Torchwood Ep 1-10
Well, thank god it’s getting better. Torchwood started out doing what I’d worried Doctor Who would do in 2005. I thought it would try to be US-slick and would embarrass itself. But while Doctor Who is not without its faults, it seems to surpass them convincingly enough. Torchwood started out with a flurry of wrong notes and then trampled over a lot of good storytelling practice to produce quite a few hours of terribly disappointing television.
Captain Jack (possessed of exactly the same ‘lovable rogue’ energy as that other famous Captain Jack – just without the rum-soaked delivery) was a very winning character in Doctor Who. I’m sure someone has spotted it, but he was Johnny Depp’s swagger in Han Solo’s role. But by the time he arrives at Torchwood he’s somehow a man with a past. (No wonder the scripts make regular jokes about RetCon.) It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t know if it’s a good one. Captain Jack is supposed to be the link, the way in, the thread. You knew him in Doctor Who, now here he is in his own show… except that he’s totally changed. He seems to have had at least a hundred years of unpleasant experiences since then, so actually he’s a virtually unrecognisable character who happens to have the mannerisms and the face of his old self. So he’s the central character and yet he’s now an unknown quantity – quite intentionally so. He’s the one we want to follow most closely and who we initially care most about, but we don’t know who he is any more – we don’t even know if we can still trust him.
But maybe that’s OK because there’s a second way in to the series: the old new recruit ploy. If you bring in a newbie you have a chance to explain to them – and hence to the viewer – what’s going on and what it all means. The viewer not only gets their mega-dose of exposition this way, but they have a ready-made character to empathise with. Gwen and the audience are both learning the ropes. The audience see through Gwen’s eyes and it’s a good fit because she’s just as new to it all as the viewer. The downside with that is that the viewer is latching on to someone who can’t yet be the hero. Gwen could have come to the team with impressive skills, she could have used them, but in the interests of making her more of an everyman, she’s actually clueless. Even what she does know – about policework and chasing criminals – is irrelevant: Torchwood don’t follow the rules, they rarely hunt ordinary humans and they don’t prosecute. Any instincts or experience that Gwen can bring to bear is as likely to be counter-productive as it is to help. Find a role for the newbie quickly, before the audience tires of her being adrift – that’s the advice I would give. But the role for Gwen seems to be the conscience of the team – and we’re left wondering whether they really need an infusion of conscience. And if they do, Gwen’s character is hardly in a position to provide it – she’s not especially moral herself. But if Jack, who we last met as a nice guy who can’t help but do the right thing (despite his roguish ways), has lost his moral compass, he’d better find it quickly because he’s the only one who knows what Torchwood is about. And if he hasn’t, if he’s pushing the moral envelope because he knows it’s necessary, then Gwen’s just a bleeting nuisance.
On the one hand, Torchwood has got a lot of conflict (which they equate with good drama) out of this situation – and they’ve got to ‘explore’ various moral dilemmas – but the cost of it is too high. It leaves us lost. Is Jack right, so should Gwen shut up? If Jack is wrong, then why should we root for this immoral organisation and care about any of the other characters? We want to take a side so we can root for someone but they both seem wrong and watching them bicker doesn’t help.
Of course we could set aside the characters and look at the world they live in. The BBC clearly loved the hackneyed old idea of a series about a top secret squad of Cool People With Special Skills who battle behind the scenes to save the world. Men in Black meets CSI. They have gadgets, they have secret knowledge and they have unlimited authority to interfere with the everyday workings of more familiar government organisations. But they’re a luke warm bunch. A doctor – kind of. An earnest woman who dresses a bit too young and who’s quite good with computers. And a smartly-dressed young butler who buys the stationery. The only compelling character was Suzie – who they killed. They really needed her to add some weight to the team, to make it seem solid, and to make up for Jack’s sparse leadership, but she went psycho for poorly understood reasons.
Before I say any more about the characters, I want to mention something that made my heart sink when I first saw it: the Torchmobile. The team have a car that was clearly fantasised into existence by a nineteen-year-old drug-dealer. It’s stupid looking. Though we haven’t heard it yet, I bet it has a really, really loud stereo. It also has the name of the super-secret organisation who own it embossed into the body panels. It’s a black Range Rover with a plastic body kit added to make it look more, erm, what? Memorable? Expensive? Well-wicked? As we learn in the awful, awful, unforgivably awful Countrycide, it’s even pretty easy to steal.
But back to the characters. How best to learn about them? Well good drama as we all know is all about conflict and conflict is all about bickering, so have the characters bicker a lot, picking on a different one each week. Ianto is probably my favourite character, except that he went mad one week and was happy to kill everyone to save his laughably-kinky, murderous sex-robot. Then Toshiko read everyone’s minds, found out that everyone thinks she’s pathetic, acted out a scene from Unbreakable and then went a bit funny for a while too, jeopardising the team she no longer felt loyal to. Owen’s crisis was the most bearable so far: love stopped him being a dick for a few days. Sadly for him – and for the rest of us – Diane, his love interest, couldn’t stay. She could have been a good permanent character. She could have filled Suzie’s shoes in a way that Gwen doesn’t seem able to (despite dozens of references to the contrary).
