Episode two looks to be your basic scifi series staple: the episode in which some excuse is used to make all the cast members mack it. It seems pretty early in the series to fall back on that one, but you won’t hear me complaining. Unlike Star Trek and the other series I’ve seen this trope played out on, most of the cast of Torchwood is pretty hot. Also, having a couple of bi characters makes for even more potential pairings. So bring on the title sequence!

Gwen and Incomprehensible Boyfriend are bowling, including a few gratuitous shots of Gwen’s ass as she bends over to throw the ball. Gwen is clearly smoking IB. She dances around and shrieks and basically makes an ass out of herself, and IB looks vaguely horrified. Later, they’re having dinner at a restaurant and I guess all this is in celebration of Gwen’s “promotion” to “special ops.” IB is clearly excited about it, but even more excited about the giant, flaming thing dropping out of the sky. “Is that plane on fire?” he yells, proving that he can, in fact, be understood if he puts a little effort into it, Mumbly McMutterpants. Gwen grabs his hand and tries to drag him off, with IB giving weak protest along the lines of “dude, I have not paid for all this food!” But she wins out and they chase the falling meteorite (a meteor is technically a meteorite once it enters Earth’s atmosphere – see? You learned something today!), which drops out of sight in the distance. Gwen gets a text on her cell phone – “Torchwood.” “I have to go to work,” she chirps gleefully at IB before rushing off.

Seizure-inducing credits! Also, I forgot to mention how weird the Torchwood “music” is. It’s more or less a kind of DOOOOOOOONwee-doo-wee-doo-wee-doo-wee-doDOOOOOOOONwee-doo-wee-doo-wee-doo, repeat ad infinitum.

This episode, Gwen is inside the big black SUV, not that that’s any safer than being a pedestrian anywhere near it, the way Ianto drives the thing. Currently it’s screaming down the center line (not the lane, the painted line) of an empty highway. Keyboards and monitors pop out and lower themselves into Gwen and Tash’s laps. “Think you got enough kit?” Gwen gasps at them. She is also horrified to see they can get onto the police secure network, which seems to be named “Kremit”? “Kribbit”? I don’t know why any of this surprises her anymore.

They use a little GPS-type thing to find the crash site. Ooh, pretty shot; there’s this big S-curve of highway, all lit up sort of orange form the lights, then all black on either side except for some blue lit-up buildings. They pull down some little dirt road and stop, and Ianto says, “Shit. The amateurs got here first.” I’m expecting TAPS or something, but the place is swarmed with guys in fatigues and black helmets, carrying rifles. Captain Jack pops up out of his side of the SUV and poses dramatically with his arm on the roof for a moment, all “dun-da-da-dahhhh! Captain Jack is here!” No one really notices, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Sometimes I guess you have to make your own fun. Jack opts to deal with the amateurs by strolling on in like he owns the place, while officials in neon jackets sort of gape at him on both sides. One or two opens his mouth and closes it a few ties, but nobody has the balls to stop them. Gwen grabs a bag of stuff from the Torchwood van and follows Jack’s lead, trying to look official.

Her attempt breaks down immediately as she’s stopped by two soldiers in black berets. She insists on being allowed in saying she’s with “Special ops … Torchwood. I’m with Torchwood.” She’s obviously not quite sure whether the name is secret or not, but just as she’s starting to flounder, Jack comes to her rescue, saying she went in the wrong entrance. He scolds the soldier for calling Gwen “little girl,” pointing out that she has “all the right curves in all the right places.” HA. Gwen rolls her eyes as Jack grabs her hand and drags her past the caution tape. The woods are suitably creepy, with odd fluorescent tubes set up here and there to give off light, every tree strung with caution tape, and little fires here and there still burning in the leaves. The meteorite itself is a big fake-looking rock a little taller than a man and roughly spherical. It has long grooves gouged out of it like maybe it was soft clay at one point and some giant fingers scraped along it. Owen is pointing all kinds of futuristic gizmos at it.

Samples are taken, more gizmos are pointed – at one point Owen listens to the meteorite’s heartbeat with a stethoscope – and Gwen is getting fidgety. Owen tells “sweetheart” to get her ass in gear and give him a hand. She tries to get him to call her Gwen, but he replies, “What, no Sweet Cheeks? Freckles? New Girl?” Gwen calmly replies with a crack about his tools “not being big enough to do the job,” and Jack snorts loudly. Clearly Gwen is fitting in. She flings the rather pointy tool at Owen, who ducks, and it punches a hole in the side of the meteorite. Like everything else on this show, the crack glows blue and starts spewing gas. Screechy Violins of Danger play as the Torchies grab gas masks. Glowy pink smoke pours out of the meteorite and rockets off into the sky. The Torchies glare at Gwen, who is looking around all embarassed.

