Torchwood Miracle Day: Episode 10

What a disappointment! I was starting to think that BBC had made a mistake and they should have fought harder to hold onto Russell T Davies, that he could have dug himself out the hole he’d got himself into with his overtly poor writing; that there was hope for him to redeem himself. Then he did this  - this episode of Torchwood is indicative of the reason that the Moff now gets to sit in the big chair on Doctor Who.

I’m gonna get right to the bits that ruin this episode  - they fed the blessing Jack’s blood, which caused it to make the whole human race to become immortal – ahem  THERE’S NOTHING SPECIAL ABOUT JACK’S BLOOD! This was the central reason that the Jack’s-blood-is-behind-this argument was dismissed. It’s been established that when Jack dies, he is resurrected by time itself  - it’s nothing to do with his DNA or any other part of his physical body. Jack said himself that there was nothing special about his blood, but maybe there was, maybe there was something special about Jack’s blood that not even he knew about. Fair enough, that might be the case, but do you know who would have known about it?

RUSSELL-T-DAVIES! If the only way he could resolve this story, was to contradict himself on a central point of the overarching story, he should have come up with a better story to begin with. As a viewer, I like being misdirected (for example in “The Pandorica Opens”) but I do not like being actively and deliberately misled, not through distracting me from the issue, but lying to me about a major aspect of the issue.

In series 5 of Doctor Who, Steven Moffat, at no point said that the TARDIS wasn’t going to explode, he simply used the Pandorica to disguise when it was going to explode and the fact that it was more important than the Pandorica  - this is good  - but going back and saying “forget what we said earlier” isn’t.

The more I thought about this, the more I realised that it’s just classic T Davies – he said that nothing could enter the Time War, then Dalek Kaan entered the Time War  - he said that parallel universes were all sealed off, then they weren’t  - he said the Time Lords could never come back, then they did - the man doesn’t know how to come up with ending that isn’t oxymoronic. 

The worst part is that, even if Jack’s blood was special, the whole idea doesn’t work. Evil blonde lady explains the whole thing by saying that people close to the blessing lived for exact average life span, suggesting that the blessing was responsible for the life span of every human on Earth and that those closest lived the average or ideal lifespan. So that would explain why immortality in America and the UK etc. wasn’t perfect, like Jack’s, because of the geographical distance from the blessing  - but in this episode alone we see people in the same city as the blessing become category 1 and they’re no more immortal then anyone else. According to the explanation given by the evil blonde lady, people in Shanghai and Buenos Eras should have been more immortal then everyone else, but they weren’t.

The worst part of this is that the idea that Jack could have been the cause of it all could have worked, if it hadn’t been done using his blood; something about him that we know not to be special at all. My personal hope, as soon as I found out Jack was mortal again, (perhaps influenced by the first half of series 6 of Who) was that Jack wasn’t Jack, but an imperfect copy of himself  - a flesh duplicate  - a clone, linked up to the real Jack, who’d been wired into the Blessing, so that it could use him to make the whole world immortal  - it would have been using Jack – all of him, not just one biological part of him and transmitting his temporally-factual nature to the whole world.

That could have been the Pandorica-esque misdirection  - the Jack we’d been watching could have been made from his own blood and been mortal precisely because there was nothing special about his blood. Does Davies even know what a red herring is?

Oh and why the hell does making everyone immortal, make Jack mortal? That’s not explained at all. Oh wait a minute it is  - blonde lady says that the workings of the blessing are beyond our intellect. Fuck that! Russell, explain your fucking villain - don’t you dare just say to the audience “don’t worry about trying to find sense in this thing you’re not smart enough to understand”.

Since the Moff took over Who there’s been some people complaining that the explanations given in his episodes are stupid. To them I say simply  - this is what you were willing to swallow before he took over  - shit just happening and then Russell telling you that it’s far too complicated for your little mind to grasp. The truth is, that the man doesn’t want to write endings that make sense; he doesn’t want to explain himself, because he knows that there’s nothing to explain  - in basic terms, you might think that Moffat’s explanations are flimsy (which they aren’t by the way) but at least he writes a story that gives you answers, instead of belittling you.

