Oh dear…
As second impressions go, this is not a great one. To use an analogy Dr Owen Harper would approve of, it feels like I’ve been on a date with a tall, handsome stranger who’s charmed me and left me wanting more with an air of mystery and mature sophistication, but they’ve shown up for a second date and been loud, boorish and left a big bag of dog poo on the dinner table (I imagine Owen would use a different word for poo though!).
I thought this was pretty terrible from start to finish unfortunately - the most glaring issue is that the A-plot is incredibly juvenile (I think the Whoniverse is easily capable of delivering a mature story about sex, but this ain’t it chief), but I also think all the surrounding elements were dull and uninteresting. After the smart, compelling opening episode, everything here is done in the dullest possible way: Owen continues to be an all-round douche, Gwen is reduced to being “the normal one” who has to teach everyone else to care about other people, Jack is a generic man of mystery (but he also loses the edge he had in Everything Changes), and Tosh and Ianto barely seem to do anything. On top of all that, we get Gwen predictably fobbing off Rhys and not telling him what she’s up to (which is going to continue throughout the season, I assume), and her old police colleagues predictably giving her the cold shoulder. It all just feels really obvious, and everything develops in a very generic way, IMO. And yet despite that, we still somehow get a happy ending, that feels completely unearned - possessed or not, Carys still chooses to go and kill her ex-boyfriend, but it’s okay everyone, he was a a cheater after all! She also killed, I don’t know, about seven men at the sperm bank, but they don’t count either, because we never learn their names and they were probably all single weirdos anyway (the scene with Tosh opening every door in the building and finding tiny piles of dust in each one is so absurd it’s actually funny). As long as we can get our moment of All Feeling Good because Gwen reminded us to not be completely heartless, it’s good enough for us (/s for the last few sentences, in case it’s not obvious).
There were a whole bunch of other things I disliked - Gwen releasing the alien by accidentally throwing a screwdriver at it, the pointless lesbian makeout scene, the lame fight between Jack and Carys and her escape from the hub, the extremely predictable moment where Gwen gets to show she Doesn’t Take Any S#&t by putting Owen against the wall, you name it. This felt like a filler episode of the X-Files but with none of the wit, charm, or production values, and we’re only on episode two! Very disappointing - I knew this first season was supposed to be mixed, but I wasn’t expecting something quite so poor on only the second episode…