Monday, December 11, 2006
Torchwood
Spoilers for both series of the new Doctor Who and all episodes of Torchwood broadcast to date.
It's rather irritating that Torchwood has insisted on being so variable in quality after I tried to be so positive about it's first night of shows. But, other than the odd glimmer here and there and a couple of decent-ish episodes, it has remained stubbornly half-arsed and humdrum, looking like a village panto version of Doctor Who, rather than a real show by the same people.
Some blamed must be laid at the feet of Russell T Davies. A watching of the episodes that he has written for Doctor Who show someone who is wildly inconsistent when it comes to quality of plot (see the 'running around Number 10' that takes up most of World War III or the badly thought-out anti-vivisection parallel in New Earth) but peerless when it comes to emotional content (see The Parting of the Ways, the Lady Cassandra subplot of New Earth or Doomsday for the parting of the Doctor and Rose). So it's not that surprising that what he's brought to Torchwood, in terms of deciding on the premise of the show isn't that well thought out. Torchwood is, as we are repeatedly told, ultra top secret, at one point Captain Jack Harkness can be heard phoning the prime minister to give him a ticking off for telling the Leader of the Opposition that Torchwood exists. So, why do the Torchwood team drive around in vans with 'Torchwood' written on the side, order pizzas to be delivered to 'Torchwood' (although Owen admits this is a stupid thing to do), tell anyone in earshot when they arrive at a crime scene that they are Torchwood and apparently have computer files that can be hacked so that (as seen in the latest episode Invisible Eugene) members of the public even know their names. They have a base under the Millennium Centre in Cardiff, so presumably under the large body of water in Cardiff Bay as well, which must feel safe, considering there's any number of dangerous aliens around and any number of dangerous items they're playing with at any time. It's good to know that if they were playing with a power source and it were to explode, they could guarantee taking most of central Cardiff with them. It all looks cool, but breaks down under five seconds of serious thought. Indeed so much so that you have to assume that the production team would say, if challenged, that it's 'only a TV show' or is just meant as a bit of escapism. The usual excuses for this kind of thing.
Once the first few scripts started rolling in, these problems should have become apparent. But it seems that no one talks to one another, certainly no one talks to the scriptwriters and tells them what one another are doing, so they can make changes accordingly. Take Ianto Jones. For the first few episodes he's fairly suave, non-descript and discreet, acting more like a butler to the rest of the team. Come the episode Cyberwoman and he's suddenly a stuttering bag of nerves, first smuggling in a scientist to try and save his girlfriend who was half-Cybertised in the Cyberman invasion of London at the end of season two of Doctor Who and then threatening the lives of the other members of Torchwood when that all goes wrong. The next episode, Small Worlds goes by without any mention of Ianto, but the next episode, Countrycide, written by Cyberwoman writer Chris Chibnall, Ianto is now all moody and depressed whenever he sees anyone having any fun, and has to remind everyone that his girlfriend was killed although, quite fairly, they are rather insensitive discussing relationships around him. The following week? All is well. In the first week we have a gauntlet that brings people back from the dead for all of thirty seconds. At the end of the episode it's locked up and must not be used again. It's then forgotten about for another seven episodes before it becomes the lynchpin in a very convoluted plot based around it having properties we never saw in the pilot and a character having completely different motivations.
Character, ah yes. In Doctor Who Captain Jack Harkness, played by John Barrowman, was irrepressible and full of life, flirting with anything that had a pulse and the first openly bisexual character in Doctor Who. In Torchwood he's mostly dour and very much all business, and also immortal. We don't know whether this is due to Rose bringing him back from the dead in The Parting of the Ways or involved in some way with his getting from their back to here, we don't know how long that takes him (the one episode so far that deals with Jack's past puts him in India some time prior to the Second World War, whether that was pre-Doctor as a Time Agent or whether perhaps he overshot between Doctor Who and Torchwood and has made his way through the centuries has not been explained yet). When writers remember they do give him snappy lines but most of the characteristics that make him him are absent. In one of the early episodes Gwen talks to the others about Jack and there's speculation from them that he's gay and that he flirts with anyone. Nine episodes in and we haven't seen him show any interest in anyone, male or female. It took him about thirty seconds of being in the same room with the Doctor and Rose.
