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Torchwood, episode one: Everything Changes

I read a few reviews of this before I watched it, so I knew the basic plot. But there were a few surprises. In the spirit of "man bites dog", one large shocker - Jack doesn't get laid, or even snog anyone. Perhaps sex and death are just as intimately linked for him as they are for Buffy? Buffy, feeling dead, shags to feel alive. Jack, not being able to die, loses the will to shag, since there's no sense of gather ye rosebuds.

As Donna Moss explained on the West Wing: "Gather ye rose buds, while you may, Josh. You know what that means? It means you should take the time to gather rose buds now cause later you might not be able to."

"Interpreting the classics with Poet laureate Donnatella Moss," Josh snarked back, failing to gather the Donna-scented buds for another six seasons. Lame.

But I was talking about Torchwood. My diversion probably shows that I'm yet to be convinced that any UK drama can live up to the best US shows...but Torchwood's definitely not shite.

I love the illuminated body at the start, there was something startling and uncomfortable about that. The emphasis on the mundane that RTD seems to - and says he does - love can get tiresome, kebab gags and whatnot, so I liked the eerie sense that that opening conveyed.

From the start, I liked Gwen's face, but I had to keep saying to myself "just because she's welsh, doesn't mean she sounds like Charlotte Church." But I kept on calling her Charlotte in my head anyway.

I was very amused when the police types were told to pull back from the scene and they dutifully did so. Makes me wonder, if they shot 24 in the UK, would Jack have to spend time queuing to go through customs rather than hopping on a stolen helicopter?

Then along comes the cool kids in their flowing coats. Captain Jack's looking a little puffy around the face. Must be all the pig's blood. Cause...those arial shots of Cardiff, they're like Angel's LA only moving more slowly. Plus the Batman-esque posing that Captain Jack does on the roof? He's Jack-gel, Time Traveller with the Pet Hand in a Jar, cursed to walk the mean, crime-plagued streets of Cardiff for all eternity, unable to find love because he's such a self-involved jackass (jack...ass...why did we not see this in the episode? That's what I signed on for).

Loving their fan-nods with the M-preg joke.


Question: Why does bringing back the dead stop the rain? Is it water-powered? Then, never mind helping the police. They should really use this alien technology to find environmentally friendly alternatives to fossil fuels.

After Gwen (not charlotte, not charlotte) does her nancy drewing in the rain, she returns looking like she's just stepped out of a salon. Must have really good blow dryers at the police station.

That pub fight she walks in on...when they said this post-watershed show was going to include violence, I thought they meant gunfights and maybe some shirtless torture scenes, not just some beered up blokes having a bit of a scuffle. But, nevermind, it advanced the plot and everything, getting her to hospital and giving her a logical reason to be seeing weird things so that her obligatory "normal" sidekick (Micky 2.0) can pooh pooh her sci fi visions.

After a few scenes of Gwen and Jack, I began to get very irritated with her constant bloody questions. Who for why that how happened what him who?

Points for use of the word sillybuggers. Though, worrying that the weevil gets more screen time in this ep than he has so far in the whole of season 3 of Veronica Mars.

When the hospital porter guy approaches the weevil (who does not, in this case, love you long time) and says "that’s just like real teeth," it's rather unfortunate that his severed jugular produced some distinctly fake looking blood. Leads to attack of viewer cynicism and desuspension of disbelief that does.

When the Torchwooders put a bag over his head, I did agree with their asthetic judgement. He'd never get any votes on hot or not dot com, even though he does have very nice straight white teeth. Alien-American?

Speaking of which, I found it rather convenient and unlikely that the older officer (lesbi-having you lady) a) has access to army records from the 40s on her computer, though maybe the CID research and filing system is more thorough than I assume? or b) that he'd be the only Captain Jack Harkness on record. I'm tempted to do a quick google to test that theory...except I live in a universe where there's probably about a million naughty fansites devoted to the fictional Jack Harkness so it'd take a while to get to the real ones. Plus I can't be bothered, which is often the largest factor in this kind of thing.

Gwen's pizza delivery routine? Surely a plot device considered old hat even in porn movies. Then, the communal Torchwood response to her ruse was painfully unfunny. Rather like Ricky Gervais's character doing his "you're having a larf" routine in Extras. Oh, and if they're such a bonded team who plays together and stays together...how come none of them noticed that Susie was a dangerous glove-lovin' psychopath.

Gloves = evil. We should all know this by now. Yellow Submarine AND Buffy both teach us as much.

Love the Torchwood station. Makes me wonder what they're doing in the now-closed Shoreditch station. Probably nothing, but if I see anyone delivering pizza there I promise I won't ask lots of annoying questions when I go down there and inevitably, like Mary Sue, get invited to join the team and share lusty glances with the tight-bunned leader.

When Gwen stares out weevil (who perhaps would love you long time now I think about it, just so long as you enjoy m/f bloodplay (if anyone's written a fanfic about that already...you are a sick fuck. But a quick-off-the-mark sick fuck) she gets kind of teared up, which makes me think she's a bleeding heart liberal there to teach those stony-hearted Torchwood types a lesson or two about humanity and sympathy for the devil. Or maybe she's just a bit of a wuss/slightly challenged/has hayfever.

