Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Torchwood - Season 1



Torchwood is the more adult spin-off of Doctor Who, although the added bloody violence and swearing don't really make it a better show. Instead of traveling through time and space meeting aliens and solving their problems, Captain Jack Harkness and crew stick around the same basic location in Wales and deal with whatever wacky cases fall into their lap. There's a decent amount of variety and creativity in the stories, including multiple cases of people accidentally falling through time and the discovery of strange alien artifacts. It's not all sci-fi either, such as one episode that's pretty much just a straight up The Hills Have Eyes sort of horror story.

Besides the main action there's also an inordinate amount of sexual tension as everyone wants to bang or is banging everyone else. It actually gets in the way of what I want to watch the show for, because there's a lot more subtle and interesting ways to do that sort of thing on a lot of other series. And it kind of undermines the seriousness a bit, because you know, screwing your coworkers isn't very professional. Still though, Torchwood is a fairly entertaining detective/science fiction show that fans of stuff like Fringe might find they like. It ties in with its parent series in a vaguely interesting way, and is a bit of a nice thematic break from it. The finale was just about as absurd as anything in Who, though.

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