The remainder of Torchwood is now in my hands. Without further ado, here’s what I thought of how the season ended.
Episode 10, “Out of Time,” centers on three people who accidentally traveled fifty years into the future (arriving in the present day) in an airplane. We pick up right where we left off, with no lapse in quality, but no improvements on problems. The characters are still stuck in ruts from being so thinly defined, and they keep living through the same plotlines: Owen keeps having sex with everyone and having to deal with the consequences, Gwen keeps having issues about communicating with her boyfriend who can’t know the truth, Tosh keeps getting written out because she has no character whatsoever, and Captain Jack keeps being the sad mysterious one who we desperately want to know better but who never actually tells his story. (The characters are in such states of perpetual recursion that Gwen’s boyfriend, who seemed to have been written out five episodes ago over the affair with Owen, reappears in this episode with no explanation and with no indication that he actually ever left…. Why?) The plotlines also continue to be ones that could just as easily be an X-Files or Twilight Zone episode. But, they also continue to be extraordinarily well written and well executed. This particular episode was a phenomenal bit of television. The characters 50 years out of time allows both for the struggle in dealing with outliving your own progeny and being ‘in your prime’ yet hopelessly out of tune with the times, while also giving the Torchwood crew the equivalent of interactions with fathers, brothers, sisters, and lovers who are every bit as mysterious and disconnected as they are. This episode works on many levels and, best of all, it is absolutely impossible to predict where it’s going; I was constantly surprised by the time travelers and their reactions (even though the members of the Torchwood team were caught in their stereotypical actions). This may be my favorite episode yet; better even than episode nine… It’s such a pity that they left the main characters so shallow, because this series has really had a lot going for it.
And, with a wave of my magic wand, I return the show to its primal suckiness. Someone desperately needs to inform the writers of this show that ripping off a famous film is never a wise idea; at best it results in a well made clone, at worst it results in laughable shit. No more “let’s make ‘The Hills Have Eyes’”; no more theft of concepts from Buffy… Episode 11, “Combat,” involves an encounter with a secret group, one that seems eerily similar to Torchwood – but mostly it’s a rip-off of a well known film. I’d tell you which well known film, but that would spoil the plot. The moral uncertainty of the group’s actions returns in this episode; unfortunately, so does the less compelling storytelling and the uncreative plotlines. What’s left is the show as it initially was supposed to be – a sci-fi special ops soap opera. But the soap opera aspect continues to be tired and predictable. We’re still caught up in Gwen’s troubles with her boyfriend; the only new twist here is that it gets morally hazy. Owen’s soap opera is a little better; at least him being love-scarred is a new development, and the ending may well be the first true twist in the series (although, it might just as easily be forgotten). Most of this episode is just bland. What the X-Files had that Torchwood does not is that you always felt like it was going somewhere. Torchwood rarely does. Only in the last 30 seconds does this plot really feel like it might have a lasting effect on a character and help us to learn about him. (But “Cyberwoman” felt like that as well, and never went anywhere.) Mostly, this is just character development for characters who barely exist – and that doesn’t work too well… This was the least creative and least compelling episode in a long time, though it may also be the one which kicks the series into a new level of interest in character and motivation.
