Torchwood: Series 1 Episode 10

When a small passenger aircraft falls through the Rift from 1953, the Torchwood team tries to help three temporal immigrants adapt to a new life in present-day Cardiff. Out of Time is unusual in that the regulars, with the exception of Owen (Burn Gorman) hardly feature at all.

Mark Lewis Jones Guest Stars

The refugees react in very different ways; of the passengers, John Ellis (Mark Lewis Jones) is a traditional working class man who served in the war, and who fathered a boy who - at the time of his disappearance - was sixteen. John finds him a prematurely senile old man who has no recollection of him and does not recognize him. John’s house has been demolished. Smoking – one of the few pleasures left to him – is outlawed indoors, and he is completely alone. Unable to face the thought of starting again, he trails a hose from the exhaust into his car, and kills himself. In a wonderfully poignant moment, the camera cuts to an invincible Jack, sitting the passenger seat, holding his hand, tears streaming down his face.

By contrast, Emma (Olivia Hallinan) is a shy, demure young girl with no ties to her own age. She is liberated from the everyday repression she experienced in her own time, and finds warmth and companionship with the other girls in the hostel where she’s been placed. Emma ends up by going to London – she is the one girl who has some sort of happy ending.

Pilot Diane Holmes (Louise Delamere) is a woman who was struggling to come to terms with a post-war world: the same world that had taught her to fly during wartime, then discarded her experience as superfluous to requirements. At first Diane embraces the new world she has found herself in.

Owen is enchanted by her, and she seems to reciprocate his feelings (ever since the first episode featured Owen spraying himself with a fragrance that makes him sexually irresistible, at least one viewer has wondered whether he used it to bed Gwen). He falls headlong, hopelessly in love with her, showing a previously hidden side that is more vulnerable, making him almost likable.

An Intense Affair

However, as their affair grows ever more physical and intense, so Diane starts to long to move on. It’s unclear whether it’s simply a fear of commitment in general, or intimacy with Owen.

Despite Owen being distraught and begging her to stay, in a finale whose consequences will reverberate throughout the rest of the series, Diane flies her plane back into the rift, even knowing that the historical records show that she never returned.

Owen is left bereft.

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