There's a little television show over in England called
Doctor Who - perhaps you've heard of it? Well, the show is so popular that the BBC has done spin-offs - several, in fact.
Doctor Who Confidential, The Sarah Jane Adventures, Totally Doctor Who - and the subject of today's review:
Torchwood.
In 2002, before the revival of
Doctor Who, producer Russell T. Davies began to develop an idea for a crime drama with a science fiction bent - something along the lines of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Angel. This idea, originally titled
Excalibur, sat on the shelf for several years until BBC Three Controller Stuart Murphy invited Davies to develop a science-fiction series for the channel.
During the production of the 2005 series of
Doctor Who, the word "Torchwood" (an anagram of "Doctor Who") had been used as a codename for the series while filming its first few episodes, kind of like
Blue Harvest was a cover for the location shoots of
Return of the Jedi. RTD said "Wait a second - that's a brilliant name!" and resurrected the earlier
Excalibur idea, and decided to tie the show into
Doctor Who.
Torchwood centers on the team that makes up Torchwood Three, the Cardiff branch of the Torchwood Institute. Torchwood was founded by Queen Victoria after an encounter with the Doctor and tasked to research and combat alien threats to the British Empire, and use their findings to restore the Empire's former glory. To those ends, it acquires and reverse engineers alien technology by any means deemed necessary.
Torchwood Three is a team of five operatives, led by Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), with Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) as the "new girl" who joins up in the first episode and acts as a point-of-view character for the viewer. There's doctor Owen Harper (medic and psychologist), doctor Toshiko Sato (Original from the Doctor Who episodes Aliens of London/World War III), Ianto Jones (general support) and Suzie Costello (weapons specialist and all around bit
ch). There's also a handful of minor recurring characters - but we'll get to them in a bit.
And so our intrepid Torchwood team battles aliens and demons from hell and time travelers and all manner of flotsam and jetsam, amid personality conflicts, secret adjendas, and some hard core snogging action.
Oh yes, did I mention the snogging? While
Doctor Who is very much a family show, sutible for all ages (even if it does occasionally scare the pants off them and send them scurrying behind the sofa), Torchwood is very much an adult program. Swearing, sex, soft core nudity, adult themes - it's all there.
And that's where we start running into problems. Oh
Torchwood, how I so badly wanted to like you.
The problem - well, the main problem that I had with the series - was that it was trying too hard to be adult, to prove that it wasn’t cut from the same cloth as the parent program. Now, I will freely admit that I am no prude. I enjoy sleezy exploitation grindhouse trash, graphic slasher flicks from the eighties, and raunchy juvenile humor like
Benny Hill as much as the next guy. But the adult content of
Torchwood feels like it was bolted on at the expense of character development and plot, like the production team was going "Look! We're dropping the F-Bomb! See, we're not
Doctor Who!" It's like
Torchwood is a teenage boy who's parents have gone away for the weekend so it insists on throwing the biggest house party since Shorty Arbuckle set the Johnson place on fire with a cherry bomb in the toilet last Christmas.
It's also terribly inconsistent -
Torchwood wants to be mature and hard-hitting, but it's not confident enough to shed it's
Doctor Who trappings. It sacrifices the development of the supporting characters before they become truly formed. It wants to be a deep character piece, but insists on doing action/adventure whenever it can. It wants to be racy and sexy, but shamelessly indulges in a bit of juvenile innuendo.
This wouldn't be a big deal if we gave a damn about the characters. I wouldn’t say that I disliked the characters - that implies a passive, inert state of being. No, I actively hate them, to a man. When I wasn’t hating them, they were busy leaving no impression on me whatsoever. They're often written and portrayed as if they were smacked around with a baseball bat made out of frozen idiocy.
But wait a second - what about Captain Jack? Jack is still the best thing to come out of Neo Who to date. John Barrowman is charismatic, charming beyond belief, full of energy, clearly loves his roll and is good looking to boot. The problem is - the show is all wrong for him. His
Doctor Who-ish whimsy only serves to point out just how miserable the rest of the show is. And even happy-go-lucky Jack is dragged down by
Torchwood. (I'm hoping that the time he spent at the end of the universe in
Utopia was enough to let him get over his personal issues and get back to devil-may-care Jack).
(Although really, I could have done without that whole Captain Scarlet "I cant die" thing)
So, what did they get right?
