Saturday, May 24, 2008
"Captain Jack is an intergalactic manwhore!"
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Torchwood - Season Two.
So one of the inadvertently funniest moments from the last series of Doctor Who was in the penultimate episode where The Master tells Captain Jack that he's got the rest of the Torchwood team out of the way by sending them to another part of the world on a wild goose chase. Considering that under the control of Chris Chibnall this team of rapists, emotional cripples and closeted lesbians had almost all managed to kill Captain Jack at least once and were treated with absolute contempt by the Welsh constabulary, why sending them out of the country was supposed to be a blow to Jack wasn't entirely clear.
Ahhh, Chris Chibnall. The Anti-Matter RTD. The RTD of Earth-2. In the 'Mirror, Mirror' alternate universe of Star Trek: DS9, where the evil Kira does nothing except wear bondage gear and suck the face off of every female that comes near her, RTD looks like Chris Chibnall. Are we clear? This man has a talent for writing. Unfortunately, he has elected to use his powers for evil. Rich Johnston has reported that Chris has got the job of showrunner for the preposterous sounding 'Law and Order: London'. We have to hope that Rich is on the money about this one, because if he isn't then Chris would be replacing RTD on 'Doctor Who' when he leaves at the end of the next series, and that is too terrifying to contemplate.
And so, Torchwood series two. I believe that series two was offered before series one aired. I never bothered to look up the viewing figures but as it was on BBC3 I don't think they'd tell us much to judge whether it was a hit with fans. I remember there was a comedy show about teachers in the mid-nineties called something like 'Chalk' where they commissioned two series straight away saying comedy needed time to develop characters for the public to like. Result= Two series of a show that was consistently derided as awful, then it disappeared, never to be seen again.
But I start watching and, blow me, it's good. It's as though Chibnall has actually read all the criticism on the net, or maybe it's just that the show is going out at 9:00 pm on BBC 2 rather than 10:00 pm on BBC 3. The team act intelligently and, in Owen's case, aren't trying to shag Gwen and kill not-Gwen all the time. They work as a team, whereas in season one they all hated each others guts and seemed locked in a vicious spiral of self-loathing and abuse. They don't fly off the handle about Jack's reticence to speak about his past (which I still don't really understand) and the scene with Ianto and Jack in the office is genuinely sweet, whereas all the same-sex snogging in the first series was as erotic as Big Daddy fighting Giant Haystacks. The script is also very funny. The much ridiculed notion of a super secret team that drives around in it's own monogrammed cars seems to have been quietly forgotten, everyone knows of Torchwood and I'm fine with that.
I remain to be convinced as to whether they can sustain this throughout the series but if tonight's episode had been banned I would have jumped out straight away. This has at least made me want to come back for more.
Ahhh, Chris Chibnall. The Anti-Matter RTD. The RTD of Earth-2. In the 'Mirror, Mirror' alternate universe of Star Trek: DS9, where the evil Kira does nothing except wear bondage gear and suck the face off of every female that comes near her, RTD looks like Chris Chibnall. Are we clear? This man has a talent for writing. Unfortunately, he has elected to use his powers for evil. Rich Johnston has reported that Chris has got the job of showrunner for the preposterous sounding 'Law and Order: London'. We have to hope that Rich is on the money about this one, because if he isn't then Chris would be replacing RTD on 'Doctor Who' when he leaves at the end of the next series, and that is too terrifying to contemplate.
And so, Torchwood series two. I believe that series two was offered before series one aired. I never bothered to look up the viewing figures but as it was on BBC3 I don't think they'd tell us much to judge whether it was a hit with fans. I remember there was a comedy show about teachers in the mid-nineties called something like 'Chalk' where they commissioned two series straight away saying comedy needed time to develop characters for the public to like. Result= Two series of a show that was consistently derided as awful, then it disappeared, never to be seen again.
But I start watching and, blow me, it's good. It's as though Chibnall has actually read all the criticism on the net, or maybe it's just that the show is going out at 9:00 pm on BBC 2 rather than 10:00 pm on BBC 3. The team act intelligently and, in Owen's case, aren't trying to shag Gwen and kill not-Gwen all the time. They work as a team, whereas in season one they all hated each others guts and seemed locked in a vicious spiral of self-loathing and abuse. They don't fly off the handle about Jack's reticence to speak about his past (which I still don't really understand) and the scene with Ianto and Jack in the office is genuinely sweet, whereas all the same-sex snogging in the first series was as erotic as Big Daddy fighting Giant Haystacks. The script is also very funny. The much ridiculed notion of a super secret team that drives around in it's own monogrammed cars seems to have been quietly forgotten, everyone knows of Torchwood and I'm fine with that.
