The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum

Torchwood: Asylum

In this play a young girl, Freda is arrested by PC Andy for shoplifting and it soon becomes apparent that everything is not as it seems. For one the girl seems to talk in some kind of wierd dialect even though she has a Cardiff accent and she also was carrying a strange device that was most definitely not from the present time and so PC Andy promptly called in his old chum Gwen Cooper and Torchwood who promptly tried to take over the entire investigate much to the annoyance of PC Andy who gave as good as he got in this episode. I am not sure whether or not Andy escaped the whole experience without being retconed as it was never stated in the episode whether he had or not, but with Jack around it is safe to say that he might well have been.

Asylum was a fairly good story and was most definitely a Gwen episode as she was the focal point of the episode along with the girl, Freda, and PC Andy. Jack and Ianto were barely present in the story with Ianto having even less to do than Jack! Andy is always fun when he appears and he even gets some of the best lines in this play as well as he did when he appeared in the televsion episodes and his reaction when he finds out that Freda is an alien is priceless!

I liked the idea of a number of aliens being sent to the Earth to blend seamlessly into society so that a few generations down the line they will even forget that they were aliens as if they were told that they were human why would they think otherwise, particularily if the only difference between them and humans was in the body chemistry itself as it is for this alien race. The safe house from Out of Time reappears in this episode and the episode itself is also mentioned.

Then there is the whole question about what to do with Frida when they find out that she is an alien? A lot of this is a bit similar to the second season episode Sleeper, with Jack being more than happy to lock her away for her own safety, and for the rest of the human race’s safety, and the other trying to persuade Jack that they will act a bit like social services with Gwen as her caseworker. Yeah, like that would work. But when she seems to be harmless and not hell bent on enslaving the human race then I guess that it wouldn’t make a lot of difference if they did just let her go.

I would have to say that the best performance in the episode was not from the Torchwood crew but from Erin Richards who played Freda who carried a lot of the episode herself much like Eugene did in the first season episode Random Shoes.

I would probably listen to this again, but perhaps not for a while.

And I Feel Fine

Torchwood: End of Days

End of Days was a great end for the first series of Torchwood, and they certainly did pull out all the stops for this final episode and, the result was a, thrilling conclusion to what I consider to be an exciting series.

I must admit that I didn’t feel absolutely anything when I heard the TARDIS at the end (which I will assume would be most Doctor Who fans favourite moment of the whole series), mainly because I am not the slightest bit interested in the Tenth Doctor. Part of me hopes that when Jack enters the TARDIS he has a barny with the Doctor asking where the Doctor went and why he is speaking in that crap Dick Van-Dyke style accent, and then slaps him round the face with the wet end of the Doctor’s severed hand (that bit won’t happen as he didn’t take the tank with the hand in to the TARDIS with him did he?)

It can only be the Doctor really as for some reason his hand glowed when we heard the dematerialisation sound and if that wasn’t a definitive clue as to who it was I don’t know what would be, but I think it would more interesting if it was the Master who’s TARDIS Jack ran to at the end of the episode. I know that that is not very likely, but that’s just me.

Following on from the end of the previous episode we get to see the full consequences of Owen’s meddling with the rift and boy does he start to panic when he discovers the full meaning of what has happened, but doesn’t regret it, which I suppose he wouldn’t when we was only doing it to get his missus back.

Again all of the characters had something to do in this episode and all of them (apart from Jack and Gwen) had a vision telling them that they had to open the rift in Owen’s case it was Diane again, with Ianto it was Lisa in her pre-cyberwoman persona and with Tosh it was her mother. This was a good idea as they all had to have a reason to try and make sure the rift was opened again and what better reason that to have someone who you care about, because otherwise you wouldn’t either have bothered.

With Gwen it was the possibility that she might lose Rhys, even though she did often seem to be that concerned about him, I think that she really does love him but she wants to have her normal life with him, and the excitement of her life with her mates at Torchwood as well and it is patently obvious that she cannot really have both, and at times did chose the Torchwood crew over him.

It was certainly a shock to me when Billis actually did stab Rhys because you (well I did anyway) actually believe that Rhys was safe with being in the cells at Torchwood, and even when he did leave the cells, I still did think that he might have been able to escape, but of course the rather strange Billis actually did it the end.

Billis Manger was in this episode just as odd as he was in the previous episode and we still know no more about him that we did in the previous episode. He is certainly not human, or at least not a pure human and that was much is obvious with his ability to project himself into a police cell and then being able to disappear seemingly at will.

I have heard a theory that he might be a Timelord, which as they have now mentioned Gallifrey in Doctor Who, seems plausible and I for one never believed that there was no other Time Lords in exsistence. I am still not sure that Jack is pure human either, perhaps he might be a Time Lord as well. You never know, and I wouldn’t put it past RTD at all.

