Jack ...... John Barrowman
Plot Outline The Torchwood team are led to Delhi on the trail of
a dangerous energy field. As the field grows, they witness the simultaneous
disappearance of hundreds of people. Jack discovers that the field
centres on an old colonial mansion, Torchwood India.
Analysis by Cuisle This is a notch up from Aylum in terms of story quality, and I’m not just saying that because there is plenty of Jack in it. A story set outside of Wales would be expensive on TV, especially in India of all places. This is one way of doing it, allowing us to make the pictures ourselves. This is a story I wish I had thought of. A gentleman’s club where nothing has changed, including the clientele since 1924, preserved by a sort of time refrigerator was an inspired idea. A lot of those kind of clubs look as if time has stood still since the sun went down on the British Empire. This one really did. Duchess Eleanor’s insane desperation to stop things changing within the Connaught Club, akak Torchwood India, is very well realised over the course of the story. Jack, at first, has no clue just how mad his old flame actually is. And when he does, it is almost too late. There is enough tension and suspense in the build up to the climax just through Eleanor’s madness to carry the story. Throw in the fact that she is using innocent Human lives to fuel her time refrigerator and her nuttiness is complete.
What is especially interesting is how racist Duchess Eleanor is. Even loyal servants like Mahajan are nothing to her, just ‘natives’ who she can do with as she pleases. The Indian people were just fodder for her mad scheme. Her comments about Indian independence were so typical of the mentality of the British in India between the wars. She is straight from the pages of Forster’s Passage to India or Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. Racist, superior-minded and utterly wrong-headed about everything. The final destruction of the Connaught Club was possibly a little bit too simple. But most of the allotted forty-five minutes had been put into a well crafted storyline. So it really didn’t matter. And the saved Mahajan, after all. The poor, disillusioned, double crossed Indian deserved to be rescued. Incidentally, the writer of this story definitely has his finger on the pulse of the Doctor Who/Torchwood franchise. In the closing lines, Ianto says that there is ‘nothing at the end of the lane’ – where the Connaught Club had been. That phrase was the original working title for the first episode of Doctor Who, way back in 1963.
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