And Rex is immortal in the end – guess it must have been all that blood with nothing special about it at all that he transfused into himself. On that point, yes during the miracle transfusing large amounts of incompatible blood into yourself wouldn’t kill you, but it would still have an effect. If you’re going to say that someone having a heart attack has the same effect as normal, except it simply doesn’t kill them in the end, you can’t then say that pumping a suitcase worth of a foreign body into your system is not only, not going to kill you, but have virtually no effect what so ever. Davies is just making certain characters as immortal as the plot needs them to be.

So that’s that  - it’s really bad  - the conclusion makes no sense the cliffhanger makes no sense and the way that they start introducing a new ultimatum every thirty seconds, at crunch time is just utterly stupid.

This episode takes what was a steadily rising standard of quality and publically takes a dump on it.

I don’t know what’s worse, how bad this episode is, or that in a few weeks, episode 13 of Who is probably going to school it, on what a series finale should look like.

Torchwood Miracle Day: Episode 9.

So this episode opens with a voice cameo by Russell T Davies, which either means that the executive producer wanted to pay some homage to his own contribution to the show, or by this point in the series they’d used up too much of the budget to hire a voice actor.

One of the consequences of last week’s ending was that this episode had to start 2 months later. This is pretty frustrating to the audience, as even though it technically works, the “X time later” technique is well known as a classic screen-writing cop out. Also the fact that Jack’s almost totally healed is kind of annoying; it’s not really any different from him being immortal if the pace of story is just gonna jump ahead, every time he’s affected by the consequences of his mortality.

I thought that perhaps Esther and Jack were trying to find Torchwood 2, as they were in Scotland and that particular facility/single member to staff was known to be located in Glasgow, but that turned out to be a bit hopeful. But on reflection, it would have been a bit late to start introducing new characters, it’s just I’d have preferred to have Torchwood return to the UK to maybe clean up some of the teasers from the old series.

So Gwen’s a terrorist again, which you’re probably expecting me not to like, but as they gave her a reason and she doesn’t haplessly destroy the evidence of the injustice she’s perceiving, I've got no problem with it. I have noticed that she does seem to become more irrational and violent, when her daughter is threatened, but I’d say that’s pretty realistic. I mean I personally think that it’d have been better to make Gwen more protective of her daughter, rather than making her actively aggressive and violent towards anyone who she perceives as a threat. At first I thought they were doing some sort of stereotype reversal and Reece was going to be the one acting more like the mother of the baby, but then Reece started acting just as aggressive and violent as Gwen. I would hate to be around when those two have a marital argument.

The UK is now a police state. This bit is done pretty well – they don’t have armed police seizing people’s children like in the last series; the writers have simply turned the UK into a police state in possibly the most realistic way. It’s been done through backdoor legislation. And if anyone thinks this isn’t realistic, observe how many people have been detained under the anti-terror laws brought in since 9/11 and the London Bombings and then compare it with the amount of those arrested and detained who were actually found to have any links to the crimes named in the Acts.

The best part of this approach is that it’s done through less subtle means than just stating that most people’s human rights have gone. For example, the category 1 investigator guy has the right break down the door of anyone he suspects is harboring a category 1 – which means he can break into anyone’s house  - any given person, he can just override their right to privacy and just burst into their house and all he has to say is that he suspected that there was someone who should be dead in there. None of this is expressly stated and that’s what makes it so effective.

On that point, I’m kinda on the fence about the Category 1 searcher guy. One part of me, says that they made him too sadistic to be realistic and that anyone tasked with hunting down still living people and having them burnt alive, would only ever do so begrudgingly and that he’s only written the way he is to avoid the audience inadvertently trying to identify with him. However, another part of me says, that if a situation like the one in this series arose, who but barely disguised sadists would step to do the job of breaking down peoples’ doors and taking their husbands/fathers/wives/children away to be burnt alive?