Else where in Cardiff, near a club, a young woman is standing in an alley, leaving an angry message on someone’s voicemail, when the pink cloud corners her, pinning her up against a wall and diving into her mouth. The bouncers stop her as she goes back into the club, but she shuts them up by making out with one of them. Then, in a replay of every beer commerical ever, she stares at some guy across the room and makes a sexy beeline for him, waiters and club patrons scattering from her path. She drags him into the bathroom, and clothes are ripped off and things are done on the sink counter (ewwwwwwwunsanitary) and the camera doesn’t cut away, which wow. There’s no actual nudity or anything, but there’s some serious .. I dunno. It is intense. There is groaning and yelling and the luckiest random scruffy guy in Cardiff suddenly explodes. Literally. This is not a euphemism. Into a billion pieces which go zooming towards the girl and land in a little pile of sand on the ground. I hope my dad doesn’t think I’m watching porn up here.

Back at Torchwood, Jack is telling Gwen to stop apologizing for letting the thing out, but Owen isn’t so quick to let her off the hook. Basically, he’s pissed off. Gwen makes the fatal mistake of pointing out that the alien is just gas – “how bad could it be?” “Oh, because gas never did anyone in,” sneers Owen, who is being a bit of a prick right now. Maybe the comment about his inadequate equipment is still smarting. Ianto comes in to tell them there’s been a death at a nightclub in Cardiff, and the circumstances are “a little unusual.”

BBSUV is on the scene, parking in the middle of the street. Jack careens out and rushes into the club, shooting a “Torchwood” at the officer on duty, who gives him a look that clearly says “I hate these guys.” Gwen stops to chat with the guy, who she recognizes, until Jack calls her away, with a sort of “we don’t associate with those doofuses” kind of look. The whole point of this bit was to make it very clear that the Heddlu and Torchwood hate each others’ guts, which is going to make things interesting for Gwen.

The owner of the club is showing the Torchies the little heap of sand in the bathroom. When Jack asks how he knows what happened, we cut to the club owner jerking off to the CCTV attached to the camera in the bathroom. Ewwww. Also? Ha! When we cut back, all the Torchies look uncomfortable. The owner whips out the tape, and we see the dry-humpy footage yet again (and I turn my sound down) and the Torchies all goggle. “He just-“ “came and went!” Jack supplies, and Owen snorts. Gwen makes an attempt at interrogating the owner, but that’s not Torchwood’s style and Jack drags her out. As they rush through the club, Jack orders them to find a similar body in the Torchwood morgue and make it look like a suicide. Gwen is horrified. “You have a stash of bodies?” Jack asks her if she’d prefer to be the one to tell his family he died screwing an alien.

Jack is following the signal from some little yellow device and Gwen is following Jack. He locates the spot where the girl was initially attacked by the pink aphrodisiac cloud, and they notice yet another security camera. Sad plinky music plays as they watch the playback, and Gwen mutters “it’s all my fault.”

The possessed girl, whose name is Candice (I really shouldn’t call her a girl, she’s like my age) is bak at home with her soon-to-be-dead boyfriend. He’s chatting about his job and making dinner while she stares at the wall in a creepy trance state. Actually, that may be her dad. In which case he’s probably okay. Also, is it creepy that I’m not sure if he’s her dad or her boyfriend, even after watching this a few times? Anyway, he asks what she was up to last night (okay, her dad) and she says she can’t remember. He kisses her goodbye and goes to work. Candice continues to stare at the wall. Not a particularly good dad, then. Sad plinky music mourns Candice’s dad’s bad fathering skills.

Captain Jack has evidently stolen the big clear radar screens from the Rebel Alliance, and is blasting away at them with what looks an awful lot like a sonic screwdriver. I think it is actually a sonic screwdriver only with a neon green beam instead of a blue UV one. Jack technobabbles about how they’re going to locate the alien. Tash translates that he’s trying to determine where the meteorite came from. “Hey!” Jack interrupts, “sometimes a little technobabble is good for the soul!” Right on. Gwen says it sounds like what her Incomprehensible Boyfriend, Rhys, does for a living. Tash says, “oh, you have a boyfriend?” and Gwen replies yeah, doesn’t everyone? Well, not really, She just asks Tash, who looks shady and leaves the room. Oh, man, from the little I’ve read about Torchwood, the intense Flowcart of Issues is not something Gwen wants to get into just yet. Or ever.

Everyone in the room claims to be single, and things are kind of awkward for a second. The Torchies claim that being harassed by Jack 24-7 gives them more than enough to deal with, relationship-wise. Or just that being a Torchie is time-consuming. Six of one. Gwen seems shocked. She asks what the Torchies do for fun, then, to relax after a long day of planting dead bodies in sewers. They all look at each other awkwardly (this scene is so full of awk I can’t deal – Gwen is so rude) and finally Owen pipes up: “I torture people in happy relationships.” Ha! Have I mentioned how much I love Owen? Incidentally, there’s some old arcade game sitting behind him in this scene with a handwritten note on it saying Susie currently has the high score. I actually really like all the random shit in the backgrounds in Torchwood – there’s sticky notes everywhere and stuff like that. I will try to mention anything amusing.

Cut to someone in the shower, sobbing. Candice, I think. Plinky plinky music.

