Not that I’m sure I particularly like Gwen. I’m trying to but there’s just something intrinsically annoying about her. She’s... what’s the word...? Gobby. Mouthy. Loud. She belongs in a sitcom. Something suitably broad and tea-time-safe featuring a long suffering wife (played by Gwen) and an accident prone, perennially skint husband who blunders through life hopping from scrape to scrape. The chortles, I’m sure, would come thick and fast.
Much as they did in last night’s episode of Torchwood. After the previous 2 heavy weight outings pondering on the nature of death and undeadness the TW team played it for laughs in this week’s episode. Gwen finally got spliced to Rhys but only after overcoming a catalogue of disasters that could have been lifted straight out of an episode of Red Dwarf.
1) She gets impregnated by an alien who does the deed by biting her wrist (hey for some people I know that’s foreplay) and injecting her bloodstream with his off-world baby sauce. Kappow. Gwen is instantly 9 months pregnant and is ready to drop the sprog at any moment.
2) Rhys takes it like a man – i.e. looks totally confused and raises his voice a lot – and decides he’ll marry gravid Gwen anyway. After all he’d managed to do up his tie that morning and Gwen had scrubbed up rather nicely in her wedding dress (nice dimples, wink wink).
3) Gwen is being hunted by the alien’s mother who wants to literally rip the alien baby out of her stomach horror-film stylee and get it straight into RADA. The alien, by the way, is a shape changer and can impersonate absolutely anyone. Anyone on the entire planet... So it inexplicably chooses to look like Rhys’s mother played by none other than Nerys Hughes.
4) Del Boy and Rodney gatecrash the wedding dressed as Batman and Robin. No hold on wait, that was Jack and Ianto, sorry, getting my sitcoms confused.
To be honest it was all good clean fun. A mood lightener after the previously bleak story lines. Well, I say “clean” but one of Rhys’s mates did get eaten mid BJ by the alien mother (who I hasten to add didn’t look like Nerys Hughes at that point – this is a sitcom remember not a horror). Apparently she didn’t bite off more than she could chew... though she was possibly wondering why it wasn’t on a stick.
Which is more than can be said for poor Rhys. What kind of life is he going to have married to a woman who could arrive home at any given moment with an extraterrestrial bun in her oven? Up the duff with ET’s love child! In the family way with a Klingon kiddie!
Mind you, to be honest, Gwen’s swollen belly seemed to pass Rhys by – he couldn’t get his eyes further south than her impressively valleyed bosom. I’m sure at one point he was humming I’ll keep a welcome in the hillside...
I don’t think it’ll be too long before Gobby Gwen gets knocked up again.
13 comments:
I enjoyed last night's episode of Torchwood more than most I've seen - the series is now explicitly sending itself up. I mean, how convenient was the 'cosmic re-aligner'(or whatever it was called) thing that painlessly relieved Gwen of her pregnancy? And how ludicrously crap did it look?
Obvious point: that fat DJ fella was supposedly a good mate of the groom, yet no-one seemed to give a shit about him being killed and eaten. If that happened at my wedding, I'd at least offer a toast to the poor fucker...
That's true actually; his death by alien BJ was rather distastefully forgotten about by the end of the episode and the wedding proceeded as planned with the guests all perfectly happy. I don't see how Jack's magic rohipnol (or whatever it's called) would have patched over that troublesome event... But why worry about such annoying plot holes when Gwen looked so lovely in her dress?!
She's not exactly an oil painting, that welsh bint (I can't remember her name), but she's definitely got a little something going on.
I'd love to treat her to a good haggis.
Arghhh Steve! I can't keep up!! I've just watched last week's TW which was brilliant and disturbing, yet with comic touches. I'm looking forward to this week's episode! A
If anyone's going to tempt me to watch, you are!
PS You were tagged earlier this week, sir...! Pay a visit to DTMS? and scroll down.
Your own personal brand, Inchy? ;-)
Annie, this week's is definitely played for laughs and is quite farcical... oddly though, it works!
On my way now, Matthew!
I have to agree with Gwen in the Torchwood Declassified that
I have never been to a Valley's Wedding quite like that one!
Even with Jack's Magic Medicine I think it would be difficult to forget.
Though many of the elements have been in weddings I have attended-
*9 months pregnant Bride(the Bridegroom fainted!)
*Hideous Mother-in-law(including awful perfume!)
*People passed out at the end remembering nothing(without the Retcon!)
Come to think of it, I think Retcon should be more widely available, there are lots of family gatherings I would rather forget!
I enjoyed it more than I thought I would actually and like you said, it was much lighter in tone than the last dead-Owen-centric episodes...probably needed.
Dare I say Gobby Gap-tooth Gwendolyn looked quite nice in her dress (well after the phantom alien was dispatched that is). Amazing how the dress suddenly shrunk to fit though, don't you think? It was like a typical wedding but with some alien nasties thrown in for good measure. I actually thought the alien vampire make-up looked really good - Nerys Hughes was never more unpleasant!
Quite liked Banana Boat too (unlike Tosh) but what happened to him?
Hi OC, guess you were hoping to see the Banana unpeeled eh?
Gwen did look lovely in her dress, I have to say. Scubs up nicely, she does. And what an amazing dress - as you say, shrinks to fit... typical TW plot device!
What a strange, strange, STRANGE show.....! :-)
Eve, now that's a review! ;-)
I started watching the series before I left for New Zealand, so it is good to be able to sit back and watch entertaining series like Torchwood.
I am a bit of secret sci fi fan ( watched the whole SG-1, Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica and 4400; blame Amazon and odd working shifts!).
But I quite enjoy the light humour and innuendos of Torchwood, although I agree with you Steve on finding Gwen slightly annoying. But then I am being girlish and like Captain Jack...lol
Janete, I'm a big sci-fi fan and although I'm aware of Torchwood's many shortcomings part of me does enjoy watching the show. It's a bit of mid-week sci-fi fluff... and it doesn't take itself too seriously. Sometimes though it's a little too flippant...
Everyone I meet - especially if they're female - seems to have a thing about John Barrowman. He does nothing for me (!) but I have heard that he's a tremendously nice guy.
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