cyber-goodness, cyber-badness

As I've said before, I don't have cable and really don't even turn on the TV except to watch DVD's. But if I did have cable and watched TV, I would be sooo into Torchwood. I rented the DVD of the first couple of episodes and fell completely in love, but since then I'd only followed the show via io9 and Wikipedia...until I found out that someone on YouTube has taken it upon himself to upload whole episodes. That's how I came to watch "Cyberwoman" - and to embed it below for your viewing pleasure.

If you haven't seen the episode already, the pic above should give you all the incentive you need. In fact, you don't even need much background to follow the storyline, but I'll provide a little here for the five or ten of you not already more familiar with the show than I am.

Torchwood is a (very adult) spinoff of Dr. Who. It centers on a group, led by the secretly immortal and not-so-secretly pansexual Captain Jack Harkness, who track down and eliminate alien threats to earth. They operate out of an underground base in Cardiff, which apparently makes even less sense to British people than it does to me.

Anyway, the nervous-looking guy you see at the beginning of this episode is Ianto, who until now, has been a very quiet, very efficient, sort-of office boy. This is the first Ianto-centric episode of Torchwood; and it involves, as you quickly find out, his never-before-mentioned girlfriend who's been half-converted into a Cyberwoman. If you don't already know about the Cybermen, the easiest way to think of them is as a British version of the Borg, although they were terrorizing the Dr. Who universe decades before Star Trek: Next Generation ever came into being.

That's all you need to know before you delve into the episode. This first clip runs a little under ten minutes, and if you like what you see, you can easily move on to the next segment without ever leaving this page. There are five segments in all, and they are absolutely worth watching in full. The story is taut, sexy, and wrenching; and the actors playing Ianto and his girlfriend are phenomenal. So enjoy - before the Torchwood lawyers come along and make PKNoHonor take his clips down! ;-)