The show looks fantastic, the cinematography is gorgeous and it looks glossy and expensive. The Torchwood Hub looks (insert obligatory swear word here) marvelous - like a ramshackle CTU that hasn't had the cleaners in for decades, you could almost smell the damp. The paving slab was a great conceit but I wish Gwen hadn't drawn my attention to the obvious flaw/floor because every time we'll be down there I'll be expecting a idiot to come hurtling down the shaft. The pterodactyl was a nice touch too
At the end of the day the first season of
Torchwood is a squandered opportunity. I watched the 13 episodes mostly out of loyalty to the parent show - but if this were any other show, I'd have switched off after 3 episodes into the run. According to the behind the scenes reading that I've done, season one was rushed into production, that they didn’t have the time to put all the polish on the show that they wanted. My only hope is that now that Torchwood has its legs, now that Jack has some issues resolved with the Doctor, that the show will really take off.
But if series two is a dog like this one. . . . .
Anyway - as with the modern
Doctor Who reviews, I'll now move onto the individual episodes. As always, I'll try and remain vague - but
spoilers will inevitably abound. You have been warned. . . .
Episode One: Everything Changes
Wherein everything changes . . . .
The episode bears a strong resemblance to
Rose (the 2005 series opener episode, not the character), taking an ordinary girl and placing her in an extraordinary situation. And much like
Rose, this is a pretty by-the-numbers episode. The whole serial-killer plot seems to lose steam after ten or fifteen minutes, shifting to info-dump mode that pilots have to impart, only to come roaring back to life in the last five.
I've seen worse starts, but I've seen way better too.
Episode Two: Day One
Wherein we get Gwen's first day on the new job
The story - and I've learned from reasonably reliable sources that there indeed was one - seemed to concern sex mad alien on the loose in Cardiff looking for a man to do the humpty dance with. But at least
Species was sexy and had Natasha Henstridge in the nude. Day One wasn't sexy - it was crude, like a sticky copy of Maxim and about erotic as an episode of
Benny Hill.
Episode Three: Ghost Machine
Wherein Owen hunts down a killer - 40 years after the fact!
Hey look - it's Roj Blake as an old man! Cool! Gareth Thomas guest spot aside, this episode wasn’t all that bad. The characters didn’t offend me (well, too badly), the story - while thin - wasn’t too terribly illogical. For those of you looking for this episode to get the gold medal at the Huge Pile of Dung Olympics, you'll be disappointed. While it's not bad - not great either, mind you - it only takes away a bronze medal at most.
Episode Four: Cyberwoman
Wherein the Torchwood team faces their sexiest threat yet
And this episode right here manages to sum up EVERYthing that was wrong about Torchwood. Angry, ugly selfish characters that I couldn’t give a fig about, a plot that squanders it's potential, and gratuitous sex. The Cybermen return - but this time, they're SEXY!
Oh for pete's sake!
Yeah, the Cybermen - emotionless, relentless, unstoppable cyborgs have been reduced to a big breasted woman dressed in a full on cybernetic fetish suit, complete bare middrifts to show a bit of skin and high heels. Since when did the Cybermen understand the concept of breasts? Well, at least we learn where the Cybermen's trademark tear drop eye comes from - it's Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis' weeping from beyond the grave.
Oi vay. . . .
Episode Five: Small Worlds
Wherein Captain Jack finds fairies in his past. . . .
This episode comes to us from the pen of PJ Hammond, the mastermind behind the classic ITV series
Sapphire & Steel. While there are some good bits here and there, it's far too sporadic and uneven. What exactly were the fairies' motives anyway? If they're after the souls of dead children, why go through the whole 'Chosen One' rigmarole in the first place? Why did the fairies kill off Jack's aged love-interest? Was it to protect the fairies? Then why reveal themselves when gate crashing the party?
And then the end - which fills me with rage. If it was up to the Doctor, he'd have saved the kids, placated the fairies and saved the day for everyone involved. Instead, Jack lets the kid simply walk away into the haunted forests. And we're suppose to sympathize with this guy?
Episode Six: Countrycide
Wherein the Torchwood team encounters the family from Deliverance
Like I said earlier, I am about as far away from squeamish or prudish as you can possibly get. And frankly, everything in this episode of
Torchwood is nothing that I haven’t seen a hundred times before. Why then was this quite possibly the most repulsive things I've seen in a long, long time?
