‘The next six hours is going to be filled with boredom, followed by monotony,’ CIA agent Rex Matheson (Mekhi Phifer) remarks at the beginning as he boards a transatlantic flight with the manacled members of Torchwood in tow, but the subsequent episode is anything but dull. Following on from the volatile, supercharged opening instalment, it’s necessarily more subdued than last week’s ‘The New World’; expansive and explanatory rather than explosive, but no less enjoyable.
With Rhys (Kai Owen) and his inexhaustible supply of good gags left behind in the UK along with baby Anwen, the role of chief quipper falls to Rex, and he rarely disappoints. Mekhi Phifer breathes life into a succession of one-liners that are so ludicrously over-the-top they end up sounding damn good. ‘What you gonna do about it?’ he snipes at Rhys as Gwen (Eve Myles) and Jack (John Barrowman) are escorted onto the plane. ‘Write to your MP?’ However, after a few bittersweet but touching exchanges between our heroes (‘Did you miss me?’ Jack asks. ‘Yes!’ Gwen snaps) and a bit of handy exposition about morphic fields (‘Come on!’ Rex snorts disbelievingly, ‘that’s just science fiction’), the peaceful journey to America goes awry.
Wayne Knight – best known as Jerry Seinfeld’s nemesis Newman (‘Hello Newman!’) but playing it dead straight here as Brian Friedkin, boss of Rex and Esther Drummond (Alexa Havins) – receives orders from an unknown authority to have both agents removed from the agency and Captain Jack Harkness shoved off this mortal coil. While Esther successfully evades Tough Guy #1 and Tough Guy #2, freeze-dried queen bitch CIA operative Lyn Peterfield (former Dollhouse star Dichen Lachman) gives Jack a Mickey Finn and soon the former boss of Torchwood Three is pale, convulsing and rather-realistically chucking his guts up. At this point, the cast on the aircraft set succumb to cabin fever and a scene that was already partly filler and partly ludicrous becomes entirely overacted.
Gwen loses it completely, shrieking and yelling as she tears the plane apart – ‘It’s just bloody wires!’ – to find the necessary chemicals to formulate an antidote to arsenic poisoning that has been handily recommended by a group of healthcare experts who take a break from trying to cure the human race’s immortality and instead formulate a remedy on the instructions of a doctor – Rex’s pal from Episode 1, Vera Juarez (Arlene Tur) – that they’ve only just met. ‘I knew diabetes would be useful one day,’ comments the bi-curious steward whom everyone thinks is gay. He might as well say, ‘Literally, thank God for this deus ex machina.’ It’s a dismal line in the episode’s only weak scene.
Elsewhere, shabbily-clad paedophile and murderer Oswald Danes (Bill Pullman), who survived his execution thanks to the phenomenon engulfing the human race – ‘He’s the miracle made visible’ – appears on a newscast where he blubs in an apparently genuine act of contrition for his heinous crimes. Paxton is superbly creepy, forging a perfect combination of repulsiveness and charisma to make Danes loathsomely watchable. ‘If the devil walked the earth, I’m sure he’d be in PR,’ he says to drugs company promotional representative Jilly Kitzinger (Six Feet Under’s Lauren Ambrose), who ends up, via a handy cigarette break, in contact with Vera Juarez instead. How Jilly fits into the overall framework of Miracle Day remains unclear, but her less obvious morality makes her a vastly more interesting character than the worthy but dull Doctor with whom she shares a sneaky smoke.
With the occasional shot of severed yet living limbs and mangled bodies refusing to die to remind us what’s happening – and to explain that while people might not be carking it, they’re still getting older – there’s still a spattering of gore and Agent Peterfield’s Death Becomes Her-style reappearance after Rex has snapped her neck is as brilliantly freaky as anything from Torchwood’s past.
Yet despite this, and the usual references to Jack’s rampant sexual past, this is mostly Miracle Day as fairly conventional American drama serial – perhaps thanks to writer Doris Egan’s background on Smallville, Dark Angel and House. However, this isn’t a bad thing; and it’s certainly not a case of the episode treading water, marking time between the explosive opening instalment and the deepening drama to come. It’s more like an impressive demonstration of restraint.
Airs at 9pm on Thursday 21st July 2011 on BBC One.