‘Torchwood’ blogging: “A Day in the Death”

It’s a funny old thing, life, innit? Death too, it seems. For one thing, you get demoted to teaboy after a life of action and violence and sex and beer. How fair is that?

You have to clean out your fridge and your kitchen and your medicine cabinet of all the things you no longer need, like bananas and shaving cream. That’s just sad.

On the other hand, a man with no body heat can be useful, it seems, especially in an organization that is outside the police and beyond the law and yet not above the petty home security paranoia of rich old eccentrics. So is a man who can take 100,000 volts and not even feel a tickle from it.

And you can be cruel to the people who love you, and traumatize them even more than you did by dying -- and then by surviving dying -- because, heh, if they thought you were distant and unobtainable before, man, have you got something to withhold from them now. You can actually taunt them to their faces about how ultra super special off-limits you are to them now. It’s like you get to be extra bastard with a creamy bastard filling and a gooey bastard frosting.

And then -- and this is the funny thing -- you get to learn how to be a nicer person even as it’s too late to really do anything with it. Oh, sure, you might be able to save some anonymous random suicidal jumper from jumping by showing her a small wonder of the universe -- just a really simple thing like a postcard from another planet -- but it’s too late for you now, pal. You’re beyond saving, because you’re no longer real, as you said yourself.

You had to die to appreciate life, which is maybe true of all of us, but even though it looks like you get a second chance, it’s just an illusion. All the pretty hello-there-earthlings tendrils of alien energy in the universe can’t change the fact that you’re dead, and the universe is moving on without you.

But cheer up. It can’t get any worse, can it?

Great quote from “A Day in the Death”:

“You get to live forever. I get to die forever. It’s funny, that.” --Owen to Jack

(next: Episode 9: “Something Borrowed”)