Maybe the point is that there is no point. As a counter to the previous episode, in which the afterlife is revealed to be a misery of dark loneliness, with the spectre of something horrible bearing down upon you. You know, if you think being dead is bad because you never get to finishing watching your rented DVDs, just wait and see how frustrating it is to hang around here after you die, when you’re in the vestibule, the foyer of death, and all that was once held secret from you -- like the bedroom of Gwen Cooper and the headquarters of Torchwood -- is revealed, and turns out not to be all that cool after all. And the people whom you idolized are, you learn now that you can peek in on them, aren’t really worth idolizing after all.

Maybe that’s the point: Don’t be a fan of Torchwood. Everything connected to Torchwood is doomed.

Doctor Who has done this, too, with “Love & Monsters” and “Blink”: look at how sweet and how silly and how worth saving are those who long for something more than this small existence to the point that it impairs their enjoyment of this small existence. But only Eugene had to die to learn it. It’s fuckin’ tragic, it is: the “eye” that “almost certainly belonged to an alien” that came into Eugene’s possession at the age of 12-or-whatever, given him by a schoolteacher who took pity on him. No, surely this cannot have occurred on the same day that Dad went away forever -- surely, this is older-Eugene’s mind compensating for the terrible crushingness of that abandonment: Dad leaves, but the alien eye arrives. And, no doubt, the alien it belongs to is close behind.

Ah, I know that every lifelong fan of science fiction understands deeply and spiritually how SF -- fantasy of any kind -- can be a coping mechanism: does an affinity for SF make one a nerd, or, as if infinitely more likely, does escapist SF simply attract those who are already nerdy, lonely outcasts? Not that that characterizes everyone who enjoys SF: that’s not what I’m saying. But not everyone who enjoys SF longs to be taken away from this planet either, like Eugene, who thought the alien would “change his life.” And, as we’ve seen, if that eye had somehow turned out to be something the Doctor left behind -- maybe it’s not an eye but a nuclear fusion containment device, or an essential piece of a hyperspace engine, or a marble made of some exquisitely rare stone from a long-destroyed planet, or an item of jewelry he fancied giving Rose -- Eugene might have seen his life change.

Instead, he got squashed by a car on the motorway. Sheesh.

Random thoughts on “Random Shoes”:

• In the video store, one of the movie posters is for Acid Burn, which also is for rent in the video store in the Doctor Who episode “Blink.”

• The “hand in a jar” at the Torchwood HQ that Eugene is so bemused by is, of course, the Doctor’s hand.

• There’s a quick “42” reference in the 1992 math competition Eugene bombed out of. If only he’d heeded that ultimate answer to the ultimate question at an earlier stage in his life...

• Our lives are made up of pictures of random shoes on a cell phone, and sodden with “the smell of exhaust and banana milkshake”? Oh, just shoot me now...

(next: Episode 10: “Out of Time”)

[Torchwood screencap from The Institute]