I've been thinking about Torchwood and I stand by what I said last night, that I'm not likely to keep watching it as it was not very good. Today I'd like to elaborate on why I disliked it. Certainly there seems to have been a lot of effort put into the show: the end product is very slick in terms of set design, overall look and
camera work and such, but it currently lacks a soul. With Dr Who v2 there was the relationship between the Doctor and
Rose and Rose and her family that provided the heart of the show and drove much of the action; we haven't seen a similar dynamic in
Torchwood yet, though the show is obviously trying to set it up between cynical alien Jack and warm-but-naive human Gwen, also the audience's viewpoint character (and hence the one who gets to ask all the really dumb questions). It's a dynamic familiar from
a thousand cop shows and buddy movies and hence takes little effort to sketch in, which leaves the interaction between Jack and Gewn rote and cliched, with none of the spark the relationship between Rose and the Doctor had.
As for the other characters, none have yet stood out positively. With some six main characters, this is of course difficult to do in
just two shows, but maybe a little more thought and time might have been given to it. Instead, we got a lot of shots of Gwen running around needlessly and Jack striking dramatic poses on conveniently located skscraper roofs. I would've liked a few more scenes like
the dining scene in the second show instead, where you had the cast interacting rather than trading oneliners. It doesn't help that a couple of the characters are assholes: Jack himself behaved like an ass throughout the pilot, then there's Owen, who thought it would be a good idea to use the alien version of rophynol to get himself a date and has not shown any signs of improving since....
Apart from the characters, the concept of the show needs some work as well. There's this Hollywood idea about secret agencies that supposes they can be completely unknown to the general public, yet still able to flash their fancy ID and get police to grant them acces to a crime scene. If they're so top secret, flashing a Torchwood ID at yer average copepr will have as much effect as me flashing my library card; if they're able to have the cooperation of the local police force, their existence must be known to a the general public and
Gwen should've been able to google them. For a real life example, look at MI5 or the American NSA: their existence is not a secret, we even have a general idea of what they do, but day to day operations are secret. The same should be the case for Torchwood.
But then this is part of a greater problem, the whole "we must cover up evidence of alien visitations because you're not ready for the Truth" seems oddly quaint. We're livign in a science fiction world, with science fiction ideas having spread far and wide through our entertainment; the idea of alien visitations should not be this big a deal anymore, especially not in the Who-niverse, which had had at least one spaceship crashing into Big Bang, not to mention an invasion of Cybermen, as Jack himself pointed out. What also annoyed me in this context was Gwen, the audience's stand-in, having to ask every five seconds "what the hell is that".
All this can be forgiven of course if the actual plots and menaces in the first two episodes were any good, but they weren't. The pilot was a standard introduction of the series, while the second episode used the hoary old horror cliche of sex that get's you killed. It was all still reasonably enjoyable, but not enough to go out of my way to see.
This is just a place for me to jot down some random thoughts and reactions to the news so I don't have to yell at the television or radio, or mutter to myself whilst reading the news.
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Pharyngula
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Real Climate
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