It was good to see the whole Category 1 thing up close  - up until this point we’ve been kept at arms length from the issue, only knowing that people deemed category 1 are being burnt. Actually seeing someone (in this case Gwen’s father) being taken off to be burnt, while still writhing and very much alive really puts the audience much closer to the issue.

That said, the whole writhing and groaning thing suggests he’s not Category 1 – as I understood it, Category 1 was supposed to be those with no brain activity (which is already the UK’s legal definition of death) – the only difference between reality and Torchwood in this respect is that ordinarily such a person would require a ventilator and other life support systems to keep their body alive.

It could, therefore, be argued that Gwen’s father being Category 1 may be a bit contrived and just there to keep the main cast linked to the issue  - I don’t know I’m not an expert in life support and such.

On a lighter note, it turns out Charlotte’s gay  - just thought I’d mention it, as I liked the way it was just thrown in there as an aside and none of the other characters questioned it. It might have been bit of social commentary on how much progress has been made, given the gay vs religion arguments of previous episodes.

It’s also quite 24-esque the way, that everyone’s feeding Charlotte information, but the audience already knows she’s a mole.

Oswald Danes has joined the Torchwood team, which is either a very controversial decision or a massive misunderstanding of diversity requirements – Now Torchwood, you’ve had an omnisexual time agent, a bisexual butler and an Asian chick  - get a paedophile and you’ll be eligible for that all important tax relief.

All in all, this was a good episode; I’d have preferred to see a tad more progression and I’m not sure how much is actually gonna be explained in the finale next week – if you remember the finale of series four of Doctor Who (and if you’ve found a way to forget that, please get in contact) then you’ll know that T Davies does have a habit of just that thing happen because…and then not saying anything more. If we don't get beyond, the blessing is a big gap, I will never forgive him...

Torchwood Miracle Day: Episode 8

Well hump me sideways, another improvement  - I was fully expecting the pattern of “alright-bad-alright-bad” to make a return this week (with the expected “bad”), but no such misfortunes have occurred.

So, first things first  - last week got 500+ complaints on account of the gay love scene. The complainant groups are insisting that it’s nothing to do with fact that the scenes were homosexual in nature, but that they weren’t “suitable for children” and “Not essential to the story”. 

On the first point; this is a post-watershed program with a sexual content warning before it starts, Of course it’s not suitable for children! That’s the point of putting it after the watershed and saying “this isn’t suitable for children” before it starts. If you don’t think sex scenes are appropriate for children, how about getting the children to leave the room, when you’re warned about them or change the channel or turn the television off.

I get so fucking sick of people who think that the BBC has some sort of responsibility to impose morality on people and make programs ‘safe’ for all ages. This group of people, as summed up by the parody in the Simpsons can be referred to as the ‘think of the children’ group and they are some of the most logically flawed people in the world. They are a group of people seemingly motivated by the idea that they are not responsible for ensuring that their children develop healthy morals, instead believing that wider parts of society and media entertainment should take on the burden. Their constant motto of ‘think of children’ can be countered by a simple turn in the phrase, along the lines of ‘why don’t YOU think of YOUR children.’ It is not the BBC’s (or any other channels) responsibility to make a program designed for adults safe for children. Warning is given and the program is aired after the watershed  - so anyone who shares the not suitable for children line, should go ahead and take a look at the fact that the BBC said it wasn’t suitable for children. If they let their children watch it, it’s their own fault not the BBC’s.

On the other point  - not essential to the story? Could the same story have been told without the sex scene? Possibly, but it would have been harder and taken a lot longer to get through. When you’re writing a love story for television, depicting sex is frequently the fastest method of establishing the extent of a relationship. Plus, the element of sex cropping up in this case actually makes the love story far more believable. The majority of relationships begin with attraction (the minority being arranged marriages and such) and part, if not all, of that attraction is sexual. The presence of sex makes the relationship between Jack and Anjelo a hell of a lot more plausible than for example the “relationship” between Rose and the Doctor – and I’m not saying that there should have been sex in Doctor Who, just that the relationship between Rose and the Doctor was completely devoid of any kind of sexual attraction, which made it seem contrived.

