torchwood

Six months later

  • Reading time:2 mins read

The whole of Children of Earth is riddled with this awful futility.

The aliens had no need to be there. Had they needed the kids to eat or breed, it would have been horrible yet in some way reasonable: everything needs to try to survive somehow. As it turned out, there was no need for Frobisher to take his final actions. There was no need for the government to seek out and destroy Torchwood (with all the collateral damage involved there — Rupesh, etc.).

Just about every problem in this story is a result of vanity or weakness of character. It’s just plain stupid chaos. Gwen’s taped message in episode five puts a bullet point on that. And that’s pretty interesting!

Something else to point out, thematically — it’s only Jack sacrificing his own that solves the problem. This, after five episodes of everyone saying “it’s okay; take theirs, but not mine!” Earlier even Jack had his moment, with Ianto. Until then effectively no one is willing to make a sacrifice, no one is willing to take the burden. Even for the best characters, on some level it’s someone else’s problem.

Which I think illustrates what a strong character Frobisher is meant to be through most of this — he takes on all the responsibility that no one else wants, and he handles it. Much of that responsibility is awful, and poorly judged, but he absorbs it anyway, and takes it all to heart. He kind of fails the final test, but by that point it’s hard to much blame him.

This all, I assume, ties back into most of the characters being civil servants. Sort of a sci-fi Ikiru, except with less annoying structure.

Here comes Jack on a ruddy great tractor

  • Reading time:1 mins read

These last two episodes of Torchwood have been pretty brilliant about stealthily establishing elements that will be important later. Usually this business is fairly transparent. Here, it’s all so offhanded and apparently pragmatic that you don’t question; it doesn’t occur to you that these items or themes will come up again. The first scene in Cardiff, for instance, is Gwen at the ATM. Ah-ha, yes? That first child-event, each of the scenes they show serves several purposes, not least of which introducing characters. The only arbitrary kids given much screentime are those around Gwen’s ATM and the line not-arbitrarily blocking Rhys’s way.

So far, this is not only well-structured; it’s elegantly done. You’re so distracted by the characters and dialog that you don’t see the gears moving at all. However well-designed the machine, you still lose if it’s obviously mechanical.

Alan Wake

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So, Sarah Jane is back in town. And Sladen is a bit less awkward in her acting.

I like the way (new showrunner) Phil Ford accounted for a rather tough list of ingredients — writing out Maria, giving a big role to all the Jacksons, reusing props and effects from Who, setting up some recurring story threads, following up on recent and ancient continuity without relying on it — and churned out a rather solid, pacey adventure at the same time.

Maria’s departure could have been handled so many ways, all trite, yet it felt organic, truthful, and not at all cloying. And I love the way it folds into the A plot, effectively giving her whole family a big farewell.

It’s all rather… snuggly. A shame to lose Maria and (especially) her dad. Ah well.

I quite like, also, that the story isn’t predicated on “big reveals”. Both the Sontaran thing and the America thing are unveiled halfway through the first episode (not that either was a secret coming in), leaving the rest of the story for the development of the characters’ reactions to these facts, and for the Sontaran’s own story. (The flashbacks are pretty great, too — especially the injury.) And those reactions (to start with, SJ’s coolness to Maria; the boys’ nervous yet restrained reaction to the Sontaran) were both pleasantly atypical and, again, true.

Chrissie is another example — how she gets roped into the story. Again sidestepping the tedious, she just squints at Alan and says she believed him, because his mouth didn’t twitch. Which was a bit pat, yes, but it both fit her character’s line of thinking and for the first time illustrated a good side to the way she processes things.

The story’s full of subtle little things like that, making grace of moments that should have been annoying. It was as if the story elements were there to explore how the characters might react, rather than the characters behaving in a particular way so as to allow Things to Happen.

Even the corridor-running has a nice lateral energy to it.

The only criticism I have, really, is that whoever did the production design for the inside of the radio telescope, and the computer graphics, really… sucks.

That’s something that always bothers me, the bizarre TV/cinema notion of how computers and computer displays work. It’s kind of amazing, considering that everyone working on this show and nearly everyone in the audience must use a computer constantly. What’s the point of the wacky-flashy graphics?

