Some recent reviews (some of which, like this post, contain spoilers):
Chicken Yoghurt on Torchwood
The Sharpener on Torchwood
Dumbjohn on Torchwood
Behind the Sofa on Torchwood
Eric Lee on Tor… Spooks
After reading the three links about it above I had to remind myself that I had found Torchwood genuinely scary. (“Look at that mask, it’s like real teeth, honest- aaagh!“) Its biggest problem is that it is lazy. It’s billed as Dr Who plus sex. A sure-fire winning combination, you might think. Having thought that, Russell Davies and his team sat back and didn’t think much further.
I offer no justification for posting a few more of my observations about the programme on a website allegedly about the political bias of the BBC other than longstanding tradition, rights of co-ownership and a profound sense of social duty.
Suzie’s speech asking what do you do after you’ve done this job, was believable. And the way she complains that we on Earth never get the good alien stuff, just the dross, was a good way of turning round one of the most obvious failings of the show, its derivativeness, and making it a plus point.
Good, because if Torchwood scored any higher on the derivatives index it would be under investigation by the Securities & Exchange Commission. Just one more “We are a secret alien-catching organisation outside the government, beyond the UN” and it’ll get sucked down a Black Scholes. Dumbjon says the plot of Episode 2 was ripped off porno movies. Speaking for myself, the rip-off source uppermost in my mind was two episodes of Star Trek, one from 1967 and one from 1968. Whatever, we’re not talking cutting-edge plot development here.
Kids will watch this programme. I know it, you know it, the creators knew it.
One of the characters, Owen, gets hold of and uses a date rape drug, one that really works. Was the scene where he ends up naked in the cell meant to be his comeuppance? I’m not demanding to see him suffer in order that the right morals be drawn – I have lived long enough to know that criminals frequently do flourish unpunished – but I am interested in seeing if the series “knows” he is a rapist. This could break either way. Future episodes might show the effects on him and his victims of his willingness to use people’s bodies without their consent, in which case it could be a good SF examination of the corrupting effects of power, or the series could continue to portray him as, in the phrase used on an interview in the show’s website, a “cheeky, flirty, maverick.”
Why is Jack still in his WWII RAF uniform? When it wears out, does he get a new one from Smarts Army Surplus in Pontypridd?
There are too few people in Torchwood. They all seem to work evenings. What if alien baddies strike at 9am?
OK, that’s meant to be because the London Torchwood got zapped by the Cylons and the Daleks and the Scottish Torchwood disappeared for reasons described in episode comingupsoon. But I’d think that would be all the more reason to slap a couple of million on the Supply Estimate for security and secretarial services, wouldn’t you? However the Dr Who back story does give another opportunity for making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. A recurring glitch in Dr Who is the recurring amazement expressed by characters (usually in their last few seconds of life) at evidence of alien activity despite the fact that London and/or Cardiff is buzzed by an alien spaceship or invaded by murderous alien-controlled animate store dummies every other episode. It’s like someone fainting dead away at seeing a real, live Polish plumber. Well, Torchwood made a virtue out of this reaction. Apparently it’s widely believed that there weren’t really cybermen in every living room, it only looked that way because terrorists put psychotropic drugs in the water or something. A less responsible drama than this Dr Who spinoff would make out that it was all done by Mossad to make Muslims look bad.
Let’s see, so far members of the Torchwood team have committed three murders, an unknown number of rapes and intefered with the proper burial of a corpse. Through Gwen’s initial incompetence in chucking the chisel and the team’s subsequent incompetence in allowing the alien to escape by entirely, indeed boringly, predictable means they have also failed to prevent a massacre of around a dozen people at the fertility clinic. Our heroes also acquiesced in Carys’s murder of her ex-boyfriend. (Since she says he could have saved himself, that must mean that she was at that stage capable of controlling the alien insider her. If she was capable of controlling it and did not do so then by death-bonking him she committed murder.) What does it take to close these guys down, a Piglet mug?
Taken from this weeks Guardian ‘guide’
Page 54 Charlie Brooker’s screen burn.
Headline reads;
‘Torchwood’s Captain Jack Harkness is like Buzz Lightyear, only less realistic.’
In fact Scooby-Doo (more than, say, the X-Files or Buffy) is probably the show most analogous to Torchwood, in that both series revolve around a fresh-faced team of meddling kids tackling an ever-shifting carnival of monsters in a world of childlike simplicity. The Torchwood gang even have their own version of The Mystery Machine, although theirs is a spectacularly ugly SUV with two daft strips of throbbing LED lights either side of the windscreen whose sole purpose is to make the entire vehicle look outrageously silly – they might as well have stuck a big inflatable dick on the bonnet, to be honest.
The inside’s not much better – LCD screens embedded in every available flat surface, each urgently displaying a wibbly-wobbly screensaver … it must be like driving around in a flagship branch of PC World.
There are other glaringly daft touches: the countless overhead helicopter shots of Cardiff (what is this, Google Earth?); the ridiculous severed hand-in-a-jar (straight from the Addams Family); the protracted sequence from episode one in which Captain Jack stood atop a tall building surveying the cityscape like Batman FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER. Oh, and the team’s insistence on using the silly invisible elevator that slowly, slowly ascends through a sort of “magic hole” in the pavement – even though there’s a perfectly reasonable BACK DOOR through which they can enter and leave the Batcave at will.
