Well, look who’s a lazy boy then. Where was I? Oh, right, I was on a skiing holiday. Where was I before that? Oh, right, Torchwood.

With three more episodes, ‘Children of Earth’ comes to an end. And it’s an unexpected one in a few ways. It’s uncompromising. It’s surprisingly final. It’s shockingly bleak. It’s still not quite what I thought Torchwood was, but I can’t say I’m not happy that it is.

After the destruction of the hub, Torchwood have finally regrouped, but still unhappily lack much in the way of leverage. And while they claw their way back onto the political playing field, the 456 explain their demands and motives to the British Government, as the latest in a long line of disappointing fictional Prime Ministers makes the most logical and morally abhorrent choice available to him.

If the defining idea behind Doctor Who is that of an amazing alien wandering into an impossible situation and finding an ingenious, unforseen solution, then Torchwood this year is really taking the time to look at what would happen if the Doctor didn’t turn up. It’s in this area that the five episode format has really helped. The relentless slide towards despair and hopelessness would have felt rushed, even perhaps in a two-parter. But with five episodes, the consequences of horrible political decisions feel terrifyingly believable. The half-revealed 456 may be a very disturbing thing, but there’s no question that the scariest moment in ‘Children of Earth’ is when the army come to the suburbs to take the children away.

Two characters really drive the plot in the later part of the series: Captain Jack and Mr Frobisher. As expected after the first episodes, it’s Peter Capaldi who’s the star of the show. The befuddled, awkward Frobisher is just as Bridget Spears describes him; a good man. But he’s but just a little too ambitious, and just a little too devoted to notice the horrific position he’s been maneuvered into until it’s too late. Capaldi’s completely convincing in a role that could have easily been a cartoonishly weedy public servant. His shocking end gives the narrative back to the brooding Jack, who gets to prove himself the better man, in a way.

In the past I’ve not been a huge fan of John Barrowman’s emotional acting, but he plays it pretty perfectly this time around. It’s easy to forget that the good Captain has gone through some amazing crap in recent times. He’s lived through the twentieth century, he’s been buried through the preceding 19 centuries, he’s been imprisoned and tortured by the Master for three years. And things don’t get much better for him as he deals with the 456.

Forcing characters to choose between children and the greater good sounds a bit contrived at first glance, but there’s plenty of time in ‘Children of Earth’ to really flesh this out, too. What’s the right thing to do? Defending your own children over those of others? Giving up someone else’s children for the sake of the world? Giving up your own children? Pity poor Jack; no matter whether he cooperates or fights the 456, he runs into the same horrible choices. Of course, much more of your pity should probably be reserved for those around him.

Which brings us to death. It’s no stranger to Torchwood. The first episode killed off a team member, and the OHS issues at the Hub haven’t improved much since then. People drop like flies in ‘Children of Earth’; no one is sacred, and it’s refreshingly bleak and honest to the situation they find themselves in. But when it comes to who dies and who lives, Captain Subtext is always lingering to spot patterns. Meet me in the footnote, where I’ll discuss one controversial spoilery issue.¹

As I watched Torchwood‘s third series, I couldn’t help but be reminded of The X-Files labyrinthine alien plotline. While in many ways The X-Files is the superior show, it’s tremendously satisfying to see the themes and ideas behind it actually put in a story that has a beginning, middle and end. And it’s completely unexpected to have it done by the usually hilariously off-kilter Torchwood. A year ago I was totally indifferent to the show; suddenly I’m very keen for a fourth series. That’s a pretty impressive turnaround in five episodes.

1. OK. It’s team death number four in this story, and people are grumpy because this time it’s their favourite character. Fair enough. Oh no, wait, they’re not just grumpy, they’re angry, because Ianto was gay, mostly, and you can’t kill gay cast members, not even mostly gay ones. I agree that if you watched a three season series and found that most people who died were gay, there’d be a disturbing subtext lurking. It’s clearly not the case in ‘Children of Earth’, though — people die all over the place and seem nicely divided in age group and sexuality. And it’s certainly an odd thing to level at Torchwood in general; sure, Gwen is heterosexual and gets to live and breed, but Owen and Tosh, both generally straight, didn’t even get to snog properly. In comparison to them, Jack and Ianto have had an eminently successful relationship. What have we learned here? I’m not really sure, except perhaps never to be surprised by crazy fans and their tremendous capacity for passionate self-importance.

Still good Torchwood, but also, slow Torchwood.

Keeping things brief this time as it’s late and I want to go to sleep. The downside, I guess, to a five part format is that whilst the first part will feel epic and exciting as it can spend all its time making intriguing introductions, the second part runs the risk of sagging, if their plot only has one or two twists. And clearly, it does, as by the end of ‘Day Two’, we don’t know much more than last week.

In fact, almost half of ‘Day Two’ is taken up with undoing the events of ‘Day One’, which makes perfect sense considering the apocalyptic events the team found themselves faced with, but is a little disappointing in that our intrepid heroes are not much closer to what’s going on than they were at the start of the day.

Aside from the reasonably sedate pace, the standard is still pretty high. Peter Capaldi’s Frobisher remains excellent, and Cush Jumbo’s¹ Lois is far more interesting and fun than yesterday. Our menacing lady in black remains the epitome of a cliched eeevil black ops agent, but more damning than her general blandness are the epic failures of her and her troops to accomplish anything all episode. They played a good opening move, but to fail to catch two government agents, an escaping fork-lift truck, or even a demented old man makes them seem just a little crap. Which is unfortunate if they’re supposed to be scaring us for the next three episodes.

However, it looks like there’s someone else coming tomorrow. So they may not have to.

1. What a name. I just want to say it again. Cush Jumbo. Alright, I’m done.

Bloody hell. Good Torchwood. Woah.

No, seriously, it was! Part of this is probably because it’s the first Torchwood for ages written by Russell T Davies; perhaps one of the only writers who has ever really understood what Torchwood is for. And there’s no question that ‘Children of Earth: Day One’ feels a lot like ‘Everything Changes’ in tone. It’s understated (by Torchwood standards, at least), with quiet reflection and underlying menace, rather than the Chibnailesque over-the-top plots and awkwardly artificial character developments. Once again, it feels like the show really is exploring the shit that Suzie mentioned way back when; the dirty secrets and horrible consequences lingering at the edge of the Doctor Who universe.

So, the kids aren’t alright; in fact, they keep stopping and making annoying noises, rather like broken CD players. As millions of parents look around desperately for their receipts,¹ Torchwood and the British Government are both scrambling to work out what’s going on. Except, the government seem to have some inside knowledge, and a willingness to be rather brutal when covering said knowledge up.

The story starts off quietly and a little slowly, but constantly teases you onwards with fragments of story and humble revelations. It’s hard to shake the very encouraging sensation that we’re at the beginning of a really good story. This is possibly in part an illusion created by my knowledge of the five part format Torchwood is adopting this year. If there’s a graph of average awesomeness versus number of parts of a story, then arguably, in the lower numbers, more is better. 13 has been done very well for The Wire.

John Barrowman may well feel that his show has been punished by moving to a five episode season, but I’m vaguely hopeful after this episode that Torchwood may finally have found a format that suits it down to the ground. I’d say more, but it looks like I’ll have to write one of these every freaking day. Did I say I liked this format? It sucks.

1. Where do babies come from again? Someone explained it to me once.

Ah, Torchwood. I remember the happiness I felt watching your first episode. You seemed like you were going to be so cool.

And then you just weren’t, in so many ways. It’s become a bit of a cliche to say this, but I’ll say it anyway; I don’t think lead writer Chris Chibnail and I see completely eye to eye on what makes a good TV series. I felt this throughout Torchwood year one, and I felt it watching its season two premiere tonight.

But, it was most definitely better. Most surprising were the awesome bits; there weren’t many, but I wasn’t expecting them, so they were rather nice. The Star Wars hologram joke, in particular, was perfectly timed. The team’s awkward admission that things are more fun when Jack’s around. An alien blowfish waving a granny across the road. I had heard Torchwood was funnier this year, and it turns out the rumours are true.

It’s still an oddly awkward show at times — surprising, given that the same people are making the brash and confident Doctor Who at the same time. The aforesaid humanoid blowfish¹ opens the episode, being chased by Torchwood.² It’s an cute beginning, but unfortunately it’s let down by a painful scene where the blowfish happens to both know a lot about our heroes, and have the ability to phrase it in the most hackneyed dialogue possible.

So; Jack’s been away, but as we know has chosen to come back to Cardiff to be with his favourite not-very-secret alien-fighting organisation. Arriving around the same time is Captain John Hart, an old flame of Jack’s from his Time Agency days who looks and sounds very much like Spike from Buffy. Add his mixed motivations, the team’s usual irritation at knowing almost nothing about Jack, and a lot of snogging, and you get yourself a reasonable episode of Torchwood.

Colour me cautiously optimistic, then. ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ isn’t necessarily better than the best episodes of last year, but it does give me hope that the show is on a more even keel this year. Here’s to a better year for Torchwood, and to the hope that Chris Chibnail may yet develop an ear for natural dialogue.

1. Apparently though, blowfishes don’t look like that. If the Torchwood people can’t even categorise marine life correctly, how do they expect to save the world? Perhaps they should have tried patting him.
2. Unfortunately, the team haven’t even thought to file their name off the SUV yet. Or get rid of those bloody stupid blinking lights.

I’ve been a bit behind on my Torchwood reviews. In part this has been laziness, but mostly, because Torchwood has been a bit behind in quality.

Television’s a funny thing. Different people have different tolerances for crap. Some will give a show one strike any time, as long as the next episode is good. Some will give two. Some none. It was after watching the run from ‘Cyberwoman’ to ‘Countrycide’ that I realised I was in serious danger of losing interest in Torchwood altogether, which came as something of a shock.

Luckily for the show, along comes ‘Greeks Bearing Gifts’. Which isn’t awesome, but it does, at least, entertain, and makes the Torchwood crew far, far more appealing than they’ve been for… well, for about three weeks.

Our story follows dear old Toshiko Sato. Grumpy at how much Torchwood‘s been sucking recently, she storms out of the office and goes to the pub, where she meets a hot blonde chick. This chick knows exactly who she is, and offers her an alien device that allows her to read people’s thoughts. Wacky hijinks ensue, involving golf clubs, hot girl-on-girl action, startling revelations, and lots and lots of mind-reading.

It’s like everyone’s been given a lift this episode. Gwen’s a lot more appealing — well, alright, about as appealing as someone having an affair can be. Owen’s still a bit of a bastard, but a compassionate one at least. Ianto still suffers silently (though, we get to hear him, poor sod) and Jack’s far and away an improvement on the last few stories. Mainly because John Barrowman isn’t forced to do any shouty-crying, and instead gets to be friendly, peculiar and a little unsettling. This dangerous, manic and edgy Jack is definitely the best side of his character’s refit, and feels like a more natural part of his character’s evolution than some other moments.¹

The story does, unfortunately, finish with another deep and meaningful with Jack, but it’s not as on-the-nose as some have been recently.² What it has over some of the poorer recent episodes is a solid sense of humour; which does wonders for the tone. It has become clear that the staff of Torchwood Cardiff are a bit crap, a bit unorganised, and not as close as they could be. But at least this time round, they felt a little bit real.

1. I’m looking at you, ‘Countrycide’. I might even review you. Later. A disturbing pattern with Torchwood is that the Chris Chibnail episodes suck and the others don’t, or at least, not as much. I say disturbing because Chibnail’s writing an awful lot of them.
2. There are some more cute hints at the nature of his resurrection, too.