Tash claims that the cloud is made up of something called Vorax and Cerenium. A former chem major, I had to rewind and reply that three times before pulling up the subtitle screen because I was convinced she was talking about actual elements and I was hearing her wrong. Am stupid. Anyway, Jack replies, “My two favorite gasses!” Jack officially has some of the weirdest dialogue of any character ever. Not the most, though. Goes ding when there’s stuff. While the Torchies research those and Tash tries to match a face in the directory to the girl in the CCTV video in the alley, Butler Ianto is coming down with tea for everyone. I should mention that Ianto is inevitably wearing a suit, in every scene, and looks considerably more cleaned-up and civilized than the rest of the Torchies. It makes him easy to identify. Gwen is horrified that Torchwood has pictures of everyone in Britain. Again. Some more. Gwen is never not horrified. More random technobabble and arguing, and we cut away to-

Candice brushing her hair. She’s in a pink fluffy bathrobe and her room is rather pink and girly, more suited for someone about 13 or 14. She has a twee little vanity with a mirror as well. Suddenly, her body jerks forward in agony. She sits up slowly, shaking, and it happens again. And again, worse each time. “NOOOO!” She screams at her reflection, and the front-door buzzer rings. It’s a deliveryman, and she wastes no time ripping off his belt and hurling him down on the sofa. She straddles him despite his protests and starts wriggling. Just then, Torchies in gas masks and HAZMAT suits come busting in, pointing weapons.

Jack yells at the delivery man to get his pants on and leave. As he does so, Jack adds, “almost breaks my heart to say those words.” Tash says it’s safe to take off their masks, and as they do, Candice makes a break for it. Owen tosses a little blue glowy device in front of her, which activates a blue glowy force field around Candice. Jack yells at Owen for removing equipment from Torchwood. Owen sulks. They deactivate the force field and take Candice back into custody.

Everyone gets back to Torchwood, and Gwen brings Candice down to the basement and puts her in a cell like the one the weevil was in. Candice is scared and pathetic. Plinky, plinky, plink. She asks what Gwen wants, and is she in trouble, and Gwen just looks sad and won’t look at her. She tells Candice that she knows all about the thing living in Gwen, and about the guy who she killed, who was named Matt Stevens, and was an only child, leaving his parents with nobody now, and thinking their son committed suicide – at this point Candice starts screaming and convulsing again, and when she stops she’s got that blank, trance-y look again and is staring at Gwen all creepy.

“You broke my ship!” The thing inside Candice says. Gwen demands to know where it’s from and what it’s doing on Earth. The alien replies that it was after energy, and says it lives off of energy from orgasms. Ooooookay. It says that humans are “the best hit there is,” so apparently it’s more like a drug addiction situation than an actual feeding one. At this point Candice starts to spaz out again. She gets hurled against a wall with a nasty-sounding crunch, and begs Gwen to help her. Gwen opens the door of the cell and helps Candice get up. It turns out it was all a sham, though, as Candice pins her to the walls and starts making out with her. It must be said that Gwen does not look entirely upset about this turn of events.

Back in the main room, Owen (of course) is the one to look up at the CCTV monitor on the cells, and does a MASSIVE double-take. “Hel-lo,” he mutters, “Happy Birthday to me.” Then he kicks his chair back and keeps watching. Hee. Back in the cell, Gwen mutters, “Okay, first contact with an alien. Not … quite what I expected.” Then she grabs Candice and flips her against the wall and continues making out with her. Haaaaa! Awesome! Also, has everyone totally forgotten what happens when you actually mack it with this particular alien? Owen zooooooms in and finally decides to share the wealth with Tash and Jack, calling them over. And they just stand there and watch. Jack finally manages a “….wow.” and Owen protests that Gwen has a boyfriend already. “You people and your quaint little categories,” Jack scoffs. “We … should really get her out of there,” mutters Tash, the only one with a brain, but it’s in the voice of someone who has absolutely no intention of doing so. “Yeahhh…” Jack mumbles, then snaps out of it. “I mean, yeah! Come on!” Owen can’t tear himself away from the monitor, and hits “record.”

Back in the cells, clothes are being ripped off. This episode is awesome. I love Torchwood. I also need some booze, right now. Have I mentioned how much I love Torchwood? We gets a quick bra close-up, but then Candice snaps back to normal and is now trying to fend off a predatory Gwen. Ha. “No!” yells Candice (and as we all know, that means ‘no’) “It’s no good!” Ouch. Poor Gwen. “It’s got to be a man!” Awww, prejudiced much? Gwen snaps out of it too, and is kind of like “holy shit why am I half-naked? What was I doing? I hope Owen didn’t tape that and put it on youTube!” Candice begs for Gwen to help her fight off the alien. Gwen reflects on this – save the world, more hot alien mackage. Save the world, more hot – and the alien’s back. Gwen’s cell phone rings and she backs slowly out of the cell, closing the door. The call is, of course, from IB. He wants to know if work is “exciting.” Jack and Tash come by to make sure she’s okay, and she sends them off with an un-ironic thumbs-up.

Gwen leans back against one of the cells, and there’s a crash as the still-incarnerated weevil slams against the wall behind her. Gwen jerks away and looks at the two cells: one with the big nasty monster, the other with little tiny pitiful Candice, her eyes filling with tears. She holds her cell phone against her chest and backs out slowly, looking shell-shocked.

TBC.