And on top of all that, there’s a bizarre emphasis on bisexual tension thrown in for good measure. You half expect the Torchwood gang to drop their slacks and form a humping great daisy chain any moment. It’s Shortbus meets Goober and the Ghost Chasers meets X-Men meets Angel meets The Tomorrow People meets Spooks meets Oh God I Give Up.
Still, the act of jotting down some of Torchwood’s thundering absurdities has put a big dumb smile on my face. Whatever the hell it’s supposed to be, there’s nothing else like Torchwood on TV at the moment, and that’s got to be worth something. I just don’t have a clue how much.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/columnists/story/0,,1932445,00.html
Re: the magic elevator. Did anyone else hear Captain Jack’s explanation and think ‘ah yes, it’s Douglas Adam’s Somebody Else’s Problem field’ ? Sums it all up really, a good joke from a sci-fi classic reinvented as dull and pointless technobabble.
Anyway, I think Mr Realism took a header once the giant flying dinosaur came on screen.
I had to give up on torchwood because I was laughing so much. The finishing touch was when the nympho/alien had been tracked down – thanks to some ludicrous cross referencing of computer data – to her flat where she’s on top of the poor postman.
Having prised her off, they have her surrounded…..but, oh no, what’s this? They are all looking away; at their guns, at their gasmasks, at their shoes, at their nails – AND SHE RUNS AWAY!!!!
Oh dear, oh dear.
Oh dear, oh dear.
Still any program that features Captain Jack must be pretty to watch at least 😉
Those of us wanting decent quality sci-fi have to look to the states where for some reason the free-market keeps on providing and the BBC keeps on failing.
Battlestar Galactica (new series)
Babylon 5
Serenity
The BBC should just reimagine Blakes 7 without the cr4p sets (oh and skip the third series).
is the magic lift called a “cziltang brone”?
Well, I never even KNEW there was a dr who connection. But then, I don’t do Who. The most improbablt thing to me is the location – CARDIFF? I mean CARDIFF? The central character Doris, ? Carys? The polis woman – is a wimpess par excellence.
Love the above remarks above about the SUV. It’s sort of “Spooks meet MiB” really.
One good joke – “Splott – pronounced Splow”
Did anyone else hear Captain Jack’s explanation and think ‘ah yes, it’s Douglas Adam’s Somebody Else’s Problem field’
Actually I thought this even before Captain Jack’s explanation.
AntiCitizenOne:
Battlestar Galactica – quality sci-fi? Are you kidding?
The original series was screened around the time that the first Superman movie was released – and wittily alluding to the Superman advertising slogan, one reviewer summed up Battlestar with, “You’ll believe shit can float”.
It’s true that the gringos from Los Estados Unidas, with their stinking badges and their yanqui dollares do generally produce better SF than we, but let’s not go overboard on this.
Cheers.
Kulibar Tree,
I gather there is a remake of Battlestar Galactica that is well-regarded.
Thanks, Natalie –
But I’m moved to observe that the series had nowhere to go but up!
Cheers.
Well you guys did have Blake’s Seven; Sapphire and Steel; The Prisoner; and of course the once and future Doctor Who!
What am I missing?
PS: If you had an invisible elevator wouldn’t you use it in preference to a mundane if functional back door?
I would! 😀
Kulibar:
Battlestar Galactica (new series) currently on series 3 on SKY and it rocks! Starbuck is now female, lots of lovely long legged and blonde lady robots and each complete with on/off switch…bliss. (Dives for cover before Natalie throws Male Chauvinist Pig flower pot at me…)
http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/
Bets now being taken on when Gwen dumps her boyfriend and slides into sack with Captain (I stay awake all night) Jack….
Naaah, the boyfriend may as well start choosing a casket. He’s a goner.
But isn’t anyone going to point out Natalie’s delibrate mistake ?
dave t –
Well, well – a rockin’ Battlestar Galactica! At tne time it was just a (very) poor man’s Star Wars – who ever would have guessed it’d one day make good? “What hath God wrought?”, as Samuel Morse said, in a slightly different context.
Cheers.
“But isn’t anyone going to point out Natalie’s delibrate mistake ?”
Er, tell you what, why don’t you say what the deliberate mistake was, then we can all have a laugh together about how totally utterly deliberate it was?
Is wasn’t something to do with the Nestene Consciousness, was it?
See, now I’m in the double-posting dilema. Where’d No 1 go ? It”ll probably reappear 1 second after I press post again, and people will say ‘And him being a blogger himself’.
Anyway, the mistake: wrong cyborgs. Not that anyone can be blamed for wishing Torchwood actually learnt a few lessons from BSG.
On the subject of borrowed ideas, the date-rape spray that Owen uses is almost identical to the “sexual magnetism virus” last seen in Red Dwarf series 8.
I’m just waiting for the “luck virus” to appear…
Nah the Cylons will make an appearance as will Robbie the Robot (Danger Will Robinson! Your Auntie Anne is after you!), Mr Spock and the Vulcan Liberal Party (No violence is necessary – we will bore you into peaceful behaviour…) and I am waiting for that Range Rover to turn into Magnor the Transformer in due course just like in the Citroen ads. Fresh exciting and new talent in the BBC? Try revamping every story going for the last one hundred and twenty years, calling it a ‘new’ story and then repeating it more times than the Great Escape ever was.
is the magic lift called a “cziltang brone”?
And am I the only one here who got that?
DumbJon, Michael Jennigns: The “magic” lift has clearly been affected by the Tardis which has landed on the spot and then interacted with the rift. In the Whoniverse it was technobabble that made sense.
And of course Douglas Adams has a glorious history with Who anyway.