There were a load of interesting ideas in this episode and it is quite possible that some of them might have made interesting storylines in their own right, such as an outbreak of the plague in modern day Cardiff, which could possibly work in a Doctor Who setting if it were done right. If I had a main criticism of the episode it was that that could have been an episode in its own right, and who is to know that it might not be in the future.

One thing that made me laugh was the little piece of rolling news on the news reports that the Beatles were on the roof of Abbey Road studios. It was nice that other temporal refugees were mentioned such as the samurai running amok through the streets of Tokyo, but I wonder why Diana wasn’t thrown back, perhaps she never actually made it through the rift, and if she had of done, would she just have vanished at the end of the episode when the rift was sealed once more?

I thought that it was quite good to see the other crew members actually standing up to Jack for the first time, although I did think Owen shooting him was probably a little too far to go, but that allowed Jack to let everyone, apart from Gwen, to know a little bit more about him. I would assume that revelation will bring the characters a bit closer together in the second series (if Jack makes it past Doctor Who this coming season that is), because they all now know that Jack is virtually indestructible. That may well change the dynamic of the crew next series.

So we now come to the end of the first full series of the first spin off from Doctor Who, and I for one can say that, for me at least, the series has been everything that it could have been and was pretty much what I thought it would have been like. I can’t say that I had particular hopes for the series, because I didn’t, but I was more than happy with the finished results and look forward to the second series.

Originall posted on Jan 11, 2007

A Tale of Two Jacks

Torchwood: Captain Jack Harkness

After her first superb episode of Torchwood, Out of Time, Catherine Tregenna did not disappoint with her second episode, Captain Jack Harkness, another beautifully written tale with great characterisation of the regulars and, like Sean Alexander said, plenty of heart.

As in Out of Time there wasn’t much in the way of plot, but again that didn’t really matter, as this episode served as the first part of the series finale with End of Days, and part of its job was to set up the final episode, which it did, even though nobody in the hub knew that at the end of this episode.

I am sure quite a few people felt quite short changed in this episode when by the end of the episode we still know little more about Jack than we did at the start of the episode apart from the fact Jack Harkness is not his real name, and we found out who the real Jack Harkness was.

To be honest this was not really a big surprise as in The Doctor Dances, the Doctor saw right through him and said that he wasn’t really a captain, so if you were an eagle eared viewer you would have remembered that (I didn’t until someone reminded me, it has to be said) so that revelation wouldn’t have been surprising to anyone who had seen Jack in Doctor Who.

Having said that, if you had just seen Torchwood then that might very well have been a surprising admission, because you cannot simply assume that everyone watching Torchwood would have seen Doctor Who because I am sure there are plenty of people watching it who are not Doctor Who fans.

It also has to be said that Jack seems very much at home in the 1940s and it was obvious that he wouldn’t really have been that bothered if they weren’t able to get back, but put that to the back of his mind because of Tosh, who certainly didn’t want to be stranded in war-torn Britain and I must admit that I wouldn’t fancy being a Japanese woman in war torn Britain either. That was very nice of Jack thinking of Tosh like that and was the same kind of compassion Jack has shown on a few occasions during Torchwood.

One of the reasons that I really enjoyed the episode was because it features Tosh in quite a major way because she is one of my favourite characters from Torchwood, and if it were a toss up between Gwen and Tosh, I would pick Tosh, if you catch my drift. It was very touching I thought when Gwen read the note that Tosh had written the other half of the equation on, saying simply that she loved her family and obviously thought that she wasn’t going to make it. Poor Tosh!

Ianto got to do what a lot of people would like to do and shoot Owen. I actually don’t mind Owen that much, certainly he can be a bit of a knob and he does have a very strange looking face, but I can see why he would go to all that trouble to open the rift, as he was sure that it would bring Diane back to him. I know that I would have done the same thing if that had been me, so I can’t really argue with what he did. It would have been a very stupid thing to do, but hey you do stupid things when you are in love, which Owen certainly is.

Ianto bought up Lisa again, as he is wont to do, and they both got into a scrap about whose bird was better. Of course if Ianto had decided to bring Lisa back when she was in her Cyberwoman persona then that would have been a bad thing, but if she was bought back in her original state then that wouldn’t have been so bad, well apart from the fact that opening the rift could cause a major catastrophe. Ianto obviously wasn’t as blinded by love as Owen was at that moment as he was able to see what a bad idea it would be, unlike Owen who just basically wanted a shag.

