Review: Torchwood S2 05 Adam
This story was lovely but strangely unsatisfying.
The plot is another classic, the Evil Mindbender story. An Evil Mindbender has turned the Team into twisted versions of their true characters. You don't see it that often, as you have to have an adventure series where Evil Mindbending can take place and a Team with well-defined characters at the same time. When you do have well-defined characters and an adventure writer who loves character drama though, the result can be a masterpiece. It's closely related to the Mirror Universe plot, where someone encounters twisted versions of themselves in an alternate reality, but this one happens right at home. While I'm reasonably sure that Star Trek and Buffy have done their versions of the Evil Mindbender story, True Believers of my generation remember back to the 1970s when Mesmero tried it in X-Men #636 "Mind Games", including taking away all the Team Leader's confidence, turning the Nice Girl into a Tart and the Sweet Guy into a Monster. "Mind Games" was an early entry in the groundbreaking superhero series that proved you could do character drama within a superhero action-adventure story and be a commercial success. But I date myself.
In this episode, Mesmero -- sorry, Adam, has infiltrated the Team by altering a few basic memories. Along the way he's undone some childhood traumas in Tosh and Owen, which result in them having personalities closer to their true potential selves. Problem #1: he did it on a day that Gwen had off and forgot about her. Geez, why didn't he check the personel files? Problem #2: He's not Mesmero and he's not very good at Evil Mindbending. He only jostles around isolated fragments of the complex web of human memory, and his false memories don't play well with the rest of the head.
I must admit, it's the most realistic Evil Mindbender story I've seen. It does point out almost all the flaws modern psychology has found with the Evil Mindbender scenario. Well, except for memory using emotions as a tagging system that is. They didn't use that part.
The Evil Mindbending has temporarily made Gwen forget Rhys. But it didn't make Jack forget Rhys, so he reassures her that yes, this stange man is actually for one and only. Jack, being a gentleman, doesn't take advantage of the opportunity to take Gwen away from Rhys. Instead he works with Rhys to help Gwen regain her memories.
Tosh's long-buried confidence and Owen's long-buried geekiness and empathy have been brought to the fore by the Evil Mindbending. I'd be more impressed with this if my friend the licensed hypnotist hadn't told me how to do this very trick months ago. As it is I'm impressed with the authenticity.
I'd be even more impressed if I hadn't figured out that Tosh and Owen had these very qualities before the middle of the first series. We were hit over the head with Tosh's innate courage in Countrycide, in case we hadn't figured it out earlier. And I knew underneath his bad-boy exterior Owen was a geek at heart long before Random Shoes put the final nail in that coffin. Only a deeply repressed closet geek would show as much contempt for the breed as he did in the first series. As it was I sat there thinking, "I guess this is for the new fans?"
But what really struck me was what Tosh and Owen had lost in the process. The people we are aren't simply the product of our potential realized or unfulfilled, they're also the product of what we learn along the way. Tosh may have gotten in touch with her innate confidence, but she lost her hard-won empathy along the way. Owen may have gotten in touch with his innate empathy and geekiness, but he lost his hard-won confidence along the way. I'd be mad at the show for intimating that empathy and confidence can't exist in the same person if it weren't for Jack proving otherwise.
All the Evil Mindbending has jostled loose a long-buried memory of Jack's childhood which he wishes had stayed buried thank-you-very-much. (No he doesn't really, but.... Right. One of those.) All this trying-to-repress has Jack subdued, moody, and not paying enough attention to what's going on around him.
Meanwhile, Ianto gets suspicious when the paper trail doesn't match up with everyone's memories of Adam. I love Ianto's paper diary, it reinforcess two things about him that fanon has long suspected: his distrust of electronic records and his love of the tactile. Adam retaliates by giving Ianto the memories of a serial killer. This brings about Adam's downfall.
(At least fanon was wrong about Owen having father issues. No, no, he has mother issues instead.)
Personality is the sum of all our memories and innate traits, not just a few. If the profilers are to be believed, making a serial killer is a long, complicated process that begins in early childhood. "Gifting" a decent man with the memories of killing three women doesn't turn him into a serial killer. It turns him into a decent man who immediately goes looking for someone he can trust to lock him up, i.e. Jack. Taking away Jack's confidence hasn't taken away all his experience with reading people, and he knows deep down Ianto isn't a serial killer. And once Jack and Ianto begin comparing notes, Adam is history.