As for the others, on one level the problem is that the scripts often call for them to be really stupid. In episode one we find out that Doctor Owen Harper orders pizza to be delivered to Torchwood's secret base. He, Toshiko Sato and Suzie Costello make a habit of taking alien artefacts home to experiment with them. In Greeks Bearing Gifts Tosh is given an alien machine that allows her to read minds but spends the episode worrying about what her team-mates think about her than about the woman who gave it to her. In episode two, when Gwen starts snogging a woman that the team know is possessed by an alien energy force (released by the team due to their bungling) they spend a while watching the hot girl-on-girl action before strolling unconcerned down to the Torchwood cells to pull them off one another. Gwen Cooper, played by Eve Myles, is the Everywoman character, a policewoman who Jack recruits mainly, it seems, because the drug they use in episode one (but which again is never mentioned again until episode eight) to wipe people's memories fails on her. It's hard to define what qualities she brings to the team. Toshiko Sato, Naoko Mori, was last seen dissecting the fake pig-alien in Aliens of London, turns out she's the sexually repressed computer genius of the team. In Small Worlds she autopsies a body proving, I suppose, that medical things aren't her strong point as afterwards Gwen, from several feet away, notices the victim's throat is stuffed with rose petals. Ianto Jones, Gareth David-Lloyd, doesn't get to do much before his big plot arc involving his girlfriend with the tin-tits. After that they let him out of the office and he starts to loosen up when allowed to run around on location with guns but otherwise wooden but polite is how he'd be described. And then there's Doctor Owen Harper, played by Burn Gorman. He's also an Everyman character, in the sense that he's the kind of character that's not above using the devices he finds for his own advantage if it suggests himself. In the first episode he has a deodorant that makes him irresistible to others, using it first to get a girlfriend for the night then, when her boyfriend objects, to make him make love not war as well. This has led some to characterise him as a date-rapist and certainly most of the rest of the time he's a sleazy, lazy toe rag who doesn't appear to like anyone else much. In Ghost Machine he suddenly swings to becoming an urban vigilante, determined to punish an old man who, through the power of another alien device, he sees raping and killing a woman some half a century previously.
Every serial story ever made will have episodes based around individuals making mistakes or acting out of character, when Torchwood relies on almost every episode having some character break the rules or do something that belies their supposedly being an expert in their field it attacks the integrity of the show. At the moment Torchwood-Cardiff look like a very slipshod operation.
Torchwood is shown later in the evening than Doctor Who and aimed at an older audience. You can tell this because there's swearing, sex and occasionally slightly more graphic violence. However, none of the stories as yet have shown the intelligence of the better Doctor Who episodes, or the warmth. Before the series aired we were told by Russell T. Davies that all the characters would have a same-sex kiss at some point and that sexuality would be treated by the show as being more fluid than on DW. So far we've had Gwen seduced by an alien in Day One and Tosh seduced by an alien in Greeks Bearing Gifts. Of those only the former was completely gratuitous. On the male side only Owen has done the deed so far, to avoid a pummelling from the aforementioned boyfriend of the woman he used the Lynx effect to get. So there we have male-male sexuality used for comic relief. Then there's this, tucked away on one of the several sites based around this show. At the end of They Keep Killing Suzie there's a very odd exchange between Ianto and Jack about meeting up in Jack's office to play with a stopwatch that Ianto has. No mention of this has been made in the subsequent episode but this web page would have us believe that Jack and Ianto spend time flirting by IM after a busy day clearing up the messes their colleagues make in Cardiff and the surrounding area. Whether any of this makes it to screen before the end of the series is anyone's guess.