I remain to be convinced as to whether they can sustain this throughout the series but if tonight's episode had been banned I would have jumped out straight away. This has at least made me want to come back for more.
Labels: Doctor Who, Torchwood
Sunday, September 16, 2007
"Fuck you with something hard and sandpapery!" (NSFW)
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Jack, I'm Only Dancing...
Fifteen minutes left until the return of the Real Captain Jack. Let's hope he's got over the grump that being stuck in early-21st century Cardiff gave him...
Labels: Doctor Who, Torchwood
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
At last! Now we know who is responsible for Torchwood , Robin Hood and the bafflingly popular Most Haunted and their shitness, it's all the fault of women!
British TV standards are deteriorating because the BBC is "run by women", astronomer Sir Patrick Moore has said. The Sky at Night host also described female newsreaders as "jokey" and called for separate channels to cater for the needs of the different sexes. "I think it may eventually happen," the 84-year-old told the Radio Times.
What's great is that Sir Patrick is in that clique of BBC people who, when they spout bum-dribble of this order, the BBC say:
A BBC spokesman described Sir Patrick as being one of TV's best-loved figures and said his "forthright" views were "what we all love about him"
rather than:
A BBC spokesman sighed and described Sir Patrick as being "very old" and said his "forthright" views were "why we don't put his show on during the daylight hours"
Maybe he should have said that the BBC is run by women and they are all gay.
British TV standards are deteriorating because the BBC is "run by women", astronomer Sir Patrick Moore has said. The Sky at Night host also described female newsreaders as "jokey" and called for separate channels to cater for the needs of the different sexes. "I think it may eventually happen," the 84-year-old told the Radio Times.
What's great is that Sir Patrick is in that clique of BBC people who, when they spout bum-dribble of this order, the BBC say:
A BBC spokesman described Sir Patrick as being one of TV's best-loved figures and said his "forthright" views were "what we all love about him"
rather than:
A BBC spokesman sighed and described Sir Patrick as being "very old" and said his "forthright" views were "why we don't put his show on during the daylight hours"
Maybe he should have said that the BBC is run by women and they are all gay.
Labels: stupidity, Television, Torchwood, women
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Another Little Disappointment: Torchwood.
TOSH
I think I fancy Owen.
JACK
Girls and boys having sex is boring and for children. Do something adult for blimey’s sake.
TOSH
I think I fancy Owen.
JACK
Girls and boys having sex is boring and for children. Do something adult for blimey’s sake.
Labels: bisexual, Doctor Who, Television, Torchwood
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
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Torchwood
'Dear The Producers of Robin Hood, watch and learn...'
Actually, that's unfair. If I were feeling uncharitable I could rip the pilot of Torchwood, if I'd been visited by the ghosts of pilots past, present and future I might feel more inclined to the pseudo-medieval tosh that is 'Robin Hoodie and his Ineffective Men'. But I haven't been, so I'm not going to. And I did like Torchwood. It's supposedly a more adult version of Doctor Who but if DW is aimed at a bright twelve-year-old then T would appear to be aimed at their bored sixteen-year-old sibling, with stories that involve people who are their older brothers and sisters who are old enough to have just left university.
Cardiff beat cop Gwen Cooper comes across a mysterious group of people who can bring a murder victim back to life for a few minutes to question him about his attacker. Digging deeper she locates their secret HQ in the centre of town by the Millenium Centre. After unsuccessfully trying to wipe her memory of the experience she is instead offered a job by Captain Jack Harkness and their first job involves a discarnate alien energy being that lives off the energy human beings produce when doing the sex.
It really shouldn't work, especially the second episode which is really an excuse for a lot of jokes about shagging (at one point the woman who's been possessed by the sexy sexy sex alien of sex makes moves on Gwen and they start snogging in her cell. Rather than start worrying about alien contamination or mind control the rest of the team watch them go at it for several lo-o-o-ong seconds before deciding they should break them up, while another records it). But while Bob Hood aimed lower on Saturday night and failed, this manages to survive through two decent scripts. The first episode is exposition-heavy, both in explaining itself to viewers who've not seen the new Doctor Who but also to those who have as to what is different. Captain Jack apparently can't die and, although we don't know yet exactly how or why he's here and now, he's on the look-out for the Doctor. Although he's as smart-arse as he ever was John Barrowman also plays him with more of an edge, suggesting life hasn't been all fun since we last saw him. The other members of Team Torchwood haven't been particularly fleshed out, Burn Gorman is slightly creepy, not above using some alien technology to make him irresistible to women, but Ianto Jones, who seems to manage (as opposed to run) the team and Toshiko Sato have thus far been left as little more than sketches. Eve Myles role as everywoman Gwen, our way into the series, has a particularly thankless role in episode one, running around saying "what is..." and "who is..." every few seconds, but seems a lot happier in episode two, though things flag for a while about two-thirds of the way through. This has been a noticeable problem in Robin Hood, it seems no one involved has yet worked out how to write their episodes in the allotted time, so there's action at the beginning and the end and a boring middle.