(I'm a bit irritated at Jack in those scenes, though. I know Jack and Ianto don't like to talk about the relationship around others, but why not when they're alone and Ianto needs reassurance? Jack, it wouldn't kill you to say more than just, "I believe in you." There's nothing wrong with, "I've had murderers in my bed before, and you're not one of them." Or even, "I've known murderers before and you're not one of them.")
Likewise, taking away Gwen's memory of Rhys hasn't changed her into a person who doesn't need Rhys. She's still the same temperamental spirit who needs a down-to-earth person like Rhys to ground her. It only takes a few hours for her to realize that, blocked memories or no.
Ultimately, Adam's downfall is caused by a combination of hard evidence and emotions. The silly creature forgot to give anyone besides Tosh an emotional reaction to him in the implanted memories. As Jack puts it, "If you're the one I can confide in, how come I feel nothing for you?" Adam fell because of the Team's hard-earned trust in each other, which they did not feel for him. Indeed, one of the virtues of this episode is that the Team did not lose their trust in each other and none of the Team members lost their individual intelligence and courage.
(This also shows that Adam knows diddly-squat about how memories actually work. The human mind uses emotions as the card catalog of memory. Highly emotional memories are easy to find, memories with no emotions to them tend to sink to the bottom. This explains why it's easy to remember a favorite event and hard to learn the multiplication table.)
In an attempt to get rid of Adam Jack retcons the Team to forget him, erases the computer records and the CCTV (we're not shown this, but we're shown the results the next day), and i presume calls Rhys and tells him never to mention the past two days to Gwen or the rest of them, especially never to mention Adam. Then he goes to confront Adam before taking his own retcon and we have a Temptation Scene.
I went, "No, Jack, no!" the entire time. Anything Adam could offer would be too tainted to use, and it was. Ultimately Jack turned his back on the Temptation, because personality is the sum of all a person's life, not just a few memories. Messing about with a few memories did not change Jack from being a person prepared to do the hard things, even at great cost to himself.
A lot of fans felt sad at this episode, but I don't understand why. Sadness implies a sense of loss, and nothing was lost. Tosh and Owen don't lose their new personalities. Those parts of themselves just went back into hiding until they access them later. Gwen didn't lose her love for Rhys, she just temporarily misplaced it. Ianto doesn't lose his innocence because Jack won't let him. Even the memories they lose by taking the retcon aren't really lost. We know from Everything Changes that retcon doesn't really erase memories, it just makes them difficult to reach, fiddles with the tagging system as it were. The only one who might have lost anything is Jack. Adam apparently took away or altered a memory he had, but it was a deeply repressed memory anyway. It's not going to affect him in the present because he's not using it anyway.
All in all, the story did little to advance our understanding of the characters or any overall character arcs, save for a peek into Jack's and Owen's pasts.
But enough moaning. The script did an excellent job of highlighting what was already there, even if it was already there. Kudos to Cathy Treganna for writing so many wonderful and revealing character moments, especially for giving Jack and Owen childhoods. Jack's boyhood scenes were very well written, and shed a new light on his current clingyness. We know he's clingy because of losing his memories and because of being abandoned by the Doctor, but how much is he clingy because of losing Grey and his father?
The acting was incredible, though. Burn and Gareth were especially wonderful, but all the regulars including Kai Owen did us proud. It would be nice to see one story this series that combines stellar acting with a meaty plot, though.
Last week I started to say that the first four episodes of Series One had been the "character setup" episodes, and that after that the series really took off. Then I remembered tha S1 05 "Small Worlds" had a bit of character setup in it to for Jack for reinforcement. The first four episodes of Series Two appear to have been all "character setup" episodes, with S2 05 "Adam" providing a bit of reinforcement. Could we pretty please have some character development now?
ETA: As for the measuring tape bit, I thought Ianto might have taken advantage of a sleeping Jack to measure something he thought Jack was overly proud of -- only to discover Jack had good reason to be proud of it.