I find I keep waiting for them to mention that Owen dropped out of med school and never qualified, but so far they keep pretending that he’s a proper doctor. He’s perhaps the least believable doctor on TV. He plainly never studies. He’s not interested in science. He’s lazy and snide. If he’s qualified then it’s a safe bet he was bottom in his year. Cool, eh? But at least he has a big chip on his shoulder to make up for his lack of other positive qualities. Oh wait, that’s a bad thing.
And Gwen’s got a heart. Kind of. Though she’s not especially kind. And you can’t trust her. And her long-suffering boyfriend will either get killed (by something that followed her home from work) or will get his heart broken. Like if he finds out that she’s not faithful. She must realise all this but she doesn’t do anything about it. Perhaps she really doesn’t have a heart.
And no one trusts Jack because you can’t. He’s cruel and mysterious and cryptic and ruthless, though sometimes he smiles and makes a joke. As we’ve learned, pretty much the whole team resent him – and no one knows what to make of him. But that’s OK because it’s not clear he cares about them either. He didn’t spot Suzie going psychotic (or Ianto or Tosh). Not quite the Captain Jack who danced with Rose.
So none of the permanent characters are likable. None of them (except Jack) does much that’s heroic. We can’t tell who is right. And they’re utterly devoid of any scrap of team spirit. They’re loners who stick around because of the power and excitement. We don’t even really know what Torchwood is up to, besides reacting to things and having adventures with confiscated alien artifacts they don’t understand. If they’re all that’s protecting Earth, we’re in so much trouble. They’re not too bright, not too organised and they’re kind of a pushover in a fight. If we were in any doubt that they’re lightweights, Countrycide set about proving that the Torchwood team can barely hold their own against ordinary humans. The baddies in Ep 6 are revealed to be… middle-aged, slightly overweight Welsh farmers. Evil ones, mind you. But how exactly that evil translates into an ability to disarm and capture any member of the team at will without even being seen we never learn. The episode was at some pains to point out that these weren’t supernatural forces at work. Not, it’s possible for an ordinary, out-of-shape, middle-aged human to sneak up behind any member of the Torchwood, steal their gun and knock them out without being noticed first. After seeing that episode I’d say that Torchwood should only confront little kids, just to be on the safe side, but they were beaten by a little girl the previous week (though she needed lots of supernatural help, I’m pleased to say). Countrycide also used the worst slo-mo I’ve seen in a long while. If Torchwood had borrowed the camera that the Planet Earth team used to film Great Whites attacking seals we could have had something. But no, they used the same camera that Blake’s Seven used in their finale shoot-out. To much the same effect. It was a tired old chestnut then; it’s beyond tired now.
Consider. Who in Torchwood do we support? Why do we support them? What’s interesting about hunting aliens and what’s not? What’s believable in a world like that? What feels satisfying? What will kill our connection to the characters? Someone should answer these questions and apply what they learn to the show. Even when they get some of these things right, the show is often sloppy about it’s pivotal moments: the shifts in tone and direction are often a struggle to follow and the pacing can be erratic. There are plenty of people working for the BBC who can bring clarity to a story, but they’re not on the Torchwood team. Torchwood reeks of inexperience. One positive sign of this is evidence that the second half-dozen episodes are looking better than the first.
Greeks Bearing Gifts was the first episode that I’d say was ‘OK-ish’ rather than just ‘Bad’, or even ‘Awful’. If it hadn’t continued the counter-productive undermining of the team’s cohesiveness and inter-relationships, I might have thought it was worth a ‘Not Bad’ rating. They Keep Killing Suzie was better still, but when it was revealed that Suzie had supposedly planned it all many months ago I couldn’t help but be momentarily disgusted with that insult to the intelligence. Sure, plan a way to come back from the dead. It’s a cool idea. But then why kill yourself? Why not skip the whole resurrection plot and just, you know, not shoot yourself in the head. It’s what the rest of humanity does on a daily basis.
Random Shoes was like an episode from a different series. It was closest to Love & Monsters, the Rose and Doctor episode, which Rose and the Doctor aren’t really in. Paul Chequer’s character and voice-over seemed very reminiscent of Marc Warren’s. But it wasn’t bad. It was too homely for Torchwood. It didn’t even need to be supernatural – it could have been an episode of Cold Case or CSI (just leave Eugene himself out of the scenes). And I was pleased to see that Gwen was finally behaving in a way we could respect. Russell Davies plainly thinks she’s the heart of the show, but doesn’t give her the necessary credentials. Here she begins to earn that role. She’s an understated hero, who does what’s right, without going over the top. At long last, it’s a good start.
Out of Time was good too. Not amazing, but good. It was clearly a high-concept pitch: a plane that took off in 1953 lands in 2006. Nice idea. But that only gets you as far as the opening credits. If they could have come up with a little more plot to go along with the character piece it turned into, we could have had a little adventure, but it’s very difficult to follow up on a cool opening idea. And you don’t want to undermine the importance of the emotional journey. But it would have been nice if they could have found a way to end it which didn’t require all three characters to simply leave. But then Jack holding the hand of a man as he kills himself was damn close to touching. You might even call his behaviour heroic. Finally. And, as I said earlier, love largely stopped Owen behaving like a dick for a while. You have to be pleased about that. (Though for a grumpy smartarse with a face like a frog, he does awfully well with the women.) But overall, if they can push the series in this direction for a few more episodes, it might begin to erase the bad taste of eps 1-6. I have my fingers crossed.
More on this series at the end of the season.
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