Torchwood: Children of Earth - Day Two

WARNING: There Be Spoilers Ahead!

The conspiracy thickens as Ianto and Gwen flee from the rubble that was the Torchwood Hub, and go their separate ways. Gwen and husband Rhys head to London to try and find out who wants them dead, while Ianto trails Jack's body.

Jack is carried away from the bomb site as a "bag of bits", which slowly through this episode stitch themselves back together under the stunned eyes of the Government's black ops squad. Realising they can't actually kill Jack after all, he is locked in a cell which is then filled with quick-drying cement... in true James Bond villain style.

In London, Gwen tries to contact Torchwood's "man in the Government", John Frobisher (Peter Capaldi). Unfortunately he turns out to be the leading sinister civil servant, the man who actually put the kill order out on Captain Jack and ordered the bombing of the Hub - believing that Jack's immortality was somehow connected with Torchwood's Welsh HQ.

Frobisher is a busy man - what with the aliens and all - and so his calls are being fielded by new P.A. Lois Habiba (Cush Jumbo), who realises there's something fishy going on and risks everything by secretly helping Gwen and Rhys. She appears to be the best P.A. in the world, handing over a virtually bullet-pointed plan for them to liberate Jack from the compound where he is being held.

Interestingly, the Lois Habiba role of "friend on the inside of the conspiracy" was originally going to be taken by the character of Martha Jones, until Freema Agyeman landed her role with Law & Order: UK.

This episode was written by John Fay, but still kept up the momentum of yesterday's episode and the good mix of action scenes with wry, British humour.

As well as the "regrowing Jack" sequences - most of which took place inside a body bag to prevent a nation vomiting in unison as bones, muscles and organs patched themselves back together - we also got to see Gwen leaping out the back of an ambulance firing a pair of handguns, sadly not in slow-motion, and Ianto ram-raiding a Government facility to steal the entombed body of Jack.

Meanwhile, Frobisher's boffin sidekick, Dekker (Ian Gelder) has translated an earlier message from the alien 456 and is building a large containment unit to their specifications on Floor 13 of the M15 building.

Whilst this was all well-and-good, and obviously helps move the story along, it reminded me a bit too much of the plot of Jodie Foster's cinematic adaptation of Carl Sagan's Contact. That being said, it remains a valid narrative device for alien contact, so I'm not going to hold it against them.

Through the children of the world, the 456 have announced they "are coming tomorrow".

Tomorrow: