Torchwood

[mrph]

Sorry. I know that some of you don't like to hear that word, but I've finally finished watching the first season of Torchwood. And evilruss was right...



It's an odd idea for a series, is Torchwood. Apparently it's something RTD has wanted to do for years - but once it arrived, he only wrote one episode of season one, and he may not be writing any of season two.

It's not Doctor Who, but sometimes it's not sure what it is. It's in Cardiff, it's saving the world on a smaller scale, it's packed full of sex and bad language.

And then there's Captain Jack. The only familiar character... but Gwen is the character the viewer's usually supposed to identify with, and often gets far more screen time. Despite his reputation, Jack seems to be getting far less sex than the rest of his team, too...

Sometimes it completely misjudges itself. Sometimes it almost hits the mark - and, just once or twice, it comes up with something that's really quite special. Captain Jack Harkness, for example - best episode of the season, by a long way. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

1. Everything Changes - Meet the gang. Not bad, with a nice twist at the end. A decent start, setting the tone for the series. One of RTD's better moments - especially the pizza.
2. Day One - Torchwood's edgy, see? Sex, violence, bad language. And this episode's trying too hard. Alien sex vampire? No thanks.
3. Ghost Machine - Another artifact story, the second one in three episodes. Torchwood does this a little too much for my taste, although (as in this case) some of them are interesting character pieces.
4. Cyberwoman - look, it's a Doctor Who monster! But with added sex appeal. I can see how this might have been workable, but the finished product wasn't. Trapped in the base with something bad? Not a bad plot idea. But cyberman vs. pterodactyl? Um, no. Please. On the other hand, it's the first decent Ianto episode. Poor boy.
5. Small Worlds - I really wanted to like this one. I'm a huge fan of PJ Hammond's Sapphire and Steel, after all. And it almost worked - another nice twist ending. However... at this point I wasn't entirely sure what a Torchwood story was, but this still didn't feel like it should be a Torchwood story. Lovely moments, but something missing. And the special effects sometimes didn't help.
6. Countrycide - large chunks of this might be heavily inspired by Dog Soldiers and a few other films, but it's still a guilty pleasure. I really quite liked it. The team finally get out of their urban environment... and get out of their depth in something that they shouldn't really be involved in at all. The ending has a nice line and a poor shoot-out, but on the whole it's pretty good.
7. Greeks bearing gifts - Toshiko's moment in the spotlight, and it's not one of the strongest episodes. Another alien artifact, a passable story and a fairly weak finish.
8. They Keep Killing Suzie - I liked this one. Aside from the Avengers reference in the title, which quickly raised a smile, it's an effective sequel, a powerful character piece and another good look at just how much Torchwood messes up its staff (something which is one of the better themes in the series...). And for once it's a decent villain and a a decent finish.
9. Random Shoes. Torchwood's answer to Love and Monsters. Which actually works reasonably well. Narrated by a dead bloke who never quite knew what was going on. A very different tone from the rest of the series. But not bad at all. Quirky. Another artifact/MacGuffin story, though.
10. Out of Time. No villain. No artifact. No mystery or dastardly plot. Just three people caught up in the rift, appearing fifty years away from home. Really not sure what I think of this one. It's a story Doctor Who would never do, and it's very definitely Torchwood. It didn't have the ending I expected. It had some lovely character moments - for Owen, for Jack and for two of the guest stars. We might also see a recurring character come out of this. Maybe. But it also had moments that made me cringe...
11. Combat - 'Weevil Club'. Competent, another good Owen episode. I don't actually like Owen, but sometimes he's very watchable. Especially when he's broken. This one's Fight Club with aliens... and a nice finish, which sets the scene for what comes next.
12. Captain Jack Harkness. Best episode in the season. A few moments let it down, but this one was what Torchwood needs to be if it's going to succeed. It has a plot, it has a villain, it has angst. And it has a great final scene with Captain Jack leaving 1941.
13. End of Days - not quite as good as the previous episode, but a nice example of things going to hell in a handbasket. Secrets get revealed, our heroes get outwitted and manipulated, something Very Bad gets loose... and is a little less impressive than its herald, but never mind that.

So, that's the episodes. One final word, though. Villains. Torchwood isn't Doctor Who and the dynamic works differently. You can't use the same types of villains in both.

The Doctor is smarter than the bad guys. Hordes of alien soldiers? He'll run rings around them. Evil masterminds? They'll trade speeches and the Doctor will somehow outwit them - even if it's the Master or Davros. That's how it works. The Doctor wins through wit, not violence. And he talks a lot, so he works well with talkative villains he can swap insults with.

Torchwood is different. The first really good villain it's cooked up is Bilis Manger. He doesn't gloat before he kills you. He doesn't stop to explain himself before he's won. In fact, sometimes he doesn't talk much at all. He's a little unsettling and extremely manipulative. Torchwood are continually one step behind him - sometimes more - and struggling to catch up. He messes with their heads and lays snares decades in advance.

He's exactly the sort of villain they need - he would have made a wonderful Sapphire and Steel bad guy too - and he wouldn't work nearly as well in Doctor Who, would he?

...and on some level Torchwood, like Doctor Who, has to measure itself by the quality of its villains. So, when season two arrives, let's have more like Bilis and Suzie, less like Mary and Lisa the Cyberwoman, please.

I'm a little concerned that lead writer Chris Chibnall seems to be so patchy (End of Days isn't bad, as noted - but Day One and Cyberwoman...?), but reassured that Cath Tregenna (who wrote Captain Jack Harkness is writing at least two season two episodes.