Like Thorpie, Torchwood is also failing to live up to expectations. I’ve fallen behind on reviews mostly due to rehearsals for the Revue that happened on the weekend, but also because they’re not that exciting. I don’t enjoy writing negative reviews much, and I’ve got at least two that I need to do to catch up. It’s not the worst show ever, but it suffers from a strong case of “what the hell are we trying to do?”

And even though it looks from the outside like an ensemble show, it’s miserably failing on such things, partly because it keeps insisting on only having one plotline to sustain you for 50 minutes of runtime. This sort of thing works in Doctor Who, partly because you’ve only got two regular characters, and more because the adventure genre’s really good at stringing excitements together in a row. Putting five cast members together running through the same plot just gets dull. Let’s have multiple cases in an episode please. Or something.

At least some of the characters talked to each other this week. That was nice.

Putting on the Revue was something of a disappointment too — not that anything was wrong with it, particularly, but the fun of putting on a musical, putting all the songs and scenes together and getting something bigger and cooler as a result is completely missing from stringing a bunch of unrelated songs together. Of course, there was a lot less effort involved, too, but I’m left feeling like I paid half price for something a quarter as good.

Everyone online is talking about how good the new James Bond flick Casino Royale is, but it’s not out here for another two weeks. You’d think I’d be used to this sort of crap, but I’ve grown accustomed to getting everything at the same time as everyone else in recent years, for one reason or another.

Not everything’s disappointing. Battlestar Galactica continues to rock. There’s a Christmas special of Doctor Who around the corner. The next Harry Potter film looks like it might be better in film-form than in book-form.

Retiring at 24. Jealousy just doesn’t cover it.

There’s a device on Earth that allows its users to view the past and the future with perfect clarity. If this was Doctor Who, someone would be using it to take control of the world. It’s Torchwood though, so some lowlife is using it to blackmail grumpy old murderers.¹ Enter the team from Torchwood, to save the day… or just make the day slightly less crap, anyhow.

They’re still a bit of a ramshackle unit. Jack doesn’t appear to have much control over his staff — in fact it’s surprising that he even thinks he has. Owen’s going rogue, Gwen’s quite happily breaking the ‘don’t take the cool shit home’ rule, and Toshiko’s still refusing to get any sort of character development.² Alright, that’s not strictly relevant, but it is vaguely annoying.

What’s good in this episode is the excellently portrayed and thoroughly believable effects and consequences of the alien device. Well, the ones before the dodgy self-fulfilling prophecy bit, in any case. Gwen’s flashes of her life with her boyfriend and the opening scene with the lost boy are particularly touching. Most impressive though is Owen’s witnessing of a rape/murder in the past, and his reaction to it. His dodgy intention to rape people with alien devices in ‘Everything Changes’ was somewhat alienating, but it seemed clear that he hadn’t — like a large chunk of the viewers — thought of it as rape. Perhaps his intense reaction to the death of Lizzie is in part because he sees something of himself in the murderer. In any case, despite his faults, Owen remains for me one of the most intriguing characters.

But for all the enthralling intensity, there’s a fair amount of wonkiness too. It must be fun watching a show like this when you haven’t seen oodles and oodles of genre television, but if you have, the warning signs go up the second Gwen sees her bloody hands in the future and tells herself what happens. “Ah ha,” you say to yourself, “this prophecy will come true… but not in the way she’s expecting. For that is the way of prophecies.” I think it’s about time a prophecy came exactly true. I don’t know who’s managing Fate’s PR these days but they’re doing a rotten job of it. And on a more basic level, to get yourself fatally stabbed the way Ed manages seems… implausible. But I’ve never thrown myself onto a small knife in someone’s hands before, so I can’t be totally sure.

And then we come to the overwrought philosophising. When Jack and Gwen talk at the end, you can practically feel the author beating you over the head with the themes of the episode. Step away from the themes, Ms Raynor, put your hands behind your head and never make Jack say anything like “a million shadows of human emotion” again.³

Overall though, the tone of this story feels very right⁴ — this is where I’d like Torchwood to go, dealing with the subtle, human consequences of big sci-fi devices. That said, there’s a Cyber-babe in a skimpy outfit next week, so I might not get exactly what I want.