You have to shrug off some things, of course — the dad’s “hypnotized” acting, “totally creeped-out to the max”, constant potato jokes. Kind of the price of admission.

. . .

So consider this. The next full series of Who isn’t airing until 2010, leading people to label 2009 the “gap year”. Between December and then, there will be just five specials, a half-series of Torchwood, and probably a third series of SJA.

At twelve half-hour episodes, a season of SJA is nearly the length of a McCoy season of Who. This is more or less what aired each year, between 1986 and 1989.

At five hours, so, actually, is the rest of Davies’ Who run, through 2009.

At five hour-long specials, so is the length of Torchwood 3.

Altogether, that’s about 900 minutes (or fifteen hours) of Whoniverse programming in 2009. That’s compared with ~1000 minutes per season in the ’60s, 650 minutes in the ’70s to mid-’80s, and 350 in the late ’80s. And, of course, a total of 90 minutes between 1989 and 2005.

Some gap year.

Adrift, indeed.

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Some good stuff in here. It kind of falls apart once Gwen actually finds the island. It becomes icky, and it seems like Chibnall was searching for an excuse for all of those people to be held there. Then since the excuses he found weren’t particularly persuasive, he lumped in some ham-handed philosophy about whether some things are too horrible to know. On the basis of the last part of the episode, and the lingering annoyance it’s left me, I’d say maybe. I’m not sure that’s the parallel he was looking for, however.

What a weak and uninquisitive mind Chibnall seems to have. One of the things I like about Doctor Who is its sense that knowledge and experience sets a person free. That whatever the hardship, however difficult the knowledge, it’s better to know and have done than not. It’s better to grow than to sit and cower about what might happen. But Chibnall… he consistently writes shrill characters who go histrionic when presented with anything they can’t immediately understand. And whose minds MELT when forced to deal with anything outside themselves. This… is not enriching my life.

Again, though. Some neat character and myth stuff in the first thirty-five minutes or whatever.

The Purple Rose of Cardiff

  • Reading time:4 mins read

This year, Torchwood has become a very entertaining way to make fifty minutes disappear. It has pretty much worked out what it’s doing, even if it has yet to figure out why.

Today’s episode, though (which deals in nasty people materializing out of old films), resembles a lot of series one episodes, or “42” from series three of Who, in that it feels like it could be an episode of nearly any TV show with a vague sci-fantasy bent to it. Although the hero roles are roughly adapted to the main cast and all their quirks (despite continued confusion about Owen’s current status; can he feel anything or not? Can he breathe or not?), the same script could have been tweaked for The X-Files or Supernatural or (yes) Hammond’s own Sapphire & Steel, or any number of other shows in this vein. And it might fit in any of those somewhat more mystical shows better than in Torchwood.

(Man, I wonder if Mark Gatiss is going to write for this show. That would have been so appropriate for series one.)

It’s just this narrative island, that sticks out from the relatively tight narrative this year. And it’s clumsily written in places. The ending, in particular, which pulls out that “The story isn’t over! Be afraid of everyday objects!” trope card (which worked well, for all its hammer-over-the-skull directness, in “Blink“), is just… Well, the whole episode feels like it was written for an audience of twenty years ago. Never mind that the premise is old hat in itself, and that film as a cultural and technological concept should long since be demystified; it’s just… hard to relate to a fear of something so specific and (by 2008 standards) so esoteric as old film cans that you might dig up at a rummage sale. How many people do you know who own their own film projectors?

As far as the story itself goes, were those images on the piece of film or not? The young editor claims they weren’t, when he spliced it together. Indeed, they continue to show on his monitor even after the film is unspooled. Yet when the Torchwood team takes the film can, the images do seem to be physically part of the reel. Granted, the story probably isn’t meant for rational breakdown; it’s B-grade mystical faff. Yet it is distracting when a story can’t even get its own internal logic straight.

