Random Shoes (TV story)

Random Shoes is an episode in the British science fiction television series Torchwood, which was broadcast on 10 December 2006.

Synopsis
A hit-and-run victim, obsessed with aliens in life, realises only one person can solve the mystery of his death: Gwen Cooper.

Plot
A young man named Eugene Jones wakes up to find himself lying on a road in the country. He makes his way to where police are cordoning off a section of the road, and the Torchwood team are gathered. He calls Gwen, Jack and Tosh by name but they do not hear him. He then notices them examining a bloodied body on the side of the road, killed in a hit-and-run accident: his body. When his hand passes through Tosh, Eugene realises that he might be dead…

Eugene's mobile phone rings near his body. It is Eugene's mother, and Gwen tells her that she has some bad news. Gwen checks the phone, and just finds a few pictures of random shoes. The invisible Eugene cannot remember what happened to him, so he follows the team into the Torchwood SUV.

Eugene thinks back to 1992, when despite being good at mathematics, he blanked during a inter-school maths competition and was responsible for his team losing the final, disappointing his father. To cheer Eugene up, Mr Garrett, his science teacher, gave him an eye-like object that had fallen from the sky during a golf game. That evening, Eugene's father left the family, and Eugene believed his losing was the cause. Eugene also believed the Eye belonged to an alien, and that the alien would return one day to reclaim it. This began his interest in UFOs and alien artefacts. As an adult, he approached Torchwood several times, trying to speak to them — Gwen in particular — but they simply ignored him as a crank.

Gwen speaks with a grieving Mrs Jones as the team searches Eugene's room. They find a flyer to a lecture about black holes at Aberystwyth University's Science and Natural History Museum, and a cabinet of dubious alien artefacts. One, however, appears to be missing. The team take the rest of Eugene's possessions to the Hub for study. Eugene follows.

Gwen wants to find out more about Eugene's death, but Owen accuses Gwen of feeling guilty since Eugene had a "thing" for her. Before the autopsy on Eugene can be carried out, Ianto informs them that the driver who hit Eugene has been found. However, Gwen still wants to investigate further, feeling that something odd is going on, although the others try to convince her otherwise.

The next day, Gwen decides to return Eugene's DVDs to his video shop. She goes to the lunch café that he used to frequent, but the owner does not remember him. Eugene sits next to Gwen as she browses the contents of his phone, frustrated that he cannot remember anything. He suggests that Gwen telephone Gary, and somehow, Gwen picks up on it and does so, leaving a message.

At the video shop, Gwen speaks to the clerk, Josh, who remembers Eugene but dismisses him as ordinary and a loser. Gwen then proceeds to Eugene's place of work, a telemarketing firm, and some more of Eugene's memory comes back. Gwen finds Gary (recognising his shoes from the photographs in Eugene's phone) and another co-worker, Linda, both of whom seem quite upset about Eugene's death. Gwen makes an appointment with Linda for lunch and finds the same lecture flyer found in Eugene's room in Gary's cubicle.

Linda tells Gwen that when she was depressed about her life, Eugene offered to buy her a ticket to Australia. To get the money, he was going to sell the Eye on eBay, bringing it in to show his colleagues. The eye did not get any bids at first, but slowly, then rapidly, began to accumulate bids, ending at £15,005.50. However, Linda does not know who the final buyer was.

Gwen receives a call from and goes to see Mrs Jones, who tells her about who the Eye came from. Eugene's brother Terry reveals that two weeks before his death, Eugene found that his father was working as a cashier at a Cardiff petrol station, rather than holding a glamourous position in America as he had previously believed. Eugene remembers that once he found this out, he felt everything in his life was worthless, including the Eye, so he decided to sell it. At the Hub, Gwen tells Jack about what she has learned. Jack guesses that the Eye is a Dogon Sixth Eye — there used to be a trade in them. Jack gives Gwen permission to find the Eye.

Gwen drives to Aberystwyth for the lecture, and finds Gary there. He and Eugene had arranged to go to the lecture together. Gary confesses that he used aliases to raise the bid price on the eye to cheer Eugene up. However, when the bid jumped to £15,000, Eugene believed that the buyer was the alien, trying to reclaim the Eye. Gwen tries to find out where the exchange was going to take place, but Gary is evasive. Gwen asks why Eugene would take photographs of Gary's shoes and who the other pairs belong to, but Gary just says they are random shoes.

Eugene spends the night lying next to Gwen in her hotel room. Gwen finds a piece of napkin among Eugene's possessions, with a logo that she traces the next day to a roadside restaurant, the Happy Cook, near where Eugene's body was found. She spots the waitress wearing one of the pairs of shoes on Eugene's phone.