In terms of problems there is the question of exactly how covert Torchwood is. It's an ultra top-secret organisation yet when people like the police or the army are told to pull back they're told it's because of Torchwood, which doesn't sound very stealthy. You can tell Russell T. Davies really wanted a cool 'entrance in plain site' moment, with a false step that descends into the Torchwood HQ, so he's really put a lot of effort into explaining how something so silly works without anyone noticing. The Torchwood set looks very good (except for one point which I shall get to in a moment), crammed full of stuff, and Cardiff is shot to look gorgeous. The prosthetics, such as the alien 'Weevils' masks look great, but some effects, like the CGI pterodactyl that flies around the ceiling of the Torchwood base just looked awful. Unless it has a key role to play at some point in the future I would suggest it's quietly forgotten about. If it does play a part them perhaps it should die in the playing. Some of the scenes are badly lit. Twenty years ago there was always a clear divide between stuff shot on film and stuff shot in the studio on video tape. The video material always looked tacky and nasty by comparison. Now that technology has improved there's no longer that clear divide (Remember Neverwhere which looked nasty throughout because the video made the sets look cheap even when they were real places?) but especially the Torchwood set looks like a set at the moment. There are any number of scenes, such as when they are examining the meteorite at the start of episode two, which just look nasty.
As I'm too old for DW I'm probably not placed to comment on Torchwood 's 'adultness'. When Virgin Books started putting out 'The New Doctor Who Adventures' in the nineties a lot of the writers took the opportunity to ramp up the ick factor of the violence and introduce sex and swearing. So far that's what we've got here, having characters occasionally shout "shit!" is hardly a great step forward for drama. It'll be interesting to see what Russell T. Davies has in mind for the emotional climax of the season, considering what he was able to do in the constraints of 'Doctor Who'. Although the second episode wasn't bad, I'm not convinced that just because it couldn't have been done if the show was made under the constraints of DW. When Angel spun out of Buffy it was intended for an older audience but there weren't that many changes beyond the weird ones where if someone in Buffy so much as were in the same room as something alcoholic their souls were damned to hell. To me this seems at the moment a cynical attempt to hook the kids who sneer at DW, no-one seriously thinks that by putting it on at 9:00 pm in this day and age the BBC are putting it beyond the reach of any kids that want to watch it, they're just trying to avoid the obvious complaints. For a supposedly adult show it's depressingly hetero and vanilla, two episodes in to Captain Jack's time on the TARDIS and the Doctor was already having to explain to Rose about how people from the 51st century danced better and Jack was chatting up sexually confused airmen. Now, while he does have some good lines, Jack's now all business and his team all assume that he's gay, presumably based on the fact he's an American who takes care of his appearance. Handled badly, alternative sexuality on screen can be as crass and as dull as straight sexuality and RTD surely wouldn't want to be pigeonholed as 'the big poof who puts big poofs on screen into everything he does' but BBC3 has also broadcast Two Pints of Lager and Casanova, and I hope that Torchwood leans towards the latter (I'm thinking of the scene where Casanova decides that if he loves someone it shouldn't matter what their sexual organs are) rather than the former (big laughs ensue whenever two guys end up looking even remotely gay).
It's won the BBC a big audience share for a tiny channel and is being repeated on BBC2 tomorrow. I'll be looking to it to improve and believe it can.
Actually, that's unfair. If I were feeling uncharitable I could rip the pilot of Torchwood, if I'd been visited by the ghosts of pilots past, present and future I might feel more inclined to the pseudo-medieval tosh that is 'Robin Hoodie and his Ineffective Men'. But I haven't been, so I'm not going to. And I did like Torchwood. It's supposedly a more adult version of Doctor Who but if DW is aimed at a bright twelve-year-old then T would appear to be aimed at their bored sixteen-year-old sibling, with stories that involve people who are their older brothers and sisters who are old enough to have just left university.
Cardiff beat cop Gwen Cooper comes across a mysterious group of people who can bring a murder victim back to life for a few minutes to question him about his attacker. Digging deeper she locates their secret HQ in the centre of town by the Millenium Centre. After unsuccessfully trying to wipe her memory of the experience she is instead offered a job by Captain Jack Harkness and their first job involves a discarnate alien energy being that lives off the energy human beings produce when doing the sex.