However, compare this to Doctor Who, a 'kids show' for all the family. Although Captain Jack is initially played more lecherously by the end of the series there's the famous kiss of Rose and then the Doctor to say goodbye. We have the whole thing with Rose meeting her Dad and then telling her Mum about it, then sacrificing herself to become the Bad Wolf and save the Doctor ("I wanted you to be safe... My Doctor") then him doing the same to save her, then the whole second series but especially School Reunion, The Satan Pit and Doomsday about the two of them being split up and what they mean to one another. Torchwood strives but so far has failed to meet that emotional depth, it's difficult to care when Owen feels the pain of the woman who's raped and killed because he's an unsympathetic character who in the previous week used alien drugs to coerce other women to sleep with him. The most blatant tug at the heartstrings was last night's Invisible Eugene which is, in many ways, an attempt to replicate Love and Monsters from the second series of DW. In both stories we move away from our core cast to follow the story of someone on the periphery, someone who's been touched for better or worse by the life our main characters lead. In Love and Monsters this is Elton and, what starts as a comic story about the misadventures of him and a group of mismatched individuals trying to track down the Doctor becomes tragic as he discovers the role the Doctor played in his life when he was young and strangely life-affirming, as Elton says: "the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It's so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better." In Invisible Eugene a character who, despite having been able to hack Torchwood files so as to know the names of all the team and yet not get one of Ianto's memory-wiping pills in his breakfast, dies yet hangs around as an invisible ghost to watch as Gwen slowly figures out the circumstances behind his demise. Here the tugging on our heartstrings becomes obvious and therefore fails. Without any warning at all Gwen, who is shown at the start of the series to have a nice, dependable boyfriend, suddenly embarks on an affair with Owen mid-season. It's so sudden and out of nowhere that you have to wonder whether Owen has got his hands on the love-spray again whilst similarly everyone seems to have forgotten that Gwen has a boyfriend, he's not even mentioned.
Torchwood is being broadcast on BBC3, along with such shows as Tittybangbang and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and seems to be aiming to be Hollyoaks in Wales, with aliens.
The show is not completely without promise. Ghost World is actually a pretty good story if you accept Owen's sudden burst of humanity. Small Worlds is a story of a little girl and her imaginary friends who, surprise, surprise, turn out to not be imaginary. Unfortunately the character of the little girl is so irritating that you soon start wishing for things to happen, some nice people get murdered and by the end of it Torchwood achieve absolutely nothing and wouldn't have made any difference if they'd spent the episode in HQ wit their feet up. Countrycide is genuinely unsettling and ramps up the tension quite nicely, although it goes a little awry in the last few minutes. In They Keep Killing Suzie a case the team are working on leads to Suzie Costello, a team member who went rogue in the first episode, threatening to kill Gwen and shooting Jack in the head before killing herself because she hates what working for Torchwood has done to her and sees no way to escape. Only now it turns out that she had everything planned to hypnotise someone to start killing people in a way to attract Torchwood's attention so they'd use a gauntlet they'd found to reanimate Suzie, she programmed the gauntlet to suck the life energy from one of the team to completely reanimate her and... It requires a real leap of faith to accept such a ridiculously intricate means to escape Torchwood when it seems they have difficulty tracking what their team members are up to outside of the lab. Invisible Eugene is unforgivable, a cast of misfits who are given to strange utterances because the scriptwriter has no idea how to advance the story. When Eugene's Dad suddenly starts singing 'Danny Boy' at Eugene's funeral we're supposed to think that this is some emotional breakthrough moment as he ran out on the family when Eugene was twelve. Instead, we just wonder quite why he's started singing and whether anyone else is going to stop him or join in. At the end Gwen is crossing a road along which a car is driving. For absolutely no reason at all Eugene suddenly becomes solid and is able to push her out of the way and save her. For a few seconds everyone is able to see Eugene before he flies up in to the sky and we follow him away from the UK, then the world, then the screen goes white. Unfortunately this whole episode would appear to contradict the previous week when Suzie told Jack that there's nothing but darkness after you die and there's something hungry out there that's coming for him.
The special effects and prosthetic work is being done by the same people that do DW so depending on what you think of that TW is equally as good or bad. The theme music is rather annoying as, for the credits, it appears to be the same ten seconds looped for about two minutes.
I don't know what the viewing figures are for Torchwood but it would appear that Robin Hood has enough to warrant a second season and TW has the added disadvantage of being on a digital channel, even if it's repeated midweek on BBC2. But unless the last three episodes pull something pretty damn special out of their collective backsides no one will mourn if it disappears into the ether and is never seen again.
It's rather irritating that Torchwood has insisted on being so variable in quality after I tried to be so positive about it's first night of shows. But, other than the odd glimmer here and there and a couple of decent-ish episodes, it has remained stubbornly half-arsed and humdrum, looking like a village panto version of Doctor Who, rather than a real show by the same people.
Some blamed must be laid at the feet of Russell T Davies. A watching of the episodes that he has written for Doctor Who show someone who is wildly inconsistent when it comes to quality of plot (see the 'running around Number 10' that takes up most of World War III or the badly thought-out anti-vivisection parallel in New Earth) but peerless when it comes to emotional content (see The Parting of the Ways, the Lady Cassandra subplot of New Earth or Doomsday for the parting of the Doctor and Rose). So it's not that surprising that what he's brought to Torchwood, in terms of deciding on the premise of the show isn't that well thought out. Torchwood is, as we are repeatedly told, ultra top secret, at one point Captain Jack Harkness can be heard phoning the prime minister to give him a ticking off for telling the Leader of the Opposition that Torchwood exists. So, why do the Torchwood team drive around in vans with 'Torchwood' written on the side, order pizzas to be delivered to 'Torchwood' (although Owen admits this is a stupid thing to do), tell anyone in earshot when they arrive at a crime scene that they are Torchwood and apparently have computer files that can be hacked so that (as seen in the latest episode Invisible Eugene) members of the public even know their names. They have a base under the Millennium Centre in Cardiff, so presumably under the large body of water in Cardiff Bay as well, which must feel safe, considering there's any number of dangerous aliens around and any number of dangerous items they're playing with at any time. It's good to know that if they were playing with a power source and it were to explode, they could guarantee taking most of central Cardiff with them. It all looks cool, but breaks down under five seconds of serious thought. Indeed so much so that you have to assume that the production team would say, if challenged, that it's 'only a TV show' or is just meant as a bit of escapism. The usual excuses for this kind of thing.
Once the first few scripts started rolling in, these problems should have become apparent. But it seems that no one talks to one another, certainly no one talks to the scriptwriters and tells them what one another are doing, so they can make changes accordingly. Take Ianto Jones. For the first few episodes he's fairly suave, non-descript and discreet, acting more like a butler to the rest of the team. Come the episode Cyberwoman and he's suddenly a stuttering bag of nerves, first smuggling in a scientist to try and save his girlfriend who was half-Cybertised in the Cyberman invasion of London at the end of season two of Doctor Who and then threatening the lives of the other members of Torchwood when that all goes wrong. The next episode, Small Worlds goes by without any mention of Ianto, but the next episode, Countrycide, written by Cyberwoman writer Chris Chibnall, Ianto is now all moody and depressed whenever he sees anyone having any fun, and has to remind everyone that his girlfriend was killed although, quite fairly, they are rather insensitive discussing relationships around him. The following week? All is well. In the first week we have a gauntlet that brings people back from the dead for all of thirty seconds. At the end of the episode it's locked up and must not be used again. It's then forgotten about for another seven episodes before it becomes the lynchpin in a very convoluted plot based around it having properties we never saw in the pilot and a character having completely different motivations.
Character, ah yes. In Doctor Who Captain Jack Harkness, played by John Barrowman, was irrepressible and full of life, flirting with anything that had a pulse and the first openly bisexual character in Doctor Who. In Torchwood he's mostly dour and very much all business, and also immortal. We don't know whether this is due to Rose bringing him back from the dead in The Parting of the Ways or involved in some way with his getting from their back to here, we don't know how long that takes him (the one episode so far that deals with Jack's past puts him in India some time prior to the Second World War, whether that was pre-Doctor as a Time Agent or whether perhaps he overshot between Doctor Who and Torchwood and has made his way through the centuries has not been explained yet). When writers remember they do give him snappy lines but most of the characteristics that make him him are absent. In one of the early episodes Gwen talks to the others about Jack and there's speculation from them that he's gay and that he flirts with anyone. Nine episodes in and we haven't seen him show any interest in anyone, male or female. It took him about thirty seconds of being in the same room with the Doctor and Rose.