Billis Manger was a bit of an odd character wasn’t he? He did seem a little out of place even in the 1940s but it wasn’t until he was seen in the modern day by Gwen looking not a day older (and dressed in exactly the same way) that you knew he certainly wasn’t what he seemed at all. That certainly seemed to be something that would be followed up in the final episode especially after he had part of the rift machinery in his office (as well as a folder labelled Torchwood).

I did wonder why, if the building was in disrepair and was about to be pulled down that Manger’s office seemed no different to how it did in the 1940’s. I thought that the direction was quite effective when you saw Jack and Tosh walking down the corridors and then Gwen walking down the same corridors some 60 odd years later, and also when Jack and Tosh just walked straight into a 1940’s dance. One minute they were in an abandoned building and the next minute they were in a bustling place full of people enjoying a night off. That was a nice shot I thought.

The real Captain Jack was an interesting character, well played by Matt Rippey, a lot like the Jack we knew from Doctor Who, and it turned out he was more like Jack than we thought, so you can see why Jack would have taken his identity rather than somebody else’s. Perhaps he was the only American around at that time.

I don’t think we will ever find out the complete truth about Jack in Torchwood, but that does make his character a lot more interesting, simply because we just don’t know who he really is, well it does to me anyway.

I thought this episode was very good and moving and would love to see Catherine Tregenna pen an episode of Doctor Who, as I am sure she would turn out an interesting episode, quite different from anything we have seen before. With Helen Raynor becoming the first female to write for the new series this coming season perhaps she will be in for a shout in series four. We can but hope.

Originally posted on Jan 05, 2007

W(eevi)’ll Meet Again

Torchwood: Combat

I have been looking forward to this episode of Torchwood for a long time, mainly because it was written by Mickey, himself, Noel Clarke, and I was interested in what he could come up with the show, and didn’t he do well. He actually managed to do what no other writer has done this year and manage to integrate all of the main characters into the plot and that included Tosh and Ianto doing something interesting. He deserves something for that alone really and it was nice to see them all working as a team.

I won’t even try and say that the plot was up to much, because it wasn’t. What the episode was though was a great piece of writing and also saw some strong characterisation of the regular characters, which I have always considered to be a strong point in Torchwood.

In this episode Gwen finally decided that the thing with Owen had to stop, although how long it had been going on for is up for debate as for the last couple of episodes they have seemed like they hate each other, although that might just be an act for the rest of the crew, however in this episode I think it had finally come to a head and that is why she decided to tell Rhys all about it.

Eve Myles was good in this episode as she finally admitted to Rhys that she was shagging someone else. Of course she then went and drugged him so he would not remember what she had said to him, which probably says more about her than her just breaking down and spilling her guts.

Here we see Owen really, really pissed off (he is certainly missing Diana more than he is letting on), and the final scenes with Owen and the Weevil ask more questions that it answers. He obviously has some hold over the Weevils and certainly when he pulled that (not very scary) face the Weevil was petrified. I remember reading in the Radio Times that Owen does have something going with the weevils and that he was only member of the crew who really understands them and has been training them, probably secretly for a long time.

Certainly it was nice to see the Weevils again because ever since episode two I don’t think we have seen much of them and they did seem to make a big thing of talking about them in the first episode. Perhaps something big will happen in the finale involving the Weevils.

Captain Jack let another human die in this episode as well, but as he wanted it too happen, and as he was the one who started all of the fights in the first place, then he probably deserved it, unlike the poor blokes early on in the episode, but you could also argue that Jack nowadays just isn’t bothered about that sort of thing, and is no longer the Jack people knew in the first series of Doctor Who. Then again if being killed off then bought back to life isn’t going to mess with your mind then I don’t know what would.

It was interesting that Gwen didn’t actually know about Owen and Diana but Tosh did know. That probably made Tosh feel a little better as I don’t think she really trust’s Gwen that much anymore, especially after she found that her and Owen had something going on, and she would probably have considered that some sort of small victory for her. I don’t think that she probably trusts Jack at the moment after he let the Weevil be kidnapped, but I think that in this case that was the only way that Jack could have found out why the Weevils were being kidnapped in the first place, as they didn’t even know where Owen was at that point in time, although when Gwen received the text message on of the dead guy’s phone they would have find out anyway, so you can see both Tosh and Jack’s point of view.

Certainly Tosh has the more human view of it all, because after what Jack has experienced since meeting the Doctor, I am not sure that he is entirely human anymore. That is just what I think at the moment and I could well be proved right but I always thought that there was more to Jack than meets the eye since the last few episodes of series one of Doctor Who.

It certainly does seem now that Torchwood is playing like the first series of new Doctor Who did, and that if it did not get a second series then it would just play as a 13 part, self contained, serial, I am not sure if the confirmation of a second series will make the ending different than if it had been just intended for a single series, which I am sure a lot of people would have preferred.

