Plot
On the night before her wedding, Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) is bitten on the arm by a male shape shifting alien. Her boss, Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) kills the alien, and Gwen attends her hen night though is troubled by her wound. She wakes up the next morning heavily pregnant. Jack arrives along with Torchwood's medic Owen Harper (Burn Gorman) to examine Gwen and tries to persuade her to cancel her wedding. Gwen's fiancee Rhys (Kai Owen) also tries to postpone the wedding in Gwen's interest but Gwen insists that the wedding go ahead as she desires nothing more than to marry him. The sudden pregnancy is explained to Gwen and Rhys' families as their own child. Gwen's mother (Sharon Morgan) and father (William Thomas) are excited at the prospect of a grandchild, but Rhys' parents suspect Gwen of being pregnant by another man. Torchwood agent Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori) is sent to the wedding venue to keep an eye on Gwen and to deliver a new wedding dress to accommodate her alien pregnancy.
At Torchwood's Cardiff headquarters, Owen determines from an autopsy that the alien that impregnated Gwen is a Nostrovite, a race of carnivorous shape shifters who hunt in pairs and mate for life. He tells Jack that after fertilisation, the female transfers her eggs to the male who plants them in a host body until they are ready to hatch. Later, the female kills the host to release the offspring. At the wedding venue, the female Nostrovite (Colette Brown) murders and partly devours the wedding Disk Jockey. Toshiko investigates along with Rhys' best man "Banana Boat" (Jonathan Lewis Owen) and they are subsequently captured by the alien, who intends to feed on them later. As Gwen and Rhys prepare to say their wedding vows, Jack runs up the aisle and demands that the wedding be halted. Owen and Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd) free Toshiko but the half-eaten corpse of the wedding DJ is discovered by a bridesmaid who alerts the entire wedding party to the murder. The Nostrovite reveals herself and is chased away by Jack, escaping through a window.
Jack questions Owen about Gwen and Rhys, and he states that Rhys' mother Brenda (Nerys Hughes) is with them. Tosh mentions that she saw Brenda with Gwen's mother Mary in the garden. Tosh and Jack rush to the couple's room, where Jack identifies Brenda as an alien and calls her an "ugly bitch". After Brenda protests her innocence and Rhys punches Jack, Gwen states that Rhys' mother is not the shapeshifter as Brenda wears a distinctive perfume. Torchwood reach the garden to find the Nostrovite, in Brenda's image, with Mary. The alien holds Mary hostage, demanding that Gwen give her her child. Gwen walks towards them and as the Nostrovite releases Mary Gwen reveals a hidden gun in her wedding bouquet and fires at the creature. Owen suggests using a piece of alien equipment called the singularity scalpel to destroy the alien fetus. He sends Gwen to her room and teaches Rhys how to use the scalpel; Owen cannot use it himself due to injuries sustained in his undead state. Gwen is approached by Jack and reveals to him that she would have married Rhys a long time ago if she had not met him. She leans in as he appears to be ready to kiss her but he reveals himself to be the Nostrovite. Owen enters, shooting the creature whilst Gwen exits with Rhys. The Nostrovite, still in Jack's form, attempts to attack Owen only to be repelled by the fact he is dead.
Rhys and Gwen find refuge in a barn and Rhys explains Owen's plan to remove the fetus. As the Nostrovite launches an assault on the door of the barn, Rhys succeeds in destroying the fetus. The Nostrovite enters, again impersonating Rhys' mother. She attacks Rhys, who attempts to protect himself with a chainsaw, which malfunctions. Jack arrives and kills the alien with a more powerful gun. He shares a moment of joy with Gwen before praising Rhys' own display of heroism and telling him that "the hero always gets the girl". Rhys and Gwen return to the wedding venue and are married. At the wedding reception, they notice the guests all suddenly falling asleep. Jack reveals that he has drugged them all with amnesia pills mixed with sedative so that they will not remember the events of the day. Jack offers Gwen and Rhys pills too but Gwen declines as she does not wants any secrets in her marriage to Rhys. As Gwen and Rhys anticipate their honeymoon, Torchwood clear up the mess left behind. Later, Jack enters the Hub alone, and retrieves an old tin box from his office. He looks through photographs from his past, reminiscing, before picking up a picture of himself and an unidentified bride at their wedding.
Read more about this topic: Something Borrowed (Torchwood)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
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—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)