The real question, though, is why they haven't borrowed the writers who've really done well on Doctor Who - Steven Moffat, Paul Cornell, Rob Shearman... I mean, Paul Cornell's comic series Wisdom was almost an audition for Torchwood, wasn't it? :)

Edit: Having said that, they've got Matt Jones signed up. He wrote Impossible Planet and Satan Pit for Doctor Who, so that's a good start...

Comments

[flavius-m.livejournal.com]

I'm in two minds about the bits of Torchwood I've seen. It's puerile, the plot has more holes than a pasta sieve, sometimes you can see through it to the end of the episode and beyond, it's often cheesy as hell... and yet I kind of like it...

[alterred.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's kinda how I see it. The number of times I find myself shouting "oh ffs!" at some dumb progression of the plot. Yet, I watched the whole series and can't wait for series two!

[redandfiery.livejournal.com]

It had me from the early episode where Owen had zapped a woman with an artefact so she'd sleep with him, and then her bloke came after them. That wicked little "oh, well, what the hell" look on Owen's face before he zapped the bloke and started making out with him too made up for all the plot holes and dodgy dialogue, for the entire first season - and that later incident with Jack, Ianto and the stopwatch put me entirely in charity with the second series, in advance.

Maybe I'm easily pleased, but any mainstream TV series that shows bisexuality (in gals AND guys) on a regular basis, and portrays it as a normal aspect of human sexuality, is okay with me.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Now, that's really interesting, because that bit really pissed me off - it made me think 'Oh, lovely, Owen's a bisexual date-rapist. Why the hell is it that bisexuals on telly are always either predators or flakes or both?' And I don't think I ever got more into charity with it than that.

[mrph.livejournal.com]

Owen's a mess. I don't like him - he's a thoughtless angry man who doesn't think about consequences or morality. Either he's working and grumbling or he's trying to escape from his life somehow.

...but that makes him the most watchable member of the team, sometimes. He goes through some changes at the end of season one, so I'll be interested to see how he's portrayed in the second season.

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

Hmm... a lot of dross with the occasional sparkling episode, where else have we seen that recently?

[mrph.livejournal.com]

If you mean Deadwood, you'n'me is gonna have words. :)

[aardvarkoffnord.livejournal.com]

I disliked Torchwood intensely. But then the only Dr. Who episodes I liked were the Moffat ones. "Impossible Planet" was a good setup, but "The Satan Pit" completely fumbled it. (Very Lovecraftian start, and then it went all Xtian).

[evilruss.livejournal.com]

Interesting analysis.

Must make the comment, too much gay emphasis in this series IMHO. I don't mind it being a feature, but I felt it was a substitute for good plot sometimes. You liked the Captain Jack Harkness episode - I did not, the whole story seemed to be Jack goes back in time and meets "himself" and he turns out to be gay. I think that is exactly what is wrong with the series. It made a good scene, but some real plot please.

And Torchwood - were they really a secret organisation? When ever the Police were doing things, they just turned up saying "Torchwood" and took over. Very secret.

Anyway, John Barrowman is great and I liked his return to Doctor Who, so hoping he gets more of a central role in season two - and less of annoying Gwen.

[mrph.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Yes and no, I think...

Captain Jack is straight as a not-very-straight thing, and that's been a feature of his character ever since he first appeared in Doctor Who. It was always going to be an aspect of Torchwood, if only because of Jack.

I think they badly mishandled/overplayed it through the series - Gwen is the only character on the team who's straight (when not dosed with alien sex vampire pheremones, that is...). Of course, Gwen is also the only character on the team who has some semblance of a normal life and a partner outside of Torchwood...

...but that's partly the soap opera problem. One of the BBC's soap writers once famously commented that soap operas struggle with gay/bi characters as soap operas are all about the ever-changing relationships of the characters. Nobody really dates new characters... it's all about "mix and match" - and with same sex relationships, that either drastically limits the writer's options or means that characters suddenly come out of the closet...

Torchwood has the same problem, but even more concentrated and incestuous. RTD wants to make a point, Jack needs someone to get entangled with... then throw in Toshiko's alien girlfriend and Owen's throwaway threeshome... and it all overloads. It gets silly.

The decision that everyone except Gwen has lost their normal life makes sense from a 'stop the cast getting too large' sense, but does make this sort of thing more likely.

End rant. Now, having said that, Captain Jack Harkness is still an episode where it would have been appropriate/effective, to my mind.

Yes, it's a bit of a coincidence that the 'real' Jack was gay. But it's also a neat dramatic twist. Captain Jack, the man who thinks he's irresistable, misjudges the situation and gets completely wrong-footed. He actually fails to notice that someone fancies him. And that's someone who's about to die, whose identity he casually stole years ago...

...and that's a plot I like a lot. It would have worked much better without the heavy-handed stuff earlier in the season, mind you. But if you're going to have a justifiable 'gay emphasis' now and then, surely the Captain Jack episode is going to be one place it's going to fit into the series?

[evilruss.livejournal.com]

I see your point and understand it.

My feel is, though, that if the series was Queer As Folk, that would have been great. (In fact, did that not happen at one point? Can't remember now.) But as the main plot of an episode in a sci-fi series, it rather fell short of my expectations.

I realise sci-fi is getting more 'touchy feely' these days (BSG for example) but, as you say, after all the rest of the gay / bi emphasis in ther series, I guess I wanted something more.

On a side point, in the 1940s homosexuality was illegal, yet the real Jack kisses a man infront of a large crowd. It would have been interesting if he was so worried by the implications that it put off his concentration and lead him to make a fatal mistake on the battlefield ...