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They Keep Killing Suzie is the Torchwood episode in which Suzie Costello -- played by Indira Varma -- comes back to haunt Captain Jack and Gwen Cooper
The team is called to a crime scene, where an irate police officer stands waiting outside a suburban semi-detached house, arms folded. “This is down to you,” she says to Captain Jack. In the bedroom a scene of carnage awaits them. A couple sit up in bed, their throats cut. On the wall one word is written in their blood; ‘Torchwood.’ Later the team are called to a night-club where a man is causing trouble. He seems at first to calm down, but then suddenly runs amok. When the team have sedated him and taken him in, Owen (Burn Gorman) runs tests on the man, and finds that he can trigger murderous rages, simply by uttering the word ‘Torchwood.’ Trawling through the records, they find that the man had something in common with the couple; they were all members of a group that met every week. Someone else who was in the group was Suzie Costello (Indira Varma), the member of the group who killed herself in Day One. It emerges that the psychosis the berserkers displayed was from being overdosed on an amnesia drug kept in the Torchwood labs. The only person who could have dispensed that drug in those meetings was Suzie. Torchwood’s central mission is to impound, retain and adapt alien technology so that it can be used by humanity against alien invaders (although there is precious little evidence of that last part of the manifesto ever coming to pass). Amongst the various bits of alien kit in the Torchwood archives shown the viewer in Day One was an glove that allowed the wearer to bring a recently killed person back to life and to relive the last thirty to forty-five seconds of their life. With the unanswered questions about Suzie’s role in the recent spate of killings piling up, the team have no option but to revive her. However, when the team revives Suzie, a strange connection between Gwen and the dead woman revives her for far longer than the gauntlet's record two minutes. Before long it becomes clear that Suzie knows far more than she’s saying, and that she won’t answer any questions until she’s allowed to visit her dying father. Gwen must choose between mindlessly obeying orders, and betraying Jack’s trust. Her betrayal mirrors that of every other character in the series in one other episode or another, but what Gwen doesn’t know is that she is in mortal peril, and that the danger grows with every passing minute… They Keep Killing Suzie towers head and shoulders above every other episode, and is the one episode when the series delivered on its potential. The plot is a series of nested sub-plots, and every time the viewer seems to have the answer to the central mystery, another layer of story-line is revealed. And for once the alien technology is integral to the plot, and makes this episode the one truly SF-nal episode in the series.
The copyright of the article Torchwood: Series 1 Episode 8 in Sci-Fi TV Episode Summaries is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish Torchwood: Series 1 Episode 8 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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