I have always thought that Torchwood was getting better and better with each episode and now I am convinced that they are building up to something major in the last few episodes, because this episode was a lot like Boom Town, with its rather talky character based action before the action packed finale, and certainly judging by the trailer for the finale of Torchwood they are pulling out all the stops for these two episodes, making sure that if it didn’t get beyond a second series it would have at least gone out with a bang.

We will have to see what happens on that score till New Years Day but Noel Clarke has certainly turned out a very interesting episode of Torchwood which bowled along at quite a pace despite the fact that very little actually happened.

After the previous episode with its feminine touches this episode was unashamedly masculine and I think that Noel Clarke might have seen Fight Club one too many times and this version of fight club is up there with the robot fight club from series two of Spaced. I certainly would mind seeing a Noel Clarke penned episode of series four of Doctor Who if it gets that far.

Originally posted on Dec 29, 2006

In The Mood

Torchwood: Out of Time

Another week, another great episode of Torchwood. No, scratch that, make that a fantastic episode of Torchwood.

If there is one word to describe the episode it is emotional. There may not have been a great deal happening in the episode as far as plot goes, but that really didn’t matter as we got an episode packed with emotions and the nice, simple story of three people trying to find their way in what was, to them, an alien world. It has to be said that my girlfriend really enjoyed this episode and said that it was her favourite episode of the series so far, by a country mile. And, after reading some of the live journal communities, of which I am a member, this episode seems to have been very popular with the female viewer, more than the male viewer. I am not sure if that does have anything to do with the fact that there is no aliens or anything like in the episode or not.

If you don’t like dialogue-heavy, emotional scenes then you probably wouldn’t have enjoyed this episode, but I thought it was perfectly pitched, and there were some great characterisation in this episode.

We learned quite a bit about Captain Jack in this episode about how he too is a man out of his time and how he obviously isn’t all that happy about the situation. If any of the main characters could identify with the three people who were stranded in our time then it is certainly Jack. We also saw Owen, for the first time, affected by his lifestyle of leaping into bed with lots of different women, all though quite how he does it is anyone’s guess as he is hardly a good looking bloke is he? I think he is just a jammy bastard really.

The episode belonged really to the three guest stars: Mark Lewis Jones, Louise Delamere and Olivia Hallinan and all three of them gave excellent performances. Lewis Jones’ John Ellis’s part of the episode could probably have been one of the most emotional character arcs I have witnessed on television for a long time and if you didn’t get a lump in your throat when he broke down at the sight of his only son vegetating in a care home, unaware of anything or anyone around him then I don’t know. Perhaps it hit home to me a bit more because I recently lost my Nan and even though she was not in the kind of state that John Ellis’s son was in, I know how I would have felt if that had been me.

Olivia Hallinan gave a believable performance of a young girl from the 1950’s and it is her who was probably the only one of the three ‘temporal immigrants’ who would be able to lead a full life in a time fifty years from what she knows. The scene’s where Gwen was telling her about sex was extremely funny and was the kind of talk you could imagine an older sister giving to a younger sibling (not that I would know but is sounds like it would be) and her shock at finding out that Gwen and Rhys are living together despite the fact that they are not married was quite typical of what a well bought up 1950’s girl would think like, as was when she was getting off with a bloke in a club and just assumed that all he wanted was a kiss and a cuddle. Yeah, right, and the rest.

Louise Delamere’s Diana Holmes, was another strong female character much like Delamere’s character in The Chatterly Affair, and both of them were women who were very sexually liberated for their times. I think she must have the monopoly on that type of role, and you have to admit, she does it so well. There was certainly more than a hint of Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson in her character, which I am pretty sure, was deliberate. I loved the way that she wrapped Owen around her little finger, and really got to him, actually admitting that their little affair was more than just casual sex, which is what most of Owen’s sexual encounters up to that point had been, even with Gwen I would say. Perhaps that is not how Gwen would view it, but from Owen’s point of view I would say that it definitely was just casual. We will have to wait and see on that point because it seems that Gwen spills the beans to Rhys in next week’s episode.

My girlfriend also thought that Diana knew more than she was letting on about the rift and thought that perhaps she had come through the rift before. After all she did get back into her plane at the end and did fly back the way she had come, so maybe she was trying to make her way back to her own time or maybe she just wanted to start again somewhere else. Whatever she was planning on doing she was certainly a very confident woman who would probably be able to cope with anything she came up against.

