Their message is even more insidious than their appearance.
A new cult emerged on Torchwood last night, called the Soulless. You’ve probably already seen the creepy black-eyed pea masks they wear from the show promos, but their message is even more insidious than their appearance.
This group reasons that because they cannot die, they have no souls. To our pre-miracle society, that sounds illogical, but on Torchwood, I think we can tell they have a much firmer grip on the world than we viewers might.
To that end, we discovered that PhyCore, the pharmaceutical company represented by the devil-in-red, Jilly Kitzinger, is almost assuredly behind the Miracle, having stockpiled a mass amount of painkillers in the months previous to M-Day. The beautiful thing about this drug is that its non-narcotic, meaning that everyone on the planet could be addicted, and society would still function without the cloudy consciousness of a narcotic painkiller.
They’ve got a senator behind their plan to sell all drugs over the counter. They’ve even got Oswald Danes – who, as it turns out, is not a repentant, but merely a conflicted pedophile – to lead public opinion in the right direction. They’ve got eyes and ears all over the place keeping tabs on Torchwood.
And the kicker: they’ve got the support of the masses. People want their drugs! Rather than trying to turn Miracle Day into a real miracle, maybe even the birth of a world-wide utopia, the people of earth are partying like it’s the last day of their lives rather than the first of potentially infinite. There are people turning in their sobriety chips and there are people worshipping Oswald Danes… Surely, these people must be the Soulless.
I’ve been wondering how far along the timeline the show is going to take us. Right now, the episodes are flipping by pretty quickly. It seems like long before we get to the Soylent Green days, Captain Jack will have saved the day. I’ve got my fingers crossed that we’ll get to see some of the more spectacular results of the Miracle, but I’m confident that if we don’t, it’ll be because we get something better in the short-term.
And where are our heroes going next? The ties that bind this team together are really not the kind I’d stake the fate of the world on. They’ve set up Jack’s infected scratch like some Achilles’ heel. What’s going to happen to the most mortal man on the planet? Are we really watching Jack deteriorate into the Face of Boe from billions of years in the future?
Gwen and Esther are in no better shape, this episode presenting each of their families as just as just as epic a weakness as Jack’s arm. Rex, on the other hand, while perhaps the most dedicated, seems to be the least reliable. I find myself as invested in the tenuous group dynamic as in the plot.
Is the team headed for Los Angeles? A clue was dropped in the PhyCore seminar that they have another office there, and I just can’t imagine what other leads the team has at this point.
All in all, this was another great episode, leading us deeper into the hell that Miracle Day sets up. While I’m a little dismayed that there was more action than ideas this episode, as a result I find it hard to not feel even more excited for next week.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.