When she goes on about "my boyfriend says" re acid-spiked terror water I did wonder, do they not have feminism in Cardiff?

When Jack says "That's so Welsh!" I was wondering whose benefit that gag is for. Because, as an English person, I've never made that assumption about the Welsh, so it doesn't work as a stereotype gag. So maybe it's for Welsh people, kind of an inside joke?

Hmm, Torchwood Four went missing...so did Babylon Four...could they possibly be related?

Nasty Jack, giving the nice lady a rufie.

Good Gwen, writing it all down...I was yelling at the screen for her to do so, then she did. Maybe I'm controlling the television with my brain?

When the crazy glove lady talks about getting all the bollocks and the filth, and maybe there's brilliant stuff out there, that sounded like a meta shout out to Doctor Who, where everything is "brilliant" and "fantastic". Is this them planting their flag in the territory of doom, gloom and swearwords?

As the show goes on, so do Gwen's pointless questions. "What have you done?" Well, love, she's shot him, I would've thought the gun was a giveaway. Fair enough asking questions about who are these mysterious strangers, but, really.

Then again, on a metaphysical level, perhaps it was a fair question given that the chap can't die, leading to moral questions about can you murder someone who doesn't stay dead.

Sadly, I knew that Jack was going to come back from the dead so there was no element of surprise. Then again it's unlikely that there would be much surprise even if I hadn't been spoiled, given that he's the hero. While Spooks taught us that killing an apparently main character early on in the game (Buffy too, for that matter) is doable, killing the big star that everyone's tuning in to see would be a little reckless.

I'm bloody glad Gwen rememberes everything after the shooting. If I had to go through all that exposition again I'd be following Susie's example on the blowing out of brains front. Maybe that was her motive too?

Again I say, surely Jack or ther others must've realised she was nuts before. He didn't look very surprised, so maybe? But then, why didn't he do something earlier? And, was it something in Torchwood that sent her nuts? Or should he be looking into a more stringent psychological profiling of new employees? Rather than, say, just asking any random waif or stray to join the team after knowing them for a day.

Jack's character shifts from his Doctor Who incarnation are interesting. I like the fact that he badly wants to lead, and keeps trying to assert his authority, telling her that she'll want to follow him, just like people wanna follow the Doctor...but if you need to tell them, they're not going to follow you, honey. His queries about what's it like to die at the start of the episode were...well, they seemed a little random, really. Sure, the theme of death is big in his arc setup. He's died before, he's come back, he can't die...there's a whole im/mortality theme going on. But it felt clunky, and didn't quite mesh or lead into the "I can't die" reveal naturally. But maybe it will make more sense when I've seen future episodes and tie in better to where they take him and his deathless state next?

I enjoyed Gwen's very weary "okayyy". If they keep some of her sarcasm under the radar, so JAck doesn't detect it, there could be a really interesting dynamic. If they (the writers that is) don't go all out on the knowing winks, and instead work with the idea that they can't always communicate, that he has secrets, that she doesn't quite fit into his world, nor does she want to..on a more general level, if they don't try to make the charctacters fit too neatly together in a Mulder and Scully package, that'd be nice.

When Jack offers to get involved, it seems a bit weird that it’s only just occurred to him that they should help the police. More realistic would've been that Torchwood had discussed the idea of helping the police but dismissed it for whatever reason, rather than that they'd never (apparently) had the discussion before. Ooh, I hope she's not going to be the farking conscience of the group who opens their eyes to truth justice and beauty. Pisses me off when a naive character is used to do that. It’s like all that crap about how the wonder of children helps us see the world with fresh eyes. Sometimes clever people know stuff too you know.

Pterodactyls over Cardiff - If Morissey lived in Wales, I imagine he'd write songs with titles like that.

I help the hopeless

I like lost causes and underdogs, though not enough to actively fight for them. So, when I read an article in a Sci fi mag (maybe Dreamwatch, maybe SFX) that laid into the Pylea arc in season 2 of Angel, I considered writing a letter, but scaled down my effort to writing a blog entry about it instead.

There's a tangental question - do blogs create apathy? We feel like we've done something because we've moaned about it in a technically public forum?

But back to Pylea. The article was a regular feature called "Jumping the Quark" and it had the Pylea storyline down as one of the low points of the show, though not an actual shark-jumping moment.

Ungrateful, blind wretches. Pylea's over the rainbow reworking of the Angel mythology was inspired. The fairy tale knights in armour stuff, alice in wonderland mirror tricks, and the discombobulation of the self, wizard of oz wish (self) fulfilment with an added joy of Angel being on the equivalent of red kryptonite and being tranformed into both beauty (checking himself out in the mirror) and the beast (all green and scaley),...I just don't see how you can turn your back on all of that, unless you're a 14 year old boy who thinks it's "gay", and doesn't realise that queer metaphors are only one aspect of the superhero myth of hidden or split identities.