Certainly it was the John Ellis character that bought out the emotion in the episode with the whole finding his son thing and then him trying to kill himself at the end of the episode. I knew that that scene would not have been that popular with some of the viewers and the whole idea of letting someone end their own life is not considered to be a popular one, and I am sure that if I was ever in that situation I would probably have a different opinion to how I did during the episode. In this case John wanted to end it, had nobody else to miss him, would have done it anyway even if Jack had tried to stop him, so what choice did Jack really have? And Jack did the noble thing and helped him to do it in a dignified way. It was simply the right thing for Jack to do.

I must admit I did find the line where Owen was telling Diane how he felt about her how he just thinks about what she is wearing etc and then kills the romance stone dead by mentioning how her face looks when she comes. Well who said romance is dead? That certainly did raise a giggle. Given Owen’s usual demeanour with woman, he can be a charmer when he wants to be as the scene where he takes Diana dancing (even though it was on top of a multi-storey car park in Cardiff) shows.

Catherine Tregenna certainly has a handle on the characters in the show and she makes a good job of a script where very little happens and the brilliant thing about it is that you don’t really miss the fact that there isn’t a lot going on, as you are drawn into the dilemma’s of the characters and what might become of them. That is the mark of a good writer making things interesting even if nothing actually does happen. Certainly I didn’t miss the fact that there was no alien involvement. I mean who is to say that you have to have alien involvement in every episode? In this case the episode worked better because it was just about people rather than about aliens and I am certainly looking forward to Tregenna’s next episode of Torchwood in a couple of weeks.

Still, it could have been a lot worse, the person in the plane landing in 21st century Cardiff could have been Glenn Miller. What a thought!

Originally posted on Dec 21, 2006

The Amazing Adventures of Eugene Jones

Torchwood: Random Shoes

I’m going to sound like a broken record again I’m afraid, but what the hell, I loved Sunday’s episode of Torchwood. True it was very similar to Love & Monsters (which I also loved, and having watched it again on Sunday I have to say that it was the best written, directed and acted episode of the second series aside The Girl in the Fireplace) but that isn’t a bad thing. If you are going to rip something off then you should at least rip-off something good, that’s what I say.

True the bit about somebody dying and persisting on hanging around afterwards is hardly original either (it wasn’t original when they made Randall & Hopkirk nearly forty years ago now) but what is original nowadays? At the end of the day I thoroughly enjoyed the episode, and that is good enough for me.

One of the things I really like about Torchwood is how it is always different and each episode is nothing like the previous episode. Surely that can only be a good thing because if it was the same each episode wouldn’t it get rather boring and stale.

After all isn’t that the reason why we all love Doctor Who so much because each episode and story is different from the previous one? Or is only Doctor Who that is allowed to do that and everything else just a pallid imitation compared to the brilliance that is Doctor Who? Personally I think the latter but then again what do I know? I’m the odd bloke who likes Torchwood/the heretic who doesn’t think David Tennant is the best Doctor ever (*delete where applicable).

It could be said that while this episode is in a similar vein to Love & Monsters this episode did actually have one of the regular characters involved in the plot from beginning to end (unlike L&M), but sidelined the rest. I didn’t even miss Jack, Ianto, Owen or Tosh in the episode at all to be honest.

This was a good episode for Eve Myles who really shone is this episode as the heart of Torchwood and the only one who seemed to care about what had happened to Eugene. I suppose it did seem a bit odd that Torchwood got involved in something that was just a straightforward hit and run. I know that Eugene was a Torchwood chaser so that was where the link was but at first that did seem to jar a little, but only for a little while, as in the end it didn’t really matter. I never thought that Torchwood was meant to be that realistic anyway, the same way in which Doctor Who isn’t meant to be realistic. The characters may be more realistic in Torchwood but the situations certainly aren’t. I mean how can a science-fiction show be realistic anyway?

I thought the alien eye was a nice little touch, as that was the start of the road that led him to Torchwood and to his eventual demise, in part due to the greed of his friends. Quite what the point of the alien eye was in the end though was debatable but it did allow for a nice little subplot where he went and sold it on Ebay.

Paul Chequer who played Eugene was rather good I thought. I have never seen him in anything before but he made a good account of himself in this episode. He was a believable character I would say: a bit of a loner interested in science-fiction and the like, hangs around with a couple of close mates (or so he thought), not very memorable or popular by his peers. Sounds a bit like myself (and quite possible a lot of other Doctor Who fans even if they won’t to it) but like Elton in Love & Monsters, he was just an ordinary guy who just happened to be a little geeky (unlike Elton though), and you genuinely felt empathy for him especially in the scenes in the funeral where hardly anyone turned up, and how he seemed to go unnoticed in his place of work apart from by a handful of people (well not even a handful).