1. How’s that for a TV show? I’d watch that.
2. She’s still the cutest of the group though.
3. A million seems a conservative estimate in any case. The technobabble was largely good this week — the best Who science is the stuff that makes a certain amount of emotional, hyper-logical sense but doesn’t get bogged down in the technicalities. I like the idea of various emotions and strands of consciousness echoing throughout time — simple, effective, and opens the door to psychics later on.
4. Well, except for the weird Jack/Gwen gun flirting. I don’t particularly like guns, or people getting off on shooting them.

So, they tell you, there’s going to be a post-watershed¹ spin-off for Doctor Who. It’ll deal with more adult subject matter. It’s at this point that you get to make a decision: when I watch this show, will I take it on its own terms, or will I count all the swear words and complain later about how many there are?²

After presenting us with naughty words used by irritated people in episode one, Torchwood now shows us sexing. As we’ve all worked out by now, based on viewer guidelines that rate seeing a naked breast as more adult than seeing someone shot in the head, sex is also very naughty. And hence, a touchy subject. ‘Day One’ has to try and walk the middle ground between so tame that it looks like it’s treating the subject with kid-gloves, and so raunchy that it looks like it’s doing it all for titillation.

Or, granted, you could not do a story about an alien who’s come to Earth for the sex. It is a bit silly,³ but let me say just this. Firstly — it’s a hell of a lot more understandable than when the Daleks came to Earth for the planet’s core. And secondly — shouldn’t we all be taking this as a kind of compliment anyhow?

‘Day One’ has many strengths, but it must be said that most of them don’t involve the sex-obsessed alien possessing poor Carys. The story’s more about Torchwood than her by the end, and the scene where she berates her stinker of a boyfriend for bad treatment and bad sex just seems to come out of nowhere. The plotline isn’t so much smutty as awkward — there are some good ideas sneaking around in the background, but they don’t seem to be being used much.

The rest of the plot — the ‘Gwen’s first day’ plot — is actually pretty good, and the bits where it intersects with Carys are amusing too. Gwen’s desperation to be useful and Owen’s snarky comments keep things pretty grounded. As it always is, once Gwen gets some confidence to her, she’s better at her job. And, also, able to tell the others that they’re doing their job wrongly. So, quite a bit of confidence then. The argument between her and Jack was particularly entertaining.⁴ There’s nothing particularly awesome in this story either, but it does set up the interactions between the team very nicely.

I’ve been irritated reading some of the reviews of this episode. It’s not brilliant, but that’s not because it shows two people getting it on. Or because there was a brief shot from behind of a fat guy wanking. These things are not, in and of themselves, bad or wrong, and people should be allowed to put them on televsion.⁵ If it’s bad, it’s because the alien’s plot is slow in the boring bits and rushed in the interesting bits, and because the whole idea is, frankly, just a shade too silly to fly.

And if it’s good, it’s because it reminded us what a flirt Jack is and was. I’d almost forgotten.⁶

1. A British term meaning “after the children are in bed”.
2. What impresses me is that the people who feel it necessary to list all the naughtier words that appeared in the episode in their reviews are the ones calling the show “peurile”. Personally, I find people not swearing less realistic and thus, less involving in a show like Torchwood.
3. And, yes, a bit similar to episode two of Angel. But that story, ‘Lonely Hearts’, was about loneliness. ‘Day One’ is more about, well, self-destructive emotionless sex. Kinda.
4. Just the sort of thing, in fact, that was notably absent from Doctor Who in its second season.
5. Although, I admit a certain preference for the former over the latter.
6. It’s also good because of the slightly disturbing obsessiveness Jack displays over the Doctor’s hand that he lost in ‘The Christmas Invasion’. And because of the haunting snatch of the ‘Bad Wolf’ theme that plays as Jack cradles it.