But here I am yelling about sex and such and everybody who hasn’t stopped reading already is probably wondering what I thought of this episode. It was pretty good; so for anyone keeping score, in the last six days we’ve had a pretty damn good episode of Doctor Who and a pretty damn good episode of Torchwood, meaning the table now reads: Moffat – 6, Davies – 1.

The strength of this episode comes from the fact that it starts acting like Torchwood again. For the past few weeks we’ve had a CIA/outlaw thriller intersected by random rip-offs from popular American shows. Now, we’ve got a shiny piece of alien technology doing what alien technology does best in Torchwood, setting up the plot of the episode. The ‘null field’ is a nice reminder that this series is a relative of Doctor Who and the way that Jack protects it brings back memories of the good old days when Torchwood ran the show.

Incidentally, there is a great performance by John de Lancie as a high up CIA agent. Anyone who ever watched Star Trek: The Next Generation will recognise parts of his arrogance as that of “Q” and might accuse him of playing basically the same character as he did opposite Patrick Stewart, but hey Q was a pretty damn entertaining character in that show and if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. 

We finally see Oswald Danes crack and get some sense that things are starting to move against him  - It was starting to get ridiculous having a paedophile running around amassing followers with no one trying to get him thrown back in prison or kill him.

There was one thing I didn’t like and that was Gwen, When De Lancie’s character gets tired of her and orders her deportation, she effectively has a strop, knocking stuff on the floor as she goes and yelling at people. So as well as being liable to turn into terrorist, given the right stimuli, apparently, when provoked, Gwen will also turn into a fourteen year old, if John de Lancie tells her she’s been misbehaving. Look, I like Gwen, she’s a good character and I’m sure she’s instrumental in teaching mainstream America that Wales exists, but I’d just like this kind of behaviour to be toned down. It’s immature and kind of strips the character of all dignity, more than anything else she’s starting to remind me of an angry football hooligan. 

Her reaction gives off the impression that de Lancie was right to deport her; I wouldn’t want to work with someone whose going to keep crucial bits of information from me and then have a tantrum when I come up punishment for trying to sabotage my investigation. And to be fair, Gwen acts like a child for most of this episode and really pisses me off. “No I’m not English and no I’m not a girl” – well don’t act like a fucking little girl then.

But this does raise one good question. Is there a narrative reason that Gwen’s being sent back to Wales? We know that Anjelo salvaged the null thingy from the Torchwood hub in Cardiff  - is there any more alien tech knocking about in the Welsh capital? Does the hub have some sort of TARDIS like ability to repair itself, so it can play a role? Is the Cardiff rift involved in the miracle?

Oh and I was wrong about Jack’s blood, but I’m happy about that  - if it was that easy to make an immortal, then the old Torchwood would have had Jack hooked up to a blood harvester the second they figured it out.

We have two more episodes left and to be honest, I’m excited about them.  As far as this one goes, it’s good  - alien tech, solid story and good tense ending.

Oh and preview thoughts  - “corner of your eye” – anyone else thinking a perception filter has some role to play?

Torchwood Miracle Day: Episode 7

Certainly an improvement on last week. In fact the more I think about episode 6 the more I dislike it. Rex and Esther were agonizingly incompetent and Gwen became a terrorist. And for anyone who was all like, “yeah, you go Gwen  - explosion yeah” consider that Gwen was trying to expose a concentration camp on UK soil, by blowing up. “Look everyone; a Nazi-esque solution to the present problem…err but don’t bother looking for any evidence of it, cuz I blew all of it up.” Whistleblowers get taken seriously, investigators get taken seriously, but people who respond to things they don’t like by blowing them up DON’T. The character of Gwen Cooper knows this, why would she blow a giant military complex up. Her actions, in my opinion are horribly contrived and kinda insulting to the audiences’ intelligence.