It really shouldn't work, especially the second episode which is really an excuse for a lot of jokes about shagging (at one point the woman who's been possessed by the sexy sexy sex alien of sex makes moves on Gwen and they start snogging in her cell. Rather than start worrying about alien contamination or mind control the rest of the team watch them go at it for several lo-o-o-ong seconds before deciding they should break them up, while another records it). But while Bob Hood aimed lower on Saturday night and failed, this manages to survive through two decent scripts. The first episode is exposition-heavy, both in explaining itself to viewers who've not seen the new Doctor Who but also to those who have as to what is different. Captain Jack apparently can't die and, although we don't know yet exactly how or why he's here and now, he's on the look-out for the Doctor. Although he's as smart-arse as he ever was John Barrowman also plays him with more of an edge, suggesting life hasn't been all fun since we last saw him. The other members of Team Torchwood haven't been particularly fleshed out, Burn Gorman is slightly creepy, not above using some alien technology to make him irresistible to women, but Ianto Jones, who seems to manage (as opposed to run) the team and Toshiko Sato have thus far been left as little more than sketches. Eve Myles role as everywoman Gwen, our way into the series, has a particularly thankless role in episode one, running around saying "what is..." and "who is..." every few seconds, but seems a lot happier in episode two, though things flag for a while about two-thirds of the way through. This has been a noticeable problem in Robin Hood, it seems no one involved has yet worked out how to write their episodes in the allotted time, so there's action at the beginning and the end and a boring middle.
In terms of problems there is the question of exactly how covert Torchwood is. It's an ultra top-secret organisation yet when people like the police or the army are told to pull back they're told it's because of Torchwood, which doesn't sound very stealthy. You can tell Russell T. Davies really wanted a cool 'entrance in plain site' moment, with a false step that descends into the Torchwood HQ, so he's really put a lot of effort into explaining how something so silly works without anyone noticing. The Torchwood set looks very good (except for one point which I shall get to in a moment), crammed full of stuff, and Cardiff is shot to look gorgeous. The prosthetics, such as the alien 'Weevils' masks look great, but some effects, like the CGI pterodactyl that flies around the ceiling of the Torchwood base just looked awful. Unless it has a key role to play at some point in the future I would suggest it's quietly forgotten about. If it does play a part them perhaps it should die in the playing. Some of the scenes are badly lit. Twenty years ago there was always a clear divide between stuff shot on film and stuff shot in the studio on video tape. The video material always looked tacky and nasty by comparison. Now that technology has improved there's no longer that clear divide (Remember Neverwhere which looked nasty throughout because the video made the sets look cheap even when they were real places?) but especially the Torchwood set looks like a set at the moment. There are any number of scenes, such as when they are examining the meteorite at the start of episode two, which just look nasty.
As I'm too old for DW I'm probably not placed to comment on Torchwood 's 'adultness'. When Virgin Books started putting out 'The New Doctor Who Adventures' in the nineties a lot of the writers took the opportunity to ramp up the ick factor of the violence and introduce sex and swearing. So far that's what we've got here, having characters occasionally shout "shit!" is hardly a great step forward for drama. It'll be interesting to see what Russell T. Davies has in mind for the emotional climax of the season, considering what he was able to do in the constraints of 'Doctor Who'. Although the second episode wasn't bad, I'm not convinced that just because it couldn't have been done if the show was made under the constraints of DW. When Angel spun out of Buffy it was intended for an older audience but there weren't that many changes beyond the weird ones where if someone in Buffy so much as were in the same room as something alcoholic their souls were damned to hell. To me this seems at the moment a cynical attempt to hook the kids who sneer at DW, no-one seriously thinks that by putting it on at 9:00 pm in this day and age the BBC are putting it beyond the reach of any kids that want to watch it, they're just trying to avoid the obvious complaints. For a supposedly adult show it's depressingly hetero and vanilla, two episodes in to Captain Jack's time on the TARDIS and the Doctor was already having to explain to Rose about how people from the 51st century danced better and Jack was chatting up sexually confused airmen. Now, while he does have some good lines, Jack's now all business and his team all assume that he's gay, presumably based on the fact he's an American who takes care of his appearance. Handled badly, alternative sexuality on screen can be as crass and as dull as straight sexuality and RTD surely wouldn't want to be pigeonholed as 'the big poof who puts big poofs on screen into everything he does' but BBC3 has also broadcast Two Pints of Lager and Casanova, and I hope that Torchwood leans towards the latter (I'm thinking of the scene where Casanova decides that if he loves someone it shouldn't matter what their sexual organs are) rather than the former (big laughs ensue whenever two guys end up looking even remotely gay).
It's won the BBC a big audience share for a tiny channel and is being repeated on BBC2 tomorrow. I'll be looking to it to improve and believe it can.
Labels: Doctor Who, Television, Torchwood
