An elderly lady is in a forest at night, obviously looking for something. As she stands on the edge of a clearing, small, luminous flying creatures are seen, seemingly fairies. She photographs them. As she turns away, they morph into something far more sinister looking.
Captain Jack is experiencing nightmare flashbacks while catching a nap in the Torchwood Center, but they're cut so quickly - we can't really make out what's happening. Getting up, he sees Ianto is still there. The tension between them is apparent (presumably following on from last week's "Cyberwoman" episode).
In the next scenes, a child is waiting for her stepfather to pick her up from school, and is being watched by a pedophile, who tries to lure her in to his car. She is saved by an unseen force. Most of these scenes are from the force's point of view, with a green tint and soft focus, very much like the opening scenes of "The Evil Dead". We hear a distorted childlike voice say "Come away, human child".
Capt Jack & Gwen attend a talk given by the old lady from the pre-title sequence. She's giving a presentation of slides showing the "fairies", whom she says are "friendly, loving creatures”, but according to Jack, she is "Wrong. She always gets it wrong".
Meanwhile, the pedophile has left his car and is staggering around a market, coughing, and vomiting red flower petals. He begs a police officer to help him and manages to get himself arrested.
The old lady is called Estelle, and Capt Jack & Gwen visit her at home. Surprisingly, she has very old pictures of Jack on her mantle. The photos are old, but Jack looks exactly like he does now. When Gwen asks about this, he dismisses her with an explanation that it was his father in the photo. He & Estelle knew each other during the war.
The pedophile is killed in his jail cell, choked on red petals. Jack has seen this before. He explains that they are not an alien race, they can be seen peripherally, they live forever and protect their own. They have a "chosen one" - a human child whom they look after, and can control the elements and the weather.
Estelle comes under attack and is drowned in heavy rain on an otherwise clear night. The weather anomaly is picked up by Torchwood. Jack cries as he sees her body and admits to Gwen that it was indeed him in the photos. "We made each other a vow that we'd be with each other until we died". He also explains his first encounter with the "fairies" was in Lahore, India in 1919. Here we see a more detailed version of the earlier flashback. He was in charge of a squad of 15 soldiers on a train. As it entered a tunnel, the train stopped and all 15 men were killed, chocked with red petals. Capt Jack was left unharmed. The men had inadvertently killed a child a week earlier. That child was the chosen one.
Gwen's home has been trashed - there are red petals among the wreckage.
Torchwood track another incidence of freak weather to a primary school, where the fairies are protecting the chosen one, Jasmine Pierce (no relation) who was the girl saved from the pedophile. A couple of bullies are picking on her. Incredibly high winds rear up, leaving Jasmine untouched. Later, they launch a spectacular attack on a family barbeque, killing Jasmine's cruel stepfather. Here they reveal themselves and manifest as green, tall, thin, spindly, sprite-like creatures with gossamer wings. Jasmine follows them as they lure her away to an area close to the house which used to be an old forest.
Gwen & Jack follow Jasmine...and in a stunning development, Jack allows Jasmine to go with them in order to save the many. The Torchwood team is disgusted with him, Jasmine's mother in hysterical with grief, having lost both her partner and her daughter within the space of a few minutes. But, as Jack pleads "what else could I do?”
The episode ends on a somber note as Gwen sees an image of a fairy with Jasmine's face on a photo.
Verdict
This is an interesting change of pace for the series. The previous threats have all been alien, now we deal with naturally occurring phenomena. Interestingly we have Jack doing the "wrong" thing for what he sees as the "right" reasons, pretty much like Ianto did in the previous episode. We learn some more about Jack, in that he hasn't aged a day since at least 1919 - the earliest sighting we had of him previously was in 1941. He still has something strapped to his wrist, some kind of scanner that has never been explained.