But enough about last week; this week’s better and sees the return of the Gwen who isn’t violent and is motivated by moral dilemma, rather than sudden psychopathy.

It’s also nice to see the overall narrative going in the right direction; last week was mostly internal storylines, but this week we start to get to the point of the story. The flashbacks are good and it’s nice to see Captain Jack as an immortal again. However, the love story does get a bit slow and how it links to the end of the episode is quite predictable. I’d have preferred to have this flashback in an earlier episode, to make the ending more effective. We see a bit more of the show being used as social commentary, in the discussion about religion and homosexuality in one of the flashbacks.

It’s been stated in both Doctor Who and previous series of Torchwood that when you die, you simply cease to be, a particularly good quote for this comes from a 2005 Moffat episode of Who which describes life as “the Universe’s way of keeping meat warm”. It’s nice to see that Jack doesn’t take the hardline atheist approach to the religious argument; at no point saying that he has actual knowledge that there is no God or heaven, within the Doctor Who universe and that setting yourself by a religion is pointless. 

This has the effect of making the altercation more of an argument and the fact that Jack isn’t willing to just tell Anjelo that his religion is completely off the mark is quite a good way of showing that he cares about him enough not to start dismantling his beliefs, but only questioning the most harsh parts of them. It also gives a fair bit more depth to their romantic relationship, easily topping Jacks last onscreen relationship, which seemed to revolve around demanding sex off Ianto, then getting it.

To stay briefly with the element of homosexuality in television and in particular Torchwood, I can say categorically that this episode is going to be a far better measure of whether BBC complainants are actually homophobic or not. Basically there’s a gay sex scene in this episode; now last time there was one of these, the Beeb got quite a few complaints about it. That last one was intercut with a heterosexual sex scene, as Jack and Rex got respectively laid, within their own gender preferences and had people crying at the BBC’s door (or at least the complaints section of their website). This episode  - no heterosexual love scenes, so lets see who complains. Before it wasn’t clear what was being complained about, whether it was the gay sex scene or just the sex scene in general, but this episode will lead to a far better picture.

Either way, the complainants don’t hold much water in my opinion. If they’re saying that the scenes shouldn’t exist because of the homosexual parts, while it’s not fair to say that they’re homophobic, they don’t really have a leg to stand on. Let me try and explain that a bit more; simply because they’re more comfortable watching a heterosexual love scene than they are watching homosexual one doesn't mean they hate gay people. I don’t consider myself homophobic, but I wasn’t comfortable watching John Barrowman get it on with Anjelo and I admit that the sex scene from an earlier episode between Rex and Vera didn’t make me uncomfortable. 

The difference between the complainants and myself is that I didn’t feel comfortable with that scene, but I knew that the writers had every right to put it in the episode. Torchwood is a post-watershed program; there are limits on how much sex, violence etc can go in them, but in the 21^st century we have to accept that sex is sex and whether it’s sex that makes the majority of people uncomfortable or not is irrelevant. I should point out that the BBC has already responded to the complaints with a politely worded but fairly strong “fuck you” and it is positively thrilling to see them do something like this, especially given the sheer ridiculousness of some of the complaints they’ve entertained in recent years.

Well this discussion’s gone on for a bit longer than I thought it would. Back to the episode I think. So we finally start to get some answers to how the miracle started; we don’t get them precisely, but there’s a scene in this episode that I think pretty much gives away how it started (it involves an old Italian lady and a small bottle). 

Other than that and the flashbacks, most of the episode takes place in a car. It doesn’t quite manage to replicate the tension from episode 2, as the threat of death is significantly less immediate, but it does the job alright and serves as a platform for Gwen to get back to normal.

The exchanges between Gwen and Jack are also quite good and show some pretty good development on the part of both characters. Rex and Esther spend most of this episode in the background, which is a shame, given that Esther’s killed her first person and Rex just lost his love interest. I was kinda hoping for a bit of development on both counts but who knows, maybe next week. One thing I will say is that, while she’s far more in character, Gwen seems less intelligent than normal; you might be able to tot this up to being emotionally involved with the situation, but I just thought she really acted a bit dumb.

