Torchwood: Miracle Day

The two regular seasons of Torchwood were pretty weak. The shortened Torchwood: Children of Earth miniseries was pretty good. The question was which direction Miracle Day would lean, as it has the former's longer length but the latter's singular focus on one idea. Unfortunately, it tended toward the weak side of the scale. Miracle Day either didn't take the right lessons from Children of Earth or just didn't apply them correctly, because while I thought it started off pretty strong, it couldn't sustain itself, and I had completely lost interest by the time it ended. It really should have been another five episode run. There just isn't enough story here to justify it being ten hours, and it's all the worse for being stretched out.

The concept is intriguing enough. One day, death basically turns off, and while people can still be crushed and maimed and weakened by disease, their bodies just won't die. Torchwood, or the two surviving members of it, get involved when they receive a message at the exact moment of the "miracle", a message that the CIA detects, causing two agents named Rex and Esther to pursue them. The four team up to figure out what caused the miracle and why, and there's also a completely terrible, nonsensical subplot that ultimately goes nowhere featuring a creepy pedophile murderer played by Bill Pullman whose execution is aborted by the miracle and somehow becomes a popular public speaker for a while.

The show works early because it looks at what would happen if death stopped happening. Hospitals fill up, disease begins to spread like wildfire, doomsday cults form, and quickly the global economy collapses. Procedures and policies that function because death exists break down and have to be rethought. It's interesting stuff, but it gets pushed aside once Torchwood gets a whiff of what's behind it. They quickly learn that a certain pharmaceutical company had stocked up medication for just such an emergency, and must be involved in whatever plot caused the change. They eventually figure out the real truth, which is pretty silly, doesn't capitalize on the concept of death disappearing, and revolves around Jack's two key characteristics - his immortality (which disappears after the miracle) and his willingness to have sex with anyone (which doesn't).

The final answers to the show's question are not satisfying, and the journey to get there is too padded and dull to make that an irrelevant complaint. The new characters don't contribute much either. Pullman's Oswald, as I said, makes no sense. Rex is too much of an asshole on the asshole-rogue scale, and Esther is cute but not much else. The show really doesn't do much with its transition to America, honestly. There's one pretty good for TV action scene in the premiere, and they make a few easy jokes about how the US and the UK are different, but that about covers it. The CIA is also amazingly inept and inconsequential to the plot, with its only success being the introduction of John de Lancie as one of Rex' higher-ups a little too late.

The plot is meandering, with most episodes struggling to stretch themselves to over fifty minutes and too much time wasted before any real information actually gets exposed. It's just a textbook example of how to sully a neat science fiction concept in a television show. I'm not sure if Starz plans to renew their collaboration with the BBC on this, and I'm not sure I care either way. And I definitely hope they don't follow through on their threat in the finale of returning to the same idea.

Torchwood: Children of Earth

This is one of the more interesting things I've seen a running series do. When Torchwood moved from BBC2 to the regular BBC, they only got an order for a five episode miniseries instead of a full season. So they turned it into a five day event, and it became the most interesting thing the show has done. Instead of several disconnected stories, they tell one with a lot of attention to detail. You'd think stretching a plot over five hours instead of fifty minutes might result in some boredom, but the events are heavy enough that I was attached to my seat the entire time, unlike my previous experience with the show.

The pace is generally slow, but the drip-feed of information and curiosities is enough to keep you interested before things really ratchet up. It's a couple episodes before the real villains actually show up but their presence is felt through the creepy manipulation of all the world's children. It sets the mood for what's to follow, where politicians have to face a terrible decision, and it gets treated with the proper weight that you generally don't see in fantastical stories like this. The normal activities of the Torchwood Institute are sort of placed on the back burner as the focus is more on their survival and personal relationships, and they spend a lot of time just trying to not die. The resolution was pretty rapid compared to the amount of buildup and drama before it, but it was a nice capper to a genuinely intriguing tale. I'm really not sure what's going to happen in season 4 with the current state of the cast, but it will probably be worth at least checking out.

Torchwood - Season 2

Torchwood. We watch over a rift in time and space through the middle of Cardiff. We capture and study alien technologies. We also like having sex with people.

The second season of this wacky ass show doesn't do a lot that the first didn't. There's still people who have been sent through time and Weevils (Aliens who have come through the rift and live in the sewers) and not a whole lot of variety or ambition in the stories. It's kind of odd, because they have more freedom with adult content than parent series Doctor Who, but practically none of the freedom with actual story ideas. There are some interesting guests though, with a stint by Freema Agyeman reprising the Martha Jones role and James Marsters of Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame playing a fellow time agent every bit as pansexual and insane as Jack was before he spent a century and a half stuck on Earth. There's a somewhat interesting plot involving a cast member living in a state of death, although I'm not sure they really took it to its rightful conclusion. I thought the finale was weak, mostly because the villain was such a whiny turd who earned almost none of his constant hate for everything. The ending is surprisingly far-reaching in its effects on the show though, resulting in a seemingly very different third season. It's really not that good, but it's not a waste of time either.

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.