DR Matt:
Last week you were asking why Torchwood had an episode that had almost nothing of Captain Jack, and for that matter almost nothing of most of the regulars (except for Gwen).
We caught the episode earlier this evening, and I can understand your confusion. It was a mirror of two episodes of Doctor Who, "Love and Monsters" in the second series and "Blink" in the third. What producer Russel T. Davies discovered was that there was too much of a time crunch to get all the stories produced in time, requiring too much of his stars. So, he included a story in the second season that only marginally involved the Doctor (and Rose) to afford his cast and crew the time they needed... and the trick worked. He pulled it off the second time by... well, that would require spoilers.
So, Davies pulled it off again with "Random Shoes," basically a story involving Gwen with a character named Eugene Jones, a stand-alone story told from Eugene's POV. Given the big special effects stories to come towards the end of the series, this gives the rest of the cast and crew the time to get their work done.
(And, spoiler time... yes, the last stories, from what I've come across, have a lot going on, special effects-wise and otherwise.)
