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. ↩

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009. It concerns such pressing issues as Torchwood, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.