The funeral scene did go on for a little longer than it needed to and perhaps the choice of Danny Boy wasn’t the best of choices, but it was at a funeral so I can forgive that. I didn’t think much of his so called mates. At least one of them actually missed him and felt bad about what they had done after he had died, the other one, from the video shop, didn’t seem to care, all he wanted was the alien eye. I mean who need enemies when you have friends like his?

I thought that Eugene’s infatuation with Gwen was rather sweet and the look on his face at the end when she kissed him was priceless. I mean he didn’t mind being dead after that did he? I mean she was his great, unobtainable love, the one person he could never get, as it were. Gwen certainly seems to be a little bit psychic doesn’t she? I mean when Eugene said out loud that they could phone Gary, Gwen scrolled down to his name on Eugene’s phone.

I doubt that she just picked out that name at random, unless it was just a massive coincidence. Probably not as later on in the car when Gwen went to see Eugene’s father she virtually answered Eugene. Then there is the bit when Gwen in is in her bedroom and Eugene says that he loves here. There was an intimation that she may have heard that comment as well.

This will only add to the rumours that Gwen is indeed a descendant of Gwyneth from The Unquiet Dead and make even more Who fans insist that they have to watch Torchwood, because if they don’t they somehow won’t understand what is going on in the parent series. Quite how that works I am not sure but I am digressing from the episode here.

I did wonder why the episode was called Random Shoes (I thought for a brief moment that the episode was going to be about Gwen going shopping in Cardiff town centre for random shoes), as the original title of Invisible Eugene did seem more relevant to the episode as it played out, but now I like the title, it doesn’t really make sense, but I like it nonetheless.

This episode may have not been to everyone’s taste but I liked it and thought it was a very effective episode and was a nice and different insight into the world of Torchwood. Gwen may have been a little bit blasé about the real world since she had joined Torchwood but when things like this happen to ordinary people it brings her back down to Earth again and she is able to remember what it was like to just be an ordinary person back in the day before she first got involved with Torchwood. She is truly the heart of the organisation and this episode really showcased that side of her character.

Not the best episode of the series so far, but another good example of modern television, Random Shoes was, in my opinion, just as effective as Love & Monsters was at showing a different side to the characters we have known for the past eight weeks.

Originally posted on Dec 12, 2006

Suzie of the Dead

Torchwood: They Keep Killing Suzie

To quote Sean Alexander :’Complete tosh, obviously. But for once entertaining tosh.’ I fully agree with what Sean is saying here. I am not pretending that Torchwood is perfect (which it isn’t. Nothing is, not even Doctor Who), but I do enjoy it, and this week I enjoyed it once again.

To me it is one of the best things on television at the moment, not that you have to agree with me of course. My girlfriend, who is half-and-half about Torchwood (and was a big fan of the first series of Doctor Who but not so much of the second series) said to me at the end of the first episode that she didn’t think that was the last we would see of Suzie, and she was right. I had to admit at the time I wasn’t as sure as she was about it, but then again I don’t always notice the obvious. It did seem a bit strange at the time to have her on the front cover of the Radio Times as a regular character if they were just going to kill her off in the first episode.

In my first review I said that I thought it was good that they were able to do that, to prove that not any character was safe from dying in any episode (well apart from Jack that is) and I still think it was a good thing that they did it, but bringing her back for an episode was also a good thing.

It is not uncommon is science-fiction for previously dead characters to come back at random intervals (although strangely not that often on Doctor Who), and in the glove, or ‘the risen mitten’ as Ianto dubbed it, they had a good enough reason to bring her back without having to go into a lengthy explanation of how it happened. Here we knew that the glove could bring people back to life, so why couldn’t they bring her back to life if they wanted to, not that they probably would have wanted to if they could have helped it I would imagine.

I did wonder how they were going to get around the time limit thing on the glove, but again here it was part of the plot, why Suzie could be resurrected for longer than just two minutes, because it would have made for a very short episode if they had. It could have been possible with the episode being called They Keep Killing Suzie that they would just resurrect her for two minutes then have to do it again and again, killing her each time, but as she was already dead that wouldn’t really work would it as you can hardly kill someone who is already dead. Being Science Fiction it doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t make completely sense in the real world but perhaps even that would be pushing the silly stakes a bit high.

Suzie’s plan was a little convoluted, if I’m being honest, I mean killing yourself so that you can be resurrected three months later just in time for her to kill her dying father. She would have to have been very sure that this would have happened otherwise her plan would have failed, but you could say that if anyone knew the way Torchwood worked then she did, as she was the second in command before her betrayal.

