Torchwood (Exit Wounds, S02E13)

Wow, they pulled it off, absolute highlight of the season. Utterly riveting, feelings of sadness, empathy and loss. Why can't they deliver at this level all the time. But no cliffhanger?

Captain John's first appearance in the show was silly, high camp and not very impressive. What a turnaround they achieved with the season finale. Explosions all over Cardiff, each member of the team dealing with one location. All because they were mean to him? No not quite.

Capt John takes Captain Jack back to 27 AD. He shows him a bomb that is molecularly bonded to his arm. Everything he has done was under duress. Suddenly Jack's brother Gray appears, hugs him and stabs him. He has the anger of centuries and blames it all on Jack leaving him behind to be tortured by monsters as kids on their home planet. Even worse, he buries Jack alive, effectively forever. Capt John throws in his ring into the grave.

Whew, ring turned out to be a transponder and Jack is eventually dug up thousands of years later by Torchwood staff and placed in frozen storage so he doesn't encounter himself on another time-line.

Meanwhile, the horrible weevils are everywhere and the nuclear powerstation is going into meltdown. Poor Tosh gets shot by Jack's brother and it looks like Owen dies when the room is flooded with radiation. But surely he is dead already? Is this the way to reset that dead-end plotline for the next season?

Gray is defeated but Tosh dies.

I don't mean to sound flippant about the plot because I found the whole tortured brotherly relationship touching and was also very surprised that they killed-off Owen in addition to the insipid Tosh. After so many let-downs during this season, they got the plotting and acting spot on. Looking forward to the next series already!