Gadgets & Gizmos Everything Changes

Acknowledgements

Before I start, I would like to thank Gary Russell for writing the excellent 'Torchwood: The Encyclopaedia’ as this was my reference bible during the writing of this article. And also for some little guidance from the man himself along with a fellow fan ThetaSigmaLady on Twitter with regards to one of the gadgets I speak of.

Introduction

Over the coming issues, we shall be looking at the various alien gadgets and gizmos seen throughout the four series of Torchwood that were used by the team and other characters in each of the episodes.

We will look at everything from Toshiko’s book scanner, to the contact lenses used both in Children of Earth and Miracle Day. We'll look at them in as much detail as we can manage and even look, where possible, at our own technologies that maybe similar to those seen in Torchwood.

So for issue 02 we shall start at the beginning. Episode 01 “Everything Changes.” And the very first gadget is right at the start of the show.

The Resurrection Gauntlet

Also known as the ‘Risen Mitten’, so named by Ianto Jones.

The first thing we notice about the gauntlet is that it looks like a piece of a knight’s armour with its jointed fingers, held together with rivets and made for the right hand. The metal looks to be nothing more special than the aforementioned knight’s armour. But that’s where the similarities between the two end.

The gauntlet was thought to have fallen through the rift around 1967 and into Cardiff Bay where it lay at the bottom until it was dredged almost 40 years later by Torchwood Three and at the time no one at Torchwood knew what it did.  So Captain Jack Harkness had his weapons expert and second in command, Suzie Costello (Indira Varma), do research and experiments with the gauntlet to try and find out what exactly it did.

She discovered that this piece of alien tech was able to bring back the recently deceased for a very short time; the return to life really was very brief, only around 2 minutes, and depended on both the experience and the empathy of the user. Suzie also found that it was much more effective on recently deceased victims of violent trauma. For the user to successfully use the gauntlet it seemed they needed a certain amount of empathy and so not everyone was able to use it. Only Suzie and Gwen seemed to be in tune with the gauntlet and manage to use it, everyone else had tried and failed. We also see that it’s not just humans it works on, as we do see Suzie bring a fly back to life and apparently she also did this with goldfish.

Suzie became obsessed by the gauntlet and wanted to see how far she could push it and if consistent usage would improve the time. But she needed victims and there were not enough forthcoming so she started killing. John Tucker (Rhys Swinburn), who we see at the start of the episode, was her final victim. To do this she used another item that was, apparently, found with the first gauntlet and named ‘Life Knife’ by Ianto Jones. This was an ornate and complex blade, with wing like blades fixed to the side of the main part of the knife and was approximately 18 inches long, from the top of the handle to the tip of the blade. (We will look at this more closer when we look at the gadgets used in ‘They Keep Killing Suzie.’)

At the end of this episode Suzie is found out and takes her own life in front of Jack, whom she’d just shot in the head moments before, (which he’d recovered from), and PC Gwen Cooper.

Further down the line we find out more about the gauntlet in ‘They Keep Killing Suzie’ when they have to bring her back from the dead to find out some information. This time it’s Gwen who resurrects Suzie, also using the ‘Life Knife', which adds extra power to the gauntlet. They have to use the two together because she’s been dead a while. Ianto's stopwatch is ticking away and gets past the usual 2 minutes and Suzie is still alive. After a while they come to realise that she isn't going to die again. She stays alive, living, breathing and bleeding from the wound in her head, which as time progresses, starts to heal. It’s discovered that as Suzie is getting better, Gwen is dying and that from the moment Suzie drew breath again, a permanent link between them had occurred. A symbiotic link between Suzie and Gwen’s hearts and Suzie was draining Gwen of her life. It’s also found that it seems impossible to kill Suzie, regardless how many rounds Jack put in her.  In the end the only way they manage to break the link and kill Suzie is for Toshiko to destroy the gauntlet.  Towards to end of the episode Ianto made a point of the fact that gloves and so therefore gauntlets always come in pairs; so implying there must be a second gauntlet out there.

The first and right-hand gauntlet could only be used by Suzie and Gwen, but when the left- hand gauntlet was discovered by Jack in “Dead Man Walking” series 2, and retrieved from St Mary’s church, after Jack had spoken to a mysterious girl who read Tarot and informed Jack of the second gauntlets location. He was able to use it to bring back Owen, who’d been killed by Aaron Copley (Alan Dale) at the Pharm. And once again, Owen stayed alive, though more like an animation of himself than really alive - Owen could speak and to all intents and purposes he was Owen, but he wasn’t breathing and had no heartbeat. And worse still, he couldn’t heal. A broken bone stayed a broken bone. Owen also became a conduit for a death-like being, who used Owen to access our world in order to take souls and to bring itself permanently back, just as it had back in 1479 through a child called Faith. In the end, like Faith, it was Owen who destroyed Death when it tried to feed off him, as it's 13th victim, but Owen had no life for Death to use.