So there you have it, not much to say, it’s better than last week and we start to get some answers. Recommended.

Torchwood Miracle Day: Episode 5

Well that wasn’t bad at all. It was nice to finally have an episode that wasn’t already explained in the previous week’s trailer.

This was good, clearly raising the bar from last week and working quite nicely to give the characters something else to do. I will say that my prediction of Gwen needing to have a personal connection to overflow camps paying off didn’t come true. Although it gives Eve Myles some emotions to work into the character, story-wise she doesn’t really do anything in Wales that she couldn’t have done in the overflow camp in America.

I got the impression that Wales only featured in this episode to keep the UK fans happy. I will say that it was refreshing to see her at the beginning of the episode arriving at Cardiff Airport, which makes more sense than episode 1, when Rex flew into Heathrow then drove all the way to Swansea; He knew Gwen and Reece were in Wales, but presumably touched down in London because the majority of the new American audience would be more familiar with the English capital over the Welsh. But now that Davies seems to be comfortable to make a good deal more sense with his storylines maybe we’ll see even more improvement next week.

But then again, as I said, there wasn’t actually a narrative reason for Wales to feature in this episode and the involvement of Gwen’s dad seemed to indicate that the writers didn’t really have anything to do with her, so they had to have her doing the same thing as everyone else, but in a different place.

But that’s just a little quibble. The positives of this episode make up for such aspects.

We get a lot more definition to Oswald Danes and a speech (and some actions leading up to it) that really hammers home how we’re supposed to feel about the character.

Plus we’re introduced to a character who I hope features in the episode next week for good comeuppance.

Still no real elaboration on the main villains, but the ending really starts to put some serious dark vibes on them.

So that’s about all; Five episodes left now people  - scary stuff!

Torchwood Miracle Day: Episode 3

Ok…It was ok…

It’s only the third episode but I’m already starting to imagine this series on a graph that starts off at ‘meh’, goes up to ‘ok’ then stays there on a great, long and most importantly dull line.

This episode seems desperate for something to do, which isn’t surprising, given that there’re seven episodes still to come after this and we’ve now met all the new characters and been informed about all the stakes.

I don’t expect to see much progression until at least episode five, which means the “that’ll do” mentality that seems to have been present in the writing room for this episode is going to repeated next week.

This presents us with the problem that Russell T Davies seemed to have with series two of Doctor Who. Namely he seemed to run out of ideas. The result was an immensely lacking series, which had a total of 3 good episodes.

Is this going to be repeated here? Are the bits of quality we’ve seen so far, going to be the only lights in a pit of bad writing, poor excuses and jokes that stopped being funny ages ago?

There are also bits of this episode that are really annoying. For example, there’s a bit where Esther translates what Gwen’s saying in English to American English, but she translates it for Gwen. The words “I think you mean” are even used at one point. I don’t know who taught this lady her manners, but if you already understand that when a person says ‘cashpoint’ they mean what you’d refer to as ‘ an ATM’ you don’t need to point that out to them. She just comes across as really condescending. I know the whole exchange was probably for the benefit of the American side of the audience who (thanks to the relatively small size of the UK television industry) don’t get exposed to as much of the British dialect of English as we do the American, but the tone of the conversation paints the American terminology as superior. I don’t know whether this was an accident, or a deliberate attempt to make the American viewers more comfortable with the series, but it irked me either way.

We learn who the main villain is in this episode though! Yay! Accept not. Basically it’s a pharmaceutical company called Phicor. And in a disturbingly familiar way, you already know that because it was in the trailer last week.

We essentially watch this episode for the pure unadulterated filler, which includes Jack and Rex separately going AWOL, and both getting respectively laid, the introduction of a cult and the emergence of the paedophile Oswald Danes as the poser boy for Phicor.

Other than that, not much to say, it’s ok, but the bar really isn’t being raised.