If the Devil walked the Earth today, he'd need a PR agent. As played by Lauren Ambrose, twitchy PR agent Jilly Kitzinger (even her name sounds over-caffeinated) may as well be the devil. Red-headed, red-dressed, Satan needs to learn some subtlety.
Or, perhaps, I hear some screaming, Russell T. Davies does.
Let's face it; Davies likes to work in grand sweeping gestures, hammering emotion. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. But when you've got some actors doing intense drama, the urge to go over the top threatens to overpower some fine work. Trust the moments you're building, Mr. Davies.
In the second episode of Miracle Day, subtitled "Rendition," Doris Egan actually scripts, but it's of course under the eye of Davies and the team that created Torchwood in the first place. "Rendition" proves a mixed bag, not so much moving the plot along as offering up ideas as to why there is a plot. It's curiously paced, frontloading with ideas and then taking its time as other characters try to catch up.
But what great ideas – in the first twenty minutes, Dr. Vera Juarez (Arlene Tur) seals her destiny as a future member of Torchwood by being the only person able to synthesize all the new world order into theories. We go back to the idea of aliens – still too pat a conclusion for these non-Torchwood people to be reaching – and then some really horrific consequences get discussed.
First, modern medicine has to reverse its thinking, rushing to fix horrendous wounds before trauma patients die. Of course they're not going to anymore, so even though not enough time has passed to see if healing still works, doctors can take their time.
Ah, and healing may still work, but apparently humans are still aging. Are we going to be turned into a planet of useless husks, bubbling in our own dementia? Or – and Dr. Juarez doesn't quite make this leap, thank you – are we about to become incubators for superbacteria? Could they perhaps be intelligent and engineering all of this?
Of course, an uglier possibility raises its head. Wayne Knight shows up Rex Matheson's (Mekhi Pfifer) supervisor, dispatching Dollhouse's Dichen Lachman to "help" him bring in Torchwood from out of the cold. Meanwhile, Knight tries to eliminate Matheson's one ally left in the CIA, analyst Esther Drummond (Alexa Havins).
For Dr. Vasquez and the demonic Jilly have both reached the conclusion that pain management is the wave of our short-term economy, and that means that somebody's going to profit from keeping the critically injured doped up. So is the real villain Major Pharmaceutical?
When Torchwood works best, it's questioning the best and worst of human nature, and this episode delivers that in spades. With no reincarnation left in their belief systems, India and Pakistan seek to make peace, while in Rwanda, a Hutu village is horrendously slaughtered, because an enemy's suffering can now be essentially eternal.
Except for Captain Jack (John Barrowman), who gets to return to full form this episode, even as he ponders a newfound mortality. Despite his charm, it's the sequences focusing on him that seem to drag the most, suspenseful though they may be. Though at the end Gwen (Eve Myles) sardonically spits "Welcome to Torchwood," this season has made them seem the most ineffective part of the story. No wonder the Americans have to give them new life.
The good and the bad are rolled up in Bill Pullman this week, continuing an amazing turn as the executed child molester Oswald Danes. Still having trouble looking people in the eye, he fully inhabits a man who knows that just because he's no longer in prison, he'll never be free. The question remains as to whether he's truly evil or terribly haunted, brought to a head by a tearful on-air apology.
That would have been moving had the show left it alone; instead, we get those heavy notes of people watching and being moved, telling us what we should think about what they think. Luckily, Pullman's too clever to lay out what he thinks, and the resulting Q Rating – well, the Devil doesn't need PR because we got deservedly damned with that one.
