Was it one of those slow-motion explosions? Those are pretty easy to outrun....

bwah! yes! I was confused because suddenly they were all back at Torchwood and there was no explanation.

Maybe the BBCA edit cut something. I don't remember the details from the airing I watched a week and a half ago.

The paramedic caused the explosion at the underpass. The driver behind him was honking and yelling. Don't know whether he survived. Nobody from Torchwood was there.

The slomo explosion was the guy with the shirt and tie who killed the city emergency planning chief and his family. Torchwooders were there. I assumed they got back to HQ during the commercial break, and we didn't see it because nothing of moment happened.

Maybe the BBCA edit cut something.

I suspect this. I remember that all the sleepers exploderated but Beth and the last dude, and that they showed most of the explosions and also confirmed it in dialogue.

I was also reading the newspaper as I watched so it's possible I missed a line or two of dialogue.

Sarah Jane Adventures are going to air on Scifi this APRIL!

"There's death and despair," he said, "but less violence and more fun. Also, more hugs."

Huh.

Have you seen the SJAs, Tommy? I can confirm that there is more hugging. Less M/M snogging, but more hugging.

Torchwood 2.02: I actually had a lot of problems with this episode. I got talked down off some of them on lj, but I still feel like overall, there were some hot button problems.

I felt like it was too close to the Cyberwoman episode with a black female being Other, mysterious and dangerous, possessed by something else, and without agency outside of her husband, with the only possible ending for her to go down in a hail of Torchwood bullets. Not just one bullet.

She's half of a mixed race couple and is automatically assumed to be the villain. She is incarcerated, coerced, and ultimately subjected to extreme and potentially lethal levels of pain to force a confession.

The other angle to it, the sleeper cell/terrorism thing is a problem for me, too, but I have to give it more thought.

Because, after going somewhat ape upon seeing the ep, I read this fascinating discourse over at lj, where BHP expresses several of my objections. Make sure you read the whole thing, because there's a British POV in there that completely flipped my world around and makes me think differently about the ep.

Before reading that, I felt that I was being asked to accept that Jack, the hardcore boss figure, Did The Right Thing, and we should all get in line and applaud his willingness to make the tough decision, blah blah. But what the commenter in the journal said was, look, the cultural bias here means that we see the charismatic, charming Jack as charismatic, charming, and (and this is the important bit) fundamentally untrustworthy. The American wartime imagery that is Jack, is an image that brings with it a completely different subtext. The expectation is that Jack will recommend direct action, after which one of the team will come up with the right answer.

I'm paraphrasing here, so unAmericans can correct me at will, but I found this fascinating. That recasts the entire way I view the episode, and indeed probably the series. If I'm being asked to view Jack as untrustworthy, then I'm intended to view his abrasive choices with discomfort. In fact the whole thing becomes a negative commentary on American torture practices instead of a tacit approval or at least nonaction.

That still leaves my objection to yet another mixed race couple (yay, mixed race couples!) where the minority female is ultimately evil and causes pain and/or death to the white male. But I know that ita, among others, feels differently about the depiction, so I'm willing to have the discussion further.

I hadn't thought of the racial angle before. I think there's a valid argument to be made, based (at minimum) on Beth and Cyberwoman being the only black women (and really, just about the only blacks of any gender) that we've seen at all.

I must say it's an interesting commentary that Jack is supposed to represent The American Way -- jumping right into action and doing the wrong thing.

I think there's also another argument on interracial couples. While I don't dispute your interpretation, it's also true that interracial couples (and I'll add Tosh and the alien) don't excite comment for being interracial.