I liked the fact that Gwen seems to have replaced Suzie in every way possible and I must admit that with Suzie and Owen, I would never have put two and two together on that one. Perhaps there were more discreet than his is being with Gwen at the moment, as Tosh didn’t seem particularly jealous of Suzie, so I am not sure that she knew that they were knocking each other off.

That was quite a nice bit of characterisation there and also some nice internal continuity for the series. In fact by now if you didn’t already know that this was a Doctor Who spin-off, I am not sure that you would be able to tell that it was. There was precious little links to the parent series in this episode (and the past few episodes to be honest) and that is the way it should be, after all you don’t need to have watched Doctor Who to appreciate Torchwood and conversely you don’t have to watch Torchwood in order to appreciate Doctor Who, they are complete separate entities and are all the better for it.

I thought the episode was very well written, considering it was written by two complete newcomers (Paul Tomalin & Dan McCulloch), but the episode smacks far too much of RTD and the first episode to have been solely written by the two newcomers. For one thing this was a sequel to the first episode and there were quite a few of RTD’s trademarks in the episode, most notably the view that there is nothing after death, and not bright lights etc and some very funny lines.

The acting honours in the episode went to Indira Varma who was excellent as the slightly scary and definitely mad Suzie Costello and by the end of the episode you were glad that Jack pumped her full of lead and killed her off once and for all (or not as the case may be) after what she did to Gwen. Yasmin Bannerman was good in her brief role as Detective Swanson (very much the Gwen type character of this episode) and even though only John Barrowman and Eve Myles had much to do in this episode of the regulars and both of them were strong as they were in the first episode of the series.

Ianto had precious little to do as usual but he got the best lines in this episode. I wasn’t too sure about the final scenes between Ianto and Jack although I am pretty sure that was put in to please the slash fans that have being hoping that Jack and Ianto would get it together. I didn’t have the faintest idea what they were implying until I thought about it.

As for Owen and Tosh, well they did at least get some decent lines and Tosh was the one who came up with the idea of using the ISBN number (and was the person who destroyed the glove as well), which I didn’t think was as dumb as it sounded. Someone suggested that they could just have got the poems online and looked up the ISBN number of there as well. True they could have done that but that wouldn’t have been very dramatic would it? It also made sense within the episode itself, as they need the exact same copy of the said text that Suzie had, as that was what she would have used in the first place when planning the lock down.

I won’t lie and say I thought this was the best episode of Torchwood, but it was a very strong episode, very dark and atmospheric, and was well directed by James Strong. It kept my attention for the full fifty minutes and had me engaged throughout which means that, for me, at least, the episode worked and I look forward to the last five episodes with anticipation.

Originally posted on Dec 08, 2006

Toshiko Take A Bow

It may come as no surprise to people on here that I really enjoyed this week’s episode. Now, once you have all recovered from your fainting spells, onto the episode itself.

Torchwood: Greeks Bearing Gifts

For the first six episodes of the series, Toshiko Sato had about as much characterisation as a companion of the old series of Doctor Who: i.e. very little, but now in this episode she has suddenly become a more interesting character. For the first time we saw her outside of the hub, went to her house, found out some background information on her and she had the majority of the action of the episode with the rest of the characters taking a back seat for once.

In fact I hardly saw Ianto in the episode apart from the time Toshiko heard his thoughts about how he doesn’t really want to be there and how he is so miserable (and that brief scene said so much about his state of mind), and then right at the end where the rest of the crew appeared to confront Mary.

In this episode both Owen and Gwen have caught the same smuggy, smug smug virus that the Doctor and Rose had through the whole of the second series, and you really disliked the way they both treated Toshiko in the episode, but that was really the whole point here, we were supposed to feel empathy for Tosh, and see the other characters in a completely different light to how we had before.

Jack was very mysterious in the episode and I am so sure that he is more than just human from Tosh not being able to read his mind, and also the way he was able to project his thoughts to Tosh telepathically in the final scenes. I mean Mary could do that and she wasn’t human was she? Perhaps some humans can do this but I am certain there is more to Jack than meets the eye. I am sure that this will all be addressed by the end of this first series and before Jack returns to Doctor Who to beat the smugness out of the Doctor (hopefully).

Just like Ghost Machine before it Greeks Bearing Gifts was a very character based episode with very little in the way of actual plot. This is not a criticism as we got some good character moments in the episode and I certainly like Tosh more than I have done so far, and I always had a soft spot for her; Owen was just being Owen and Gwen was a little big smug for my liking. Of course by the end Gwen redeemed herself by apologising to Tosh, but Owen just carried on as normal. I don’t believe we are always supposed to like Owen and there are times when he is an annoying bastard but at times he can be quite funny. The problem with him is that most people can’t get past the first time they saw him when he used that spray on that girl to get her to shag him. If I were in Owen’s position, if I’m being honest, I’d have probably done the same thing. Tosh may have held a torch for Owen for a long time before this episode but I doubt she will feel the same way again.

