a lot of time for affection tonight.
There was a huge amount of tension between Jack and Gwen over their clearly different approaches to Beth. Gwen wanted to be kind. Jack knew he couldn’t afford to be. He was hard and unforgiving because he knew about these aliens. He’s seen it happen in another time and place? When Gwen promised Beth she wouldn’t be killed it was in Jack’s eyes. He couldn’t make that promise. It was an old dilemma. Schizophrenic character – one nice, one nasty. It goes all the way back to Dr Jekyll and Mister Hyde. How much is Jekyll responsible for Hyde’s depravities? How much is the Human that Beth believes herself to be responsible for the murders committed by the alien inside her? Of course, Beth couldn’t be separated from the alien, so she had to die. Death by Torchwood. In the end, they had to do it. And in the end, Gwen seemed to be more forgiving of Jack than she looked like she would be. She realised that it had to be done.
Beth’s death seemed a little reminiscent of the death of Lisa the Cyberwoman last season. There, too, something unpleasant had to be done for the sake of humanity. The other sleepers were a sinister bunch. A woman pushing a pram who suddenly walks away, leaving the pram to role in front of a car. She later becomes a Human bomb taking out a strategic part of the civil infrastructure of Cardiff. A businessman kills his own wife before walking out and going to murder the leader of the local council in a very gruesome fashion. A lorry driver blows his lorry up and destroys a major pipeline. If there is a criticism to be made, by the way, it is about that scene. A lorryload of petrol exploding should have been a big budget special effect. Instead it cut straight to the Torchwood crew in the Hub and at the hospital. But then again Torchwood isn’t just about special effects. What was going on at the hub was important. So was Jack’s mission. He looked deadly serious as he drove the SUV after the manic businessman. I can’t make my mind up whether ten nuclear warheads buried in an abandoned mine near Cardiff is a plausible idea or not. It may well be. Whether it is a safe thing to do, with or without alien conspirators, is another matter. I just hope the abandoned mine isn’t in a village called Llanfairfach!
It was a good episode. I know the TV critics will find cracks in it. They won’t appreciate Ianto’s new, sharper set of one liners. They definitely won’t like the retro looking mind probe. They may think the alien arms looked like something out of Marvel comics. They won’t be wrong there. That effect was curious to say the least. Anyway, they will find fault somewhere. But I’m happy with this episode. It had the right mix of action, horror, unfolding relationships within the Torchwood team – especially Jack and Gwen and that moral issue that they turned over and over throughout the episode.
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