10 Soul Crushing Torchwood Moments That Left Us Traumatised

It's difficult to pick the saddest moment from series 2's Adrift as the entire episode is just bleak, from start to finish. The episode begins with PC Andy conducting a fairly run-of-the-mill investigation into the disappearance of a teen boy, Johan Bevan, but he is forced to rope in Gwen once he realises there's some sci-fi tomfoolery going on that's above his pay grade. Gwen takes on the case, despite Jack's adamant and somewhat sinister insistence that she drop it immediately, deciding to speak with the boy’s mother, Nikki.

The moment we meet Nikki, the episode quickly becomes somber. She seems to be coping well at first, before we learn that she spends her days religiously watching tapes of crowds at football games, searching for Jonah - it's heartbreaking. Ruth Jones, despite playing massively against type, absolutely knocks it out of the park in this episode, completely selling the role of a grieving mother clinging onto whatever she can. Gwen and Andy attend a meeting for the families of missing persons and are shocked to discover that Jonah's disappearance isn't an isolated case - far from it. With an increased determination to get to the root of the problem, she tries once again to speak to Jack about it, who swats her away and threatens her. At this point, it is clear to Gwen that Jack is hiding something, and thanks to co-ordinates passed to her by Ianto, she sets off to find out what.

Following the co-ordinates to a remote island, Gwen discovers a hidden facility in which all missing persons seem to be imprisoned, including Jonah. The facility is in disrepair, and the conditions that these prisoners are forced to live in are atrocious. As Gwen investigates further, Jack appears from nowhere - a talent he has a real knack for (that and moodily standing on top of buildings in unnecessarily precarious positions). He explains that these people have fallen through the rift and have been damaged mentally and physically by the ordeal, leaving them in no fit condition to return to society. In Jonah's case, he slipped through time to a dying planet, sustaining horrific burns and losing his mind. Whilst we can understand Jack's motives for leaving these people locked up, this is cold, even for him.

Gwen takes Nikki to meet her son, a scene which is deeply upsetting. At first she refuses to believe he is Jonah, before breaking down when she realises what has happened to him - his fate, in her eyes, is worse than death. To make an already horrible scene even more scarring, Jonah begins to panic, letting out a blood-curdling scream that haunted my dreams as a child (I was really too young to watch this show when it came out). The nurse then reveals that he screams for twenty hours every single day and Gwen escorts a distraught Nikki from the facility.

Once the two return to Nikki's home she tells Gwen she wished she'd never found out what happened to him, and that the happy memories of Jonah she could cling onto before have now been forever tainted by the image of his screaming, deformed face. She asks Gwen to go home, and she does, breaking down completely the moment she arrives and sobbing into Rhys' lap.

And that's it. No silver lining, no real resolution, and everyone ends up more miserable than they started off. It's all PC Andy's fault, if you ask me.