Again - it's all about the characters. Take the crew of the Liberator from
Blake's 7 - a team that often openly hated each other banded together to fight for a 'cause' that most of them didn't believe in, stuck with a 'leader' that was a hopeless idealist, and everyone on the team sporting more character flaws than you can shake a stick at. Yet the chemistry worked because the alternative was so much worse.
Meanwhile let's look at the Torchwood team - Gwen is supposed to be the everyman window-into-the-world that audience identifies with, but over the next hour she manages to squander away every scrap of sympathy and compassion we ever had for her. Meanwhile Owen's a total bastard, Ianto is Arnold Rimmer but without the redeeming qualities of being funny and Tosh is wallpaper. At no time did the 'good guys' exhibit any commendable behavior (much less anything remotely heroic).
The only good thing is, this is the low point of the series. No matter what happens after this, it wont get any worse.
Episode Seven: Greeks Bearing Gifts
Wherein Tosh gets some badly needed character development. . . .
By some cruel twist of fate, I wound up watching this episode by Toby Whithouse for the first time back to back with the
Doctor Who episode
School Reunion (also by Toby). Although mind you, the Torchwood episode must have been written by the mirror universe Toby Whithouse with the Spock goatee, since there is no way that such a sucktacular script could come from the same person who gave me Sarah Jane Smith back. It's like getting a slice of the fresh warm, homemade apple pie with a generous portion of hand churned ice cream after being forced to suck on a spunk flavored lollypop for an hour.
Episode Eight: They keep killing Suzie
Wherein Suzie comes back in a plot that doesn't make much sense
There was a good story in there somewhere, but as usual the heavy handed, hammered-home story telling ruined it. Oh and we learn that there’s something in the dark coming for Jack! Hurray for forshadowing!
Episode Nine: Random Shoes
Wherein Eugene Jones has to figure out the events leading up to his death
As I settled down for my daily dose of really crappy to moderately bad
Torchwood, I started to have an unusual sensation: I was actually starting to enjoy this episode. It was a weird and frightening realization - a GOOD
Torchwood episode? Well, not good in the
Empty Child/Doctor Dances sense of the word, but good as in the episode doesn't bite? Be still my heart!
Random Shoes is much like
Love and Monsters from the parent show's series two, where it takes the traditional formula and tosses it out on it's ear. It's like a peek into a parallel universe where we get a
Torchwood with no sex, no F-bombs, no gratuitous lesbianism, or people screaming at each other as they waved their guns in the air. It's an episode where the production team had a solid idea and knew what they had to do to get there.
In fact the only problem I had with the episode was one I've had with the series all along - the secondary characters have never ever, EVER been built up. So we get a Torchwood fan that's been hanging around acting like a groupie for the team. Great - where has he been all this time? Why didn’t we get some establishing moments with him in the previous eight episodes?
Sigh - I weep for the lost opportunity.
Episode Ten: Out of Time
Wherein Torchwood is visited by strangers lost for 40 years
Wow - two good
Torchwood episodes back to back? Might this be the start of a trend?
The episode begins in spectacularly unoriginal fashion: a group of fish-out-of-water time travelers have to get used to modern day life. But the unoriginal nature of the episode simply doesn't matter, since it's packed chocked full of surprisingly genuine emotion.
If I were cynical, I'd table the idea that it was bound to happen eventually - there were too many talented people putting in too much time and effort and dedication to have it all p
iss away into the directionless mess that the show has largely been since ‘Cyberwoman’. But I'd like to think that the team finally got its act together and can start delivering quality week after week.
[Note from future self - sadly, no they don't]
Episode Eleven: Combat
Wherein Noel Clarke gives us the Weevil Fight Club episode
*sigh* Just when you though you've turned a corner, the
Torchwood production team cocks it up and serves us a tepid offering like
Combat.
I have to admit that I'd been looking forward to this story ever since I learned that Mickey the Idiot was writing it, and to be fair Noel *ALMOST* gets it right. The pre-credit teaser was surprisingly effective and the script not only gives all of the Torchwood team something to do (including the criminally ignored Tosh) he actually made the team feel like - well, like a team. But Owen is still a bastard (admittedly a sympathetic bastard now), Captain Jack continues his slide into away from humanity into darkness (imagine the Doctor letting someone die like that), and the story just isn't all that good.