I know for a lot of people the whole lesbian angle was only put in the episode for mere audience titillation but I would refute that and say that both of the times this has happened it had been for plot reasons and not just for titillation for the straight male viewers out there. Now I must admit that that sort of thing is the sort of thing that I will happily watch and I don’t have a problem with it but in this case it was to further the plot and, at the end of the day, it made Tosh happy for a short while and I think she deserved a little bit of happiness even if it was only short lived.

This episode is quite a bit like Whithouse’s episode of Doctor Who (School Reunion if you didn’t know) in that both of them didn’t really have much plot to speak of and both were character pieces, and it also had some funny lines, quite a few of them being in the scenes when Tosh was walking the streets of Cardiff wearing the pendant, hearing the kind of things that most people probably are thinking about as there are walking about minding their own business such as: worrying about sending emails, wishing you had said something witty rather than stupid, hoping that you had got off with someone etc.

Again it was pretty convenient that Tosh happened to walk past someone who was on their way to murder their ex-wife and child but it was a nice touch and showed Tosh in a heroic light. Both Owen and Gwen thoughts that were overheard by Tosh were pretty much the sort of stuff that would happen if they were involved and didn’t want other people to know about it, so that rings true as well.

I suppose you could now make a point that both of the female members of Torchwood have now been seduced by women possessed by aliens, but I don’t think much of it, I am sure that kind of thing happens all the time in those sort of stories (well it does in my mind anyway). I wonder if that is part of the selection process by Torchwood if they are after female staff: you can work for us if you are likely to lez up with the first woman possessed by an alien you meet. Could be.

I must admit that they did seem to have an awful lot of aerial shots of Cardiff in this episode, probably more than they have in quite a few episodes. Perhaps this episode was under running as they had almost a minute long pan over the streets of Cardiff at the end of the episode before the end credits. It looked nice but it did seem that they realised they had a minute left and had to draw it out with something. My girlfriend calls these ‘the Apprentice shots’.

On the whole I thought this was a very good episode with fine performances from both Naoki Mori and Daniela Denby-Ashe (who has the same birthday as me. Not that that means anything, just thought I’d mention it) and some great direction from Colin Teague (get that man on Who soon. I also believe he is directing the Sarah Jane spin-off as well).

So I would have to say that that was another good episode of Torchwood and best of all it beat Lost in the overnight ratings. Well, I’m happy.

Originally posted on Nov 30th 2006

Country House

I really enjoyed Countrycide. I thought it was the strongest episode of Torchwood to date. Perhaps it is because I really enjoy all the horror films that this episode is based upon (you could name several films that this could be seen to have been inspired by Cabin Fever, Evil Dead, The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jeepers Creepers to name but a few) and you cannot say that Doctor Who never based entire stories on other sources. I mean look at the Philip Hinchcliffe era! Although that is Doctor Who which can steal plot lines and ideas and it obviously doesn’t matter.

I thought the direction was taut and always interesting and I thought the music was used to good effect to give the episode plenty of tension and you were able to believe the characters were out in the open and not sure what was going to happen next.

I personally didn’t find the episode scary, particularly gory but then again I am used to watching horror films and this sort of thing just doesn’t bother me. Both my girlfriend and our friend’s wife, who watched it with us, spent most of the time watching the episode through their fingers and were genuinely freaked by the episode and it made them jump at several moments. Surely the episode can be said to have done its job on that alone!

My girlfriend said she never wanted to watch it again; not because it was a bad episode, mind you, but because she just doesn’t like blood and gore and this episode had plenty of both and it simply wasn’t her cup of tea. Now me on the other hand I love this kind of stuff so this episode was perfect for my tastes and I do have to say that I enjoyed it immensely, it was sick but there were some funny moments and I thought it was genuinely tense throughout.

I know that this episode (and this whole show come to that) is not to a lot of people’s taste but I would have to give it top marks. I genuinely don’t have any problems with this episode and with some of things that marked it out for a few people on OG. For instance one person, and I quote, said that this episode “glorified sexual aggression” and that Owen ‘virtually raped Gwen in the woods” and best of all “The glorification of casual dalliance and the contempt for monogamous relationships”. I mean WTF?

Now on all of these points, I don’t really think that the episode glorified ‘sexual aggression’ at all, or for that matter glorified ‘casual dalliance”. The character of Owen may be sexually aggressive and yes he did get the girl in the end, but that doesn’t mean that the series is glorifying it, does it?

You can hardly say that Gwen