Here’s something to ponder on before we leave the Resurrection Gauntlet behind. Jack couldn’t use the first, but he could the second and it was this gauntlets power that Death used to come back from the darkness. Was it because of Jack that it was able to create this easy root back? Jack, after all, is the man that doesn’t stay dead. He knows what’s beyond life. And because the first gauntlet seemed different from the second, this may account for why Jack couldn’t use it. But then again, it was a priest who used it, back in 1479, to bring back Faith...who knows?

One of the other major differences between the two gauntlets is this one doesn't create a permanent symbiotic link between user and victim. That's not to say it didn't work in a similar way to the first, using some of the users life to initially resurrect the victim; something Jack has in abundance.

What Do We Have On Earth?

When I try to think of something that returns someone from the dead, the nearest I can get is a defibrillator that is used by doctors and paramedics. Though in reality, and unlike in TV and movies, it is not used to re-start the heart when it ‘flat lines.’  When that happens CPR has to be used in order to get the heart going again, along with other things such as drugs and direct heart massage.

The reality is that a defibrillator is used when a heart fibrillates, meaning it’s out of it’s normal rhythm. The electrical jolt of the defibrillator knocks it back into rhythm.

The Cologne

This episode is the only time we see this alien gizmo.  This spray consists of an alien pheromone that makes the user instantly attractive to anyone close by. To look at it looks no different to a bottle of spray perfume. But when sprayed, the sprayed mist sparkles with lights, which does make us wonder if it maybe is huon based. As I said the user will attract ANYONE. So if they are male and straight, they are just as likely to attract another male, as a woman. And they may well be straight too. It seems to cut away all boundaries of sexuality.

In “Everything Changes” we see Owen use it when he goes out for the night looking for a date. He chats up a woman at the bar, without success. So he resorts to the spray, at which point she is instantly attracted to him and all she wants to have sex with Owen. But it backfires because she has a boyfriend. To save himself from a beating Owen sprays himself again and now the boyfriend is also instantly attracted to Owen and thinking the same things as his girlfriend. After a quick snog from the guy Owen makes a hasty retreat.

But how does it work? Maybe it some how scans the person you are standing near and reproduces the pheromone it now knows instantly attracts that person and so changes the users own pheromones to match it.

What Do We Have On Earth?

If there was any kind of earth equivalent it would have to be something like the Lynx deodorant ads where the spray is so amazing it will draw any woman from her partner to the one who is wearing the Lynx. But that’s all fantasy and good advertising.

Reader

This item is something quite, I feel, wondrous and a personal favourite. A handheld scanner that literally LIFTS the pages from the book. Every detail from the words themselves to the imperfections of the paper.

We see Toshiko use this in a cut scene that is interspersed with Jack telling Gwen about Torchwood. We see Tosh take the Reader to her book shelf and hold it against the spine of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. She then takes the scanner and holds it against the edge of the monitor of her computer, not the CPU as we would expect. There the Reader downloads the book, seemingly, directly to the monitor and the pages of the book unfurl before Tosh's, and our, very eyes.

So now I am finding myself wondering how it worked. Getting my Toshiko hat on here. Well we're never going to truly know the answer, but we can muse over it anyway. Maybe one way is through sonic waves that bounce back different signals to the device depending on what it hits. So blank paper would give off a different signal to that of lettering. Or maybe a kind of reflective light that penetrates the paper and the light reflected back is again different depending what it encounters.

I shall leave you all to surmise how you think it may work.

And finally, the eagle eyed Woodies amongst you will, as series one progressed, have noticed something and I must confess that until I was reminded, I had forgotten a slight detail about this Reader scanner. It, or what LOOKS like the Reader,  makes an appearance in episode 04, "Cyberwoman" where you see Tosh with a Lockbreaker that looks uncannily like the Reader in episode 01. The reason being is that it is thought, by Torchwood, that they share the same alien origins..,OR the props department  loved their work so much they used it again and just hoped we wouldn't notice or we'd think the previous explanation I gave. 

What Do We Have On Earth?

The closest technology we have to such a thing is more of a combination of two different technologies. The scanner, either flatbed or hand scanner. And the Kindle, which is a computerised book reading device. As you know, you buy and download a book and read it on a small flat screen device. You can also download software that does the same thing for your phone, PC, and tablet. But, as of yet, we don’t have a device that can be held to the outside of a book, scans it and transfers to your computer……yet!