The bad guys suffer from that ineffectual, poorly-defined TV villain thing. Why do they spend most of the episode looking bored, milling aimlessly through abandoned places? You’d think if they were motivated enough to escape from a bit of celluloid they would want to use their time more efficiently. If the undrownable woman needs or loves water so much, and they’re in Cardiff, why is she squatting around, guzzling from stagnant ponds and lying in bathtubs? They’re right on the Bay! As evidenced in all of those helicopter establishing shots. It’s even salt water, which seems to be her preference!

Julian Bleach is decent, if a bit unchallenged, in his role as the head villain. Going by his Shockheaded Peter stuff, he just seems to be stamping out his trademark performance. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when he has a suit as specific as Davros to fill out.

Anyway. Harmless enough; just kind of irrelevant. Next week‘s looks interesting. From here on it seems like all the continuity guns are going to be blazing, on the road to a snazzy climax for the year. Though I doubt it will ever completely justify itself, this show has on a whole become a very genial piece of television.

The Trouble with Lisa

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Finally a pretty good Torchwood episode. Though each of the previous three was better than the last , last week’s height was a respectable mediocrity. Now we’re basically on target with what I expected out of the series from the start. Aside from the story and tone details (A snappy pace! Enough plot to fill an entire episode! “Adult” content that doesn’t feel completely gratuitous!), finally we get some decent characterization going on! For the first time, there’s some chemistry! Even Dr. Sato gets more to do than usual, here — which isn’t to suggest a lot.

And amongst all that, it’s probably the best Cyberman story ever produced. (Which isn’t to suggest a lot!)

Actually, that leads to odd thing: despite this episode being the biggest, most obvious crossover yet with the parent series, it’s also the first one that seems to project its own personality apart from Who. Perhaps it was being set almost entirely in the Hub, mostly using elements introduced in the previous episodes — and the Who crossover, though involving a traditional monster, was directly tied to established Torchwood lore. From the pizza to the Canary Wharf incident to Ianto’s background, to Jack’s intense hardness, for once this series feels like it’s got its own mythology.

Now that I know the production team is capable of living up to some of the series potential, I guess I can be a little harder on it. Given that this is what I had always imagined as an “average” episode of Torchwood, I’ll be expecting a lot from now on.

Rose and Rose

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Yeah, this was pretty good. Certainly a leap up from New Earth, anyway. The tone and the pacing and some other ephemera aren’t really to my taste. As with The Chrismas Invasion, I’m not sure how fond I am of this “action movie” route the series has been taking. Not enough character development. Not enough exploration of concepts and themes. Not enough time for anything except Things Happening. Still, it’s all very well-done.

I think they missed an opportunity by making the solution mistletoe instead of frankincense. Torchwood House and all. Imagine if the walls actually had “torchwood” in them instaed of mistletoe oil.

Also, yeah. Billie’s running gag was annoying. I know it was supposed to be, to at least some extent. In context it didn’t come off as a bit clever, though; just flat-out flippant. That was distracting, and didn’t really fit her character. It’s one thing to be rude with some wit. This, though… well.

The actual end, with Vic’s speech, was also a little on the nose. The sub-ending was great, though: fine, here’s your reward — now get off my lawn before I call the cops.

I was far less annoyed by the cartoon wolf than I expected to be! Normally CG irritates me; this was used minimally and with enough taste that it pretty much worked. So good. And all the running plot stuff is kind of neat. Bad Wolf indeed. Was that just an in-joke, or does it mean something? What fun.

All in all, the episode hung together much better than it should have. It’s tied with twine; stll, it holds. Commendable stuff. And as a production, it’s pretty much perfect. Best direction so far, next to The Empty Child. Probably Davies’ cleanest script, one week after his messiest.

* * *

Other people have described the Silent Hill movie better than I could. The best part was the butched-up Cybil. The worst part is… well, everything after the white-out. Just, yikes. It’s too bad this didn’t really work in the end, as there are so many nice little things about it: the way the sirens are attached to the church (much as in a Junji Ito story I just localized), the way the transitions to and from the “dark world” were visualized. Johnny Cash. There was so much potential in the dual story with Rose and her husband. Then the movie never really did anything with any of this; instead it just took that left turn onto gore street. A darned shame.