Eugene remembers that when he arrived at the Happy Cook, Gary and Josh were there. They revealed that they had artificially raised the bid at first, but when they saw someone else — a collector and not an alien like Eugene believed — was willing to pay £15,000, they decided to raise the bid up by £5.50. However, no more bids came, leaving them the final buyers. Eugene realised that Josh and Gary simply wanted to take the Eye without paying and re-sell it, and so he secretly took photographs of their shoes with his phone. Josh then tried to grab the Eye but Eugene swallowed it and ran from the Happy Cook.

Gwen finds out most of this from the waitress. At that moment, Gary and Josh come in, trying to get the waitress not to speak to anyone before they spot Gwen in the corner. Josh tries to make a run for it, but Gary trips him up. Josh demands to know why, and Gary says that he misses Eugene. Gwen gets the rest of the story from the two: they chased Eugene for a distance but then lost him. Gwen telephones Eugene's father to tell him about Eugene's death. Eugene finally remembers how he ran across a field, stopped in the middle of a road, and did not see the car coming.

Eugene attends his own funeral, seeing his father sing "Danny Boy" as the coffin goes in to be incinerated. Gwen collects the Eye from Eugene's ashes, and brings it along to the Jones house, as the rest of the team show up in the SUV. However, Eugene is still puzzled as to why he is still around since the Eye had been removed from his body. Gwen sees Mr Jones reunite with Terry and does not notice a car about to run her down. Eugene calls out to Gwen and runs forward throwing Gwen to the ground, saving her; he has become solid and visible. Everyone looks on in amazement.

Gwen thanks Eugene for saving her and kisses him. Despite her pleas for him not to go, he realises he has to. Eugene bids her good-bye as a white glow surrounds him and he rises into the sky, zooming upwards until the Earth is no longer visible.

Cast

 * Captain Jack Harkness — John Barrowman
 * Gwen Cooper — Eve Myles
 * Owen Harper — Burn Gorman
 * Toshiko Sato — Naoko Mori
 * Ianto Jones — Gareth David-Lloyd
 * Eugene — Paul Chequer
 * Young Eugene — Luke Bromley
 * Bronwen Jones — Nicola Duffett
 * Mr Garret — Roger Ashton-Griffiths
 * Josh — Steven Meo
 * Gary — Celyn Jones
 * Linda — Robyn Isaac
 * Shaun Jones — Gareth Potter
 * Terry Jones — Joshua Hughes
 * Waitress — Amy Starling
 * Café owner — Leroy Liburd
 * Pete — Ryan Chappell

Continuity

 * It is stated that Eugene's father works nights at a garage, but Gwen calls the garage in the daytime and is able to speak to him.
 * It is established that Eugene's father left in 1992, and Eugene narrates at his funeral that his father is "14 years too late", seemingly placing the story in 2006. However, Gwen joined Torchwood some time after the Battle of Canary Wharf, which took place sometime in 2007.
 * The Tenth Doctor's severed hand is seen once more in the Torchwood Hub.
 * During the scene in the conference room, Jack is handling an object that resembles the bolt gun from The Satan Pit.
 * In the Happy Cook, Gary says that they failed to catch up with Eugene because Josh was wearing new shoes. However the shoes in the picture on the phone do not look new.

Production

 * This episode was originally titled "Invisible Eugene" up until two weeks before it aired. It was then changed to its present title. It was still listed as "Invisible Eugene" in the Radio Times and other television listings.
 * Screenshots of Eugene's website as posted on the Torchwood Institute website suggest it to be hosted on the fictional Cheapserve webhost. Cheapserve has been used before by the Doctor Who production team.
 * For the first 8 minutes or so of this episode, the BBC Three digital on-screen graphic identifier was absent, with the DOG of the CBBC Channel in its place. After this, the DOG disappeared.
 * Toshiko only has two lines in this episode, in the first scene when she claims that Eugene "couldn't even die properly" and in the final scene when she says that they need to go.

Music

 * The songs "Starman" by David Bowie and "Hope There’s Someone" by Antony and the Johnsons feature in this episode.
 * Eugene's father sings "Danny Boy" at the funeral.

Outside references

 * This story bears some structural similarities to the Doctor Who episode Love & Monsters, in particular the heavy use of flashbacks and voice-overs by a guest character as narrative devices. In addition, both Eugene Jones and Elton Pope (from Love and Monsters) are lonely young men with fixations on the respective main characters of each series and both come to similar epiphanies about taking life as it comes rather than waiting for the unobtainable while confronting painful memories. Also, Love & Monsters featured an organization called "LINDA" and Random Shoes featured a woman named "Linda."
 * The Internet auction website eBay is referenced, although the page displayed in this episode does not match eBay's current page layout.
 * The DVD Owen is watching is the 1960s version of the BBC science fiction drama A for Andromeda.
 * The name and logo of the "Happy Cook" resemble those of the Happy Eater chain of roadside restaurants.