Torchwood Children of Earth, part 4: Endless love

Once again, I don't have time to give each episode of "Torchwood: Children of Earth" the proper review it deserves, so I'm going to offer up a few quick thoughts after the jump and then open it up to you. Spoilers for episode four coming up just as soon as I bump up the numbers...

"A man who can't die has got nothing to fear. So you watch it. And you keep watching." -Alice

And now "Torchwood" is not playing around, at all. Rest in peace, Ianto Jones. The line to pillory Russell T. Davies forms after all the Donna Noble fans have had their say.

Ianto's death in Thames House is the climactic, tragic scene of episode four, but the hour has several sequences that are more horrific, even if they don't bring about the end of a popular ongoing character (and Captain Jack's boyfriend).

The first is our glimpse of what The 4-5-6 actually look like -- and, more importantly, what was done with the kids Jack gave them in 1965. "Children of Earth" has gotten a lot of mileage out of using The 4-5-6 as an implied, unseen threat, and even here, the sequence is cleverly shot from the POV of the soldier's video camera, so the picture quality is poor and intermittent. We see everything we need to see to be disturbed, but not so much that we can start to spot the seams of the trick, you know?

Even more disturbing, though, is the scene where the Prime Minister and his people hash out how to select the 10 percent of their children who will be turned into immortal, catatonic fanny packs for The 4-5-6. Davies' work has never shown much fondness for politicians, but Denise's speech about the necessity of discrimination at a time like this -- "Should we treat them equally? God knows we've tried and we've failed." -- are among the most chilling words ever uttered by a "Doctor Who" villain -- if not moreso, because she's not an alien invader bent on global domination, but a scared human being trying to protect what's hers by passing the burden on to someone else.

(There aren't a lot of commonalities between "Doctor Who"/"Torchwood" and "The Wire," but I could sure imagine Tommy Carcetti participating in the American version of that meeting, couldn't you?)

But getting back to Ianto's death, what makes it especially crushing is that it comes almost immediately after it seems that Torchwood has successfully turned the tables on both the government and The 4-5-6. They can blackmail the PM into getting whatever they want, and they have knowledge and technology that the aliens might not be ready for -- but they, in turn, aren't prepared for how quickly and fatally this one representative could strike back. So Ianto (and a bunch of MI-5 employees without easy access to HazMat suits) is dead, Torchwood is now down to a team of two (three if you want to count Rhys), and it looks like the bad guys -- both the aliens and the humans -- are going to win. What now?

Keep in mind, as always, that we're following the American broadcasting schedule of this show, so talk about the first four episodes and only the first four, even if you've already seen the whole series because you live in England or are handy with illegal downloads. Any comment I consider the least bit over the line gets deleted, period.

Considering that, what did everybody else think?