As for the others, on one level the problem is that the scripts often call for them to be really stupid. In episode one we find out that Doctor Owen Harper orders pizza to be delivered to Torchwood's secret base. He, Toshiko Sato and Suzie Costello make a habit of taking alien artefacts home to experiment with them. In Greeks Bearing Gifts Tosh is given an alien machine that allows her to read minds but spends the episode worrying about what her team-mates think about her than about the woman who gave it to her. In episode two, when Gwen starts snogging a woman that the team know is possessed by an alien energy force (released by the team due to their bungling) they spend a while watching the hot girl-on-girl action before strolling unconcerned down to the Torchwood cells to pull them off one another. Gwen Cooper, played by Eve Myles, is the Everywoman character, a policewoman who Jack recruits mainly, it seems, because the drug they use in episode one (but which again is never mentioned again until episode eight) to wipe people's memories fails on her. It's hard to define what qualities she brings to the team. Toshiko Sato, Naoko Mori, was last seen dissecting the fake pig-alien in Aliens of London, turns out she's the sexually repressed computer genius of the team. In Small Worlds she autopsies a body proving, I suppose, that medical things aren't her strong point as afterwards Gwen, from several feet away, notices the victim's throat is stuffed with rose petals. Ianto Jones, Gareth David-Lloyd, doesn't get to do much before his big plot arc involving his girlfriend with the tin-tits. After that they let him out of the office and he starts to loosen up when allowed to run around on location with guns but otherwise wooden but polite is how he'd be described. And then there's Doctor Owen Harper, played by Burn Gorman. He's also an Everyman character, in the sense that he's the kind of character that's not above using the devices he finds for his own advantage if it suggests himself. In the first episode he has a deodorant that makes him irresistible to others, using it first to get a girlfriend for the night then, when her boyfriend objects, to make him make love not war as well. This has led some to characterise him as a date-rapist and certainly most of the rest of the time he's a sleazy, lazy toe rag who doesn't appear to like anyone else much. In Ghost Machine he suddenly swings to becoming an urban vigilante, determined to punish an old man who, through the power of another alien device, he sees raping and killing a woman some half a century previously.
Every serial story ever made will have episodes based around individuals making mistakes or acting out of character, when Torchwood relies on almost every episode having some character break the rules or do something that belies their supposedly being an expert in their field it attacks the integrity of the show. At the moment Torchwood-Cardiff look like a very slipshod operation.
Torchwood is shown later in the evening than Doctor Who and aimed at an older audience. You can tell this because there's swearing, sex and occasionally slightly more graphic violence. However, none of the stories as yet have shown the intelligence of the better Doctor Who episodes, or the warmth. Before the series aired we were told by Russell T. Davies that all the characters would have a same-sex kiss at some point and that sexuality would be treated by the show as being more fluid than on DW. So far we've had Gwen seduced by an alien in Day One and Tosh seduced by an alien in Greeks Bearing Gifts. Of those only the former was completely gratuitous. On the male side only Owen has done the deed so far, to avoid a pummelling from the aforementioned boyfriend of the woman he used the Lynx effect to get. So there we have male-male sexuality used for comic relief. Then there's this, tucked away on one of the several sites based around this show. At the end of They Keep Killing Suzie there's a very odd exchange between Ianto and Jack about meeting up in Jack's office to play with a stopwatch that Ianto has. No mention of this has been made in the subsequent episode but this web page would have us believe that Jack and Ianto spend time flirting by IM after a busy day clearing up the messes their colleagues make in Cardiff and the surrounding area. Whether any of this makes it to screen before the end of the series is anyone's guess.
