Next morning, Gwen’s alarm goes off, and she hits the off button sleepily, then sees her wedding dress hanging there, and claps her hands together with delight, suddenly fully alert. A subtitle informs us it is “Saturday morning”. No shit. Gwen hops out of bed, and looks down as she does so, and in doing so she sees something that freaks her the hell out. She stares at a mirror to check that she really is seeing what she’s seeing, and yep, she’s heavily pregnant. Surprise! She jumps back, looking like she might throw up, but then just lets out a hilariously underwhelmed “Ohhh.” That is the noise you make when you realise you’ve just missed the bus and will have to wait another ten minutes, or discover that you’ve run out of sugar. That is not the noise you make when it is the morning of your wedding and you appear to be carrying an almost fully developed foetus that wasn’t there a few hours ago.
Credits. Episode by Phil Ford, another new name on me, though he did a couple of Sarah Jane Adventures episodes. I should watch that show. Not based on the strength of his writing here, obviously, but because, despite being specifically aimed at children, I can’t imagine that it could possibly be a more childish and stupid spinoff than Torchwood. Really, now.
Gwen’s place. Owen holds a stethoscope to her stomach and confirms that she does indeed appear to be pregnant. Gwen wants a second opinion, which Jack is happy to provide. She’s pregnant. Teeth implanted the eggs in her through his bite, it’s a thing that some alien species do. Gwen stomps down to the kitchen and starts munching on a jar of pickles straight out of the fridge. It’s… not the most attractive she’s ever looked, for sure. Owen tells her not to worry, they have procedures to deal with this sort of thing, which I guess is what Jack was talking about when he mentioned having been pregnant way back when. Gwen’s extremely glad to hear this, until Owen mentions that she’ll be back on her feet in “a couple of days.” Because, in case you hadn’t noticed, she kind of has a wedding to get to before then. Owen tells her she’ll have to postpone, and Gwen’s neck veins start bulging and she starts ranting about how much it costs to organise a wedding and lah dee dah, I don’t care about the serious risk it poses to my physical well-being, THIS WEDDING WILL NOT BE STOPPED. It’s dumb, and everybody knows it’s dumb, but this is a farcical episode, which makes it toally OK for the characters to act like raging idiots, because it’s all in the name of comedy. Except none of it is actually particularly funny, so it just serves to make me and the episode get off on the wrong foot right away, and considering later developments, this episode really needs to work up all the goodwill it can muster as early as possible. Would the episode lose anything by having the pregnancy not be visible, and having the rest of team only find out when the wedding is about to start and having to interrupt in a vaguely comical manner? It’d still be the same wacky farce, but without everybody demonstrating IQs lower than their shoe sizes.
April 9, 2009 at 10:30 am
I think that it is a very interesting and amusing article. Practically all its main points are true.