‘Everywhere I turn, the whole CIA has been poisoned against me,’ Rex (Mekhi Phifer) snarls at Brian Friedkin (Seinfield’s Wayne Knight).

To be fair to Friedkin, except for Esther I don’t think anyone in the CIA actually liked Rex all that much anyhow. He really is a git, nasty even to Esther who dragged his ass out of the fire.

After a brief exchange of threat and beg Rex escapes with the news there are mysterious forces working against them and a phone. Sometimes someone calls on it. Ok, it’s not a lot but they are heading in the right direction.

Torchwood is in their element, out-matched, out-gunned and out-of-luck. Even when they coming down with alien technology, when they had a pterodactyl  living in their rafters, they were always up against enemies that they shouldn’t have been able to beat. And eventually didn’t.

So now, with nothing but a stolen car, a few guns and some old Torchwood software they are going to take on Miracle Day.

If they can stop arguing, shagging and dandering around photogenically in the rain. Seriously? Jack has always been a bad-situation flirt, but he’s never just jumped ship in the middle of a mission to go shagging. It seems short-sighted and unlike him. This is a bad situation, but Jack has been in worse.

Plus, I find myself eyeing his choice of shag-venue dubiously. Jack is canonically omni-sexual, but the three partners we’ve seen him with have been guys. Maybe they are just establishing that he isn’t straight, but I worry they are going to erase that part of his identity. It would be a shame to lose that, although his partner was pretty hot (in a very cut down sex scene).

At least Rex’s hook-up was useful, arming him with fresh dressings, drugs and useful information. He still isn’t my favourite on the show, but the more Phifer gets to do with the character the more he’s growing on me. He’s a jerk, but he’s one that works.

Usually I would be thrilled to see more of his hook-up, Dr Vera Juarez (Arlene Tur), who has been one of the stronger threads in the previous episodes. However, here she is an odd mixture of pragmatic and clueless. She still thinks Miracle Day is a miracle, when it should be obvious to anyone who has seen as much as her that it is not. People aren’t living forever, they are dying forever. Dying of old age, of pain, of grotesque injury and illness, but never actually getting to be peacefully dead. It’s a horror.

Gwen remains the best part of new Torchwood. She is too experienced to act the ingenue anymore (clearly the confidence-lacking, crush-having Esther’s role), but her idealism is still there. Battered, a bit scuffed up and not nearly in as mint condition as Jack’s coat – but there. She still knows what the right thing to do – although sometimes she can’t do it and sometimes she just doesn’t. The lack of surety in her own moral superiority makes her grate a lot less with me.

Unlike Oswald Danes, who remains a revolting and apparently ridiculous element in the story. I can understand the function he is supposed to play in the plot. The Big Bad is an amorphous thing, barely there. A glitter in the red devil’s eye, a triangle on a red phone. Nothing for the audience to hook into, to aim at. So…Oswald. Except he is so translucently, repugnantly bad. A gorb, a child molester, a smirking, smarmy manipulator. Perhaps next episode they will have him kick a puppy, just to make sure we’re clear on him being a monster.

He has been made a fulcrum, for reasons that make no sense. Perhaps we will find some – maybe the writers have a plan – but at the moment it all looks ridiculous. Why would the red devil caper up to this schlubby child rapist and lift him out of the gutter of beatings and grubby motel rooms? Why does Jack suddenly care so much about Oswald and his claims.

Yes, they both killed a child. However, Jack wasn’t a rapist and he didn’t enjoy it. Plus, it’s not as if there is any shortage of child killers in the world. I am sure Jack has met plenty.

Not to mention the American public deciding that said schlubby child-rapist is something to idolize like he’s the second-coming of Justin Bieber.

I haven’t talked that much about the plot, but we didn’t really move that far forward. PhiCorp was revealed to be part of Miracle Day, with stockpiles of pain-killing but non-sleepy drugs.  Hardly a surprise, red devil couldn’t work for anyone but the bad guys, but it was a necessary revelation.

Poor red devil. Out in the world she is heels, hair and wickedness – the splash of colour and the focus of everyone’s attention. In the heart of her company, she plays herself down. Proper, obedient, mousy evil. She is still wonderfully over the top when she gets a chance, playing a part she has been rehearsing for years.

And it has to have been years, they have all their pieces set up just waiting for the first nudge from an undying finger. Stockpiles and money and stooges, all set into motion.

Next week looks to be when things really take off: Gwen sees the sea-side, more people wear masks as sanity runs down like an unwound clock and humanity discovers a whole new sort of bigotry.