Torchwood “Rendition”

So, Miracle Day is when the entire human race stopped dying…no matter what happened to their bodies.  Except for Jack.  Jack, this time around, can die.

Now, why the only mortal man on Earth is suddenly a target for assassination doesn’t make a whole lot of sense unless part of it is because Jack has made a lot of enemies over the course of his very long life.

But that’s the problem.  The CIA has decided Jack and Gwen know something (they don’t, but they aren’t as dumb as Rex figures them to be), and Rhys has to…stay home with the baby.  Rhys never did get much respect.  Then again, he actually took up for Jack at one point in this episode, so Miracle Day is making strange incidents happen the world over.

Oh, and this episode makes it clear that only humans suddenly stopped dying.  Everything else is still carrying on like it was before.

Regardless, we have Jack and Gwen on a plane with Rex, the flight crew, and one other CIA agent who seems a little suspicious to me, but I haven’t trusted that woman since she went all homicidal over on Altered Carbon.

Sure enough, Rex’s boss…Wayne Knight?!?…decides he and Esther are no longer trustworthy, pulls their security clearance, and orders Jack killed because…Jack ran over his dog once or something, I dunno.  I don’t think these people are thinking things through.

The plan to poison Jack doesn’t quite work when Gwen knocks the woman agent out, Rex calls his doctor, one Vera Juarez, for help, and Gwen, Rex, and the crew do a makeshift cure for arsenic.  It works.  Jack will live.

Then again, so will everyone else.  No one is dying.  And the show is actually doing a good job so far thinking through what that all means.  Like, apparently, immortality doesn’t mean eternal youth and people are still aging.

Granted, it also means that there’s the Oswald Danes subplot, one where his blubbering how sorry he is for killing a kid somehow nets him some sympathy.  I didn’t think his performance was that good, but PR woman Jilly Kitzinger does and…wait, Lauren Ambrose?  She’s been awesome since Six Feet Under.

Regardless, it does mean Rex, Esther, Jack, and Gwen go on the run once they arrive in the States, though that woman agent did have her neck snapped by Rex after a fight, and last we saw of her, she was walking away with her head on backwards.

You know, sometimes dying is the better option.