Torchwood Miracle Day Episode 1 Review

So it’s the highly anticipated return of Torchwood  - the adult equivalent of Doctor Who, fresh with a shiny new look and some new characters and…still Russell T Davies  - well, two out of three ain’t bad I suppose.

Lets get to it, the overall feeling I have for the opening episode of Torchwood Miracle Day is that of ‘Meh.’  It’s not bad, but not exactly ‘The Eleventh Hour”.

And that’s a problem that I have with this series in general; I’m always going to be comparing it to Doctor Who, which is now in the hand of a writer who is far superior to Davies. While Steven Moffat is capable of raising the bar and seemingly managing his writing team better (so as to produce episodes of better quality), Russell T Davies tends to start well and peter out as a series goes on (often ending on an extremely weak note) while apparently letting anyone write a script for him. Seriously, there are scripts from series two of Doctor Who that should have never made it off the paper they were printed on  - no never been printed in the first place  - never been accessed on someone’s computer via the file marked “I don’t believe someone’s paying me for this”.

But anyway, looking at this episode, while trying to avoid a comparison to its family friendly cousin, brings about some good points. It’s predecessor “Torchwood: Children of The Earth” ended on a distinctly melancholy tone, with the last two survivors of Torchwood Gwen and Jack, suitably miserable, to the extent that Jack left the planet. To his credit, Davies has managed to preserve this tone, within these two characters, with both seemingly begrudgingly taking interest in the main part of the story. Barrowman plays Jack Harkness in a far less camp way and Eve Myles (while preserving the most of character of Gwen) gives off the impression that she’s developed into a far more tentative person. At one point, she turns down the opportunity to investigate the whole everyone’s not dying thing, because her husband tells her not to.

Oh yeah, the main part of the story is about how everyone on the planet can’t die. But you already knew that because that’s exactly what all the trailers said. This episode brings a bit of disappointment to the table in that it only really sets up one interesting question (besides the whole everyone not dying thing) and spends most of it’s runtime re-treading the events of the last series (no doubt for the benefit of the new American audience, the majority of which is not likely to have seen the other series’ of Torchwood). This starts off quite good, with Davies seemingly writing for both British and American audiences; while using the new characters as a way of quickly filling in the new audience on the facts of the show, he winks at the old audience, by making said characters react in a way that suggests that they have no idea just what kind of legends they’re talking about.

This is one of the main strengths of the Davies’ writing, but to be honest, it wears off pretty quickly and it gets a bit frustrating watching the new female character go through the same steps as Gwen went through in her first episode.

There’s also paedophile who’s somehow linked to the whole thing but…I honestly found it difficult to care about his character. Maybe things will be different in next week’s episode..

So there we have it a resounding ‘Meh’ for episode 1 of Torchwood: Miracle Day.