However, compare this to Doctor Who, a 'kids show' for all the family. Although Captain Jack is initially played more lecherously by the end of the series there's the famous kiss of Rose and then the Doctor to say goodbye. We have the whole thing with Rose meeting her Dad and then telling her Mum about it, then sacrificing herself to become the Bad Wolf and save the Doctor ("I wanted you to be safe... My Doctor") then him doing the same to save her, then the whole second series but especially School Reunion, The Satan Pit and Doomsday about the two of them being split up and what they mean to one another. Torchwood strives but so far has failed to meet that emotional depth, it's difficult to care when Owen feels the pain of the woman who's raped and killed because he's an unsympathetic character who in the previous week used alien drugs to coerce other women to sleep with him. The most blatant tug at the heartstrings was last night's Invisible Eugene which is, in many ways, an attempt to replicate Love and Monsters from the second series of DW. In both stories we move away from our core cast to follow the story of someone on the periphery, someone who's been touched for better or worse by the life our main characters lead. In Love and Monsters this is Elton and, what starts as a comic story about the misadventures of him and a group of mismatched individuals trying to track down the Doctor becomes tragic as he discovers the role the Doctor played in his life when he was young and strangely life-affirming, as Elton says: "the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It's so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better." In Invisible Eugene a character who, despite having been able to hack Torchwood files so as to know the names of all the team and yet not get one of Ianto's memory-wiping pills in his breakfast, dies yet hangs around as an invisible ghost to watch as Gwen slowly figures out the circumstances behind his demise. Here the tugging on our heartstrings becomes obvious and therefore fails. Without any warning at all Gwen, who is shown at the start of the series to have a nice, dependable boyfriend, suddenly embarks on an affair with Owen mid-season. It's so sudden and out of nowhere that you have to wonder whether Owen has got his hands on the love-spray again whilst similarly everyone seems to have forgotten that Gwen has a boyfriend, he's not even mentioned.
Torchwood is being broadcast on BBC3, along with such shows as Tittybangbang and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and seems to be aiming to be Hollyoaks in Wales, with aliens.
The show is not completely without promise. Ghost World is actually a pretty good story if you accept Owen's sudden burst of humanity. Small Worlds is a story of a little girl and her imaginary friends who, surprise, surprise, turn out to not be imaginary. Unfortunately the character of the little girl is so irritating that you soon start wishing for things to happen, some nice people get murdered and by the end of it Torchwood achieve absolutely nothing and wouldn't have made any difference if they'd spent the episode in HQ wit their feet up. Countrycide is genuinely unsettling and ramps up the tension quite nicely, although it goes a little awry in the last few minutes. In They Keep Killing Suzie a case the team are working on leads to Suzie Costello, a team member who went rogue in the first episode, threatening to kill Gwen and shooting Jack in the head before killing herself because she hates what working for Torchwood has done to her and sees no way to escape. Only now it turns out that she had everything planned to hypnotise someone to start killing people in a way to attract Torchwood's attention so they'd use a gauntlet they'd found to reanimate Suzie, she programmed the gauntlet to suck the life energy from one of the team to completely reanimate her and... It requires a real leap of faith to accept such a ridiculously intricate means to escape Torchwood when it seems they have difficulty tracking what their team members are up to outside of the lab. Invisible Eugene is unforgivable, a cast of misfits who are given to strange utterances because the scriptwriter has no idea how to advance the story. When Eugene's Dad suddenly starts singing 'Danny Boy' at Eugene's funeral we're supposed to think that this is some emotional breakthrough moment as he ran out on the family when Eugene was twelve. Instead, we just wonder quite why he's started singing and whether anyone else is going to stop him or join in. At the end Gwen is crossing a road along which a car is driving. For absolutely no reason at all Eugene suddenly becomes solid and is able to push her out of the way and save her. For a few seconds everyone is able to see Eugene before he flies up in to the sky and we follow him away from the UK, then the world, then the screen goes white. Unfortunately this whole episode would appear to contradict the previous week when Suzie told Jack that there's nothing but darkness after you die and there's something hungry out there that's coming for him.
The special effects and prosthetic work is being done by the same people that do DW so depending on what you think of that TW is equally as good or bad. The theme music is rather annoying as, for the credits, it appears to be the same ten seconds looped for about two minutes.
I don't know what the viewing figures are for Torchwood but it would appear that Robin Hood has enough to warrant a second season and TW has the added disadvantage of being on a digital channel, even if it's repeated midweek on BBC2. But unless the last three episodes pull something pretty damn special out of their collective backsides no one will mourn if it disappears into the ether and is never seen again.
Labels: bisexual, Doctor Who, Television, Torchwood