It's not a bad episode, but just ain't all that good either.
Episode Twelve: Captain Jack Harkness
Wherein we meet the real Captain Jack
Frustrating! This is the episode that shows the potential of
Torchwood, and enrages me all the more to watch the production team (who I *KNOW* can produce far better entertainment than this) completely and utterly blow it all. Genuine, touching human emotions, some meaty and long overdue back story on my most favorite character to come out of the new show, and it manages to showcase everything the series does (or at least should do) best.
Pity the series takes an abrupt about-face in the very next episode. . . .
Episode Thirteen: End of Days
Wherein the Torchwood team hits the End of Days and I hit the end of my rope.
As we close in on the very last episode of series one, it becomes painfully obvious that the production team didn’t have a clue on how to actually finish the run. And so they pull out of the air a 300 foot tall life sucking demon that makes no bloody sense whatsoever! At least with Bad Wolf (and the Torchwood arc and the Saxon arc) we got hints scattered throughout the various seasons - some blatant, some subtle, but at least they didn’t drag out the arc in the last half an hour of the season.
Who cares! It's the series ender - we need ACTION! ADVENTURE! DANGER! Who cares about details like common sense and plot, it's all hell breaking loose!
And yet, amid the overwhelming sense of WTF, the cliffhanger - I couldn’t help getting a slight giddy smile on my face when the sound of the TARDIS engines whisked Jack off to
Utopia and the end of the universe. God I am such a fan boy.
THE DVD -
Made only a year or two ago (from this writing), the show looks slick. It was originally shot in high definition, and I have it on good authority that the BBC will be releasing the series on Blue Ray (or whatever format wins the VHS/Betamax war), so if this is important to you, you might want to consider passing for the moment. For the rest of us though, the show looks great.
THE EXTRAS -
Now the DVD set I'm using for the review is the R2 boxed set - but 2/Entertain has mandated that the Doctor Who will sport the same content, regardless of what region you are in - so I expect this to be the same lineup of extras that we'll see in a months time when the set is released.
We get ten Behind-the-Scenes Featurettes (not to terribly dissimilar to the Doctor Who Confidential), a handful of deleted scenes per episode (often filling in answers to plot points and questions left dangling. More the frustrating, seeing that some of the gratuitous sex could have been cut in place of plot). We get audio Commentary on all thirteen episodes (As always, John Barrowman is a blast to listen to) and some outtakes.
While not as good a package as the classic Doctor Who releases get, this isn't a bad set of extras.
THE BOTTOM LINE -
If you were to make me sum up
Torchwood in one word, I guess I'd go for schizophrenic. The show can't seem to make up its mind where it's going or how it's going to get there, and the tone is inconsistent. More importantly,
Torchwood is frustrating in that when you're just on the verge of giving up on the show for good it goes and pulls a legitimately good episode out of its bag of tricks. And once you settle into a stretch where you think the production team finally has its act together, they amaze you in just how far they can stick their head up their own a
ss.
Hopefully with enough production time and that they can hit the ground running, series two will be on par with the goodness of
Doctor Who or the
Sarah Jane Adventures.
OTHER DOCTOR WHO EPISODES ON DVD:
DOCTOR ONE -
* The Beginning * Doctor Who and the Daleks * The Aztecs * The Dalek Invasion of Earth * The Web Planet * The Lost in Time Collection *
DOCTOR TWO -
* Tomb of the Cybermen* The Seeds of Death *
DOCTOR THREE -
* Spearhead From Space * The Three Doctors * Carnival of Monsters*
DOCTOR FOUR -
* The Ark in Space * Genesis of the Daleks * The Pyramids of Mars * The Robots of Death * The Talons of Weng-Chiang *
DOCTOR FIVE -
* Earthshock * The Five Doctors * Resurrection of the Daleks * The Caves of Androzani*
DOCTOR SIX -
* Vengeance on Varos * Revelation of the Daleks*
DOCTOR SEVEN -
* Rememberance of the Daleks * The Television Movie*
THE NEW SERIES -
* Doctor Who - Series One * Doctor Who - Series Two * Torchwood - Series One * Doctor Who - Series Three * The Infinite Quest*
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