Eeeek! It’s a Doctor Who spin-off! The last time they tried this it didn’t go well. But this time things are different. This time, we’ve had the New Adventures. We’ve had Buffy, and perhaps even more relevant, we’ve had Angel. Still — how do you make a spin-off to the show that has everything?

Torchwood is clearly trying to carve out a peculiar niche in the corner of the Doctor Who world. In Love & Monsters, Jackie talked about how hard it was for “those that get left behind”. If ‘Everything Changes’ is anything to go off, this whole show looks to be exploring the darker, bitterer corners of the Who universe, where the people left behind try to come to terms with the crap around them. Collecting the leftovers, the flotsam and jetsam,¹ and trying to make it work. And often, it seems, failing. Near the end, a character cries about how she wishes she could see something better, more amazing, than the shit that turns up in Cardiff. For a second, she almost sounds like a girl who wanted to travel with the Doctor and see the wonders of the universe, but grew up and found her curiosity twisted into something horrid instead.²

The show also looks like it’s the story of Captain Jack Harkness, last seen resurrected on Satellite Five in ‘The Parting of the Ways’. And the poor bastard’s been through the wringer; bad for him, but good for us viewers. A bit of moodiness, a faint streak of cruelty, and an over-arching interest in the greater good makes an interesting hero.³ His cup runneth over with mystery, too — how did he get from Satellite Five in 200,100 AD to Cardiff in 2007? What effects has his resurrection had on him? How did he get put in charge of Torchwood Three?⁴

And it’s the story of Gwen Cooper, Police Constable and generally down-to-earth woman. Living with her boyfriend, in Cardiff, swept into Torchwood and refusing to let the opportunity to refocus the team on the important things slip by her. She’s a great character too — while the overall structure of this episode is somewhat reminiscent of ‘Rose’, Gwen is just as driven by her principles as she is by her curiosity. And the Torchwood team could really do with some.

There are issues with the show; I like the sweeping shots of Cardiff, but let’s not put Jack on top of buildings any more — it’s a bit cheesy.⁵ I like the music, with its occasional discordant crescendos, but at other times it’s just a bit wannabe-poppy. And Owen’s little misadventure with the alien love potion is just a bit too far towards the date-rape side of things to be dismissed with a stern look.⁶

Reviewing this episode, I feel like I’ve been bribed. There are so many cute references to Who, so many intriguing little mysteries and concepts, how could I not love it? Tune in next time, when I review the ‘sex’ episode and talk about whether Torchwood‘s adult qualities are peurile or just realistic.

1. The original title of this episode, by the way.
2. Or like a character who’s been put in Torchwood but wanted to be in Doctor Who. Depends how meta you like your text. I loved this scene, in part because Indira Varma’s performance is just stunning.
3. And an interesting foil for the Doctor, should they meet again in the future.
4. Torchwood Four has gone missing. This is hilarious if you’re a Babylon 5 fan and you’re paying attention.
5. And a bit too Angel-esque. There’s a few strong similarities to Whedon’s twin shows here, but the emphasis is sufficiently different so that it feels like a continuation of the spirit of those shows, and not a rehash.
6. Though, we can’t say for sure that Owen won’t get punished by Karma later in a mynameisearlish sort of way.

I don’t know why the notables on the front page stopped turning up. It’s something of a mystery which I’m hoping a fresh install of SimplePie will solve in a “I never quite worked it out” sort of way. They’ll be back soon in a slightly expanded way, with yet another subtle tweaking of the front page. It’s amazing; once you get bored of the shiny factor, sliding review titles suddenly seem massively pointless.

I also don’t know whether Torchwood, the new Who spinoff, will be any good, but early signs are encouraging. SFX Magazine have a little run-down of all the characters which is one of the most encouraging things I’ve seen. Early vibe seems to suggest it’ll be a little like Angel (Whedon’s shows are a major influence according to Russell T. Davies) but with aliens instead of demons, brits instead of yanks, and added swearing.

This encourages my fervent hope that one day, I will see an episode of science fiction telly where something horribly wrong, life-threatening and scary happens, and a character says simply, “Fuck”.