Episode 12, “Captain Jack Harkness,” involves a building that sends Jack and Tosh back in time to 1941. Unfortunately, all of my deepest concerns about Owen’s plot twist from the previous episode are confirmed within the first five minutes as the potentially series changing event is swept under the carpet with no explanation and, just like Ianto before him, his personal tragedy results in little other than sad music, a montage, bitterness, and whining. In fact, Owen whines so much, that Ianto gives us his own little whining recap in some sort of whining contest. God damn it, writers… On the bright side, finally some discussion of Jack’s past comes up. And we even get his bisexuality as part of the plot, which had been MIA for about five episodes… And the plot itself is interesting and unpredictable. The episode is actually quite good, finishing with perhaps the best ending in the series (certainly the most meaningful – on many levels). After the stumble in the previous episode, this one’s a keeper. If only Owen wouldn’t be such a Ianto-esque bitch…
And finally, we go out with episode 13, “End of Days.” Yet another episode in which the thrust of the plotline is Torchwood attempting to rectify their own titanic fuck up, lest people (or in this case, the world) should be wiped out. This seems to happen to them a lot; perhaps there’s some validity to the criticism that these people all seem terrible at their jobs… Despite that, the episode is actually a quality end to the series. At last, ten episodes after the series lost its creativity and its concern with its own characters, the series finds a pair of balls, does interesting things, allows its characters to be real people, and goes out with something approximating a bang. If not for a few lines of devastatingly bad dialogue, some unacceptable fudging of the terms of Jack’s immortality at one point (he bounces back quickly after a gunshot; we know this), and a bit of poor directing (though only a bit), this would’ve been an extremely good ending to the series. I can’t really say much more about this one. It doesn’t have a great deal of depth to it; it’s just a solid finale for an earthbound sci-fi series.
So that’s it. All in all, the series was quite good. Three or four superb episodes, and a couple other very good ones. Only a couple of absolute stinkers.
There wound up being far more whining and crying in the series than I expected (and perhaps quite a bit more than it could bear with such thinly defined characters), and far less roof standing and humor than I would’ve expected after episodes one and two. There was also significantly less character development than one would hope for, although when it happened, it was generally well done. The characters were interesting despite being incomplete and thin. Perhaps the biggest failing of the show was that it wound up feeling like ‘homage hour’ on far too many occasions. (If there was something about the perpetual use of well known plotlines that was supposed to be meaningful, it didn’t come across…) But I feel now how I felt when I wrote at the end of episode nine.
I want more. I also want better…but I definitely want more.
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Meanwhile, I’ve also seen the first episode of “Sarah Jane Smith Adventures,” the second spin-off from Dr. Who. The jury’s still very very out on that one.
About 70 percent of the pilot episode was abysmal. The villain was ridiculous and stupid (gotta love that Russell T. Davies…). I don’t get much out of alien octopi who plan to conquer the earth by making everyone drink infected soda… And, to top it off, all of their acting was bad. Also, the black neighbor girl was an annoying ‘black neighbor girl’ stereotype, and the girl who will be a central character has an annoying ‘broken home’ background – also a stereotype for ‘children’s TV.’ Therefore, virtually all of the first 30 minutes of the episode was an intolerable parade of stereotypes or simply intolerable due to stupidity.
The good things, then, were few, but they were very good. The idea of making a human boy out of the minds of 10,000 other humans is a bit ridiculous and clichéd, but it also has promise. The show really only picked up when they started having conversations with him. So it’ll be interesting to see if they do anything with the character or just turn him into a typical ‘I wish I were a real boy’ whiner…
Then there’s Sarah herself, who is pitch perfect as a role model for the viewers. Though I have no idea how one could possibly explain the presence of a supercomputer, alien technology in everyday disguises, and various other things, the overall ‘character’ of Sarah Jane is excellent. Her loneliness (with expository dialogue coming from the actually rather brilliant concept of having K-9 stuck in a box saving the universe from a stupid accident) gives the series a level of emotional complexity that eludes most children’s programs, and her continual pep talks on how one must be different from the villains that one is fighting have a profundity about them that most ‘morals of the story’ in children’s television lack. Davies even gives her an excellent closing speech discussing how adulthood isn’t really what kids think it will be – “you never really know what you want to be.” Nothing new, of course, but well handled. I don’t know if it was the writing or Liz Sladen’s acting, but something about this character works.
So I don’t really know what to expect from this new show. Clearly the only thing that it is likely to do well is the ‘elderly female role model’ aspect. But is that going to be enough to save it from an almost certain fate of crappy ‘monster of the week’ villains and children’s-action-television clichés? I don’t know.
It only barely saved the pilot episode, and even then it was only possible due to the excellent handling of introductory dialogue by Davies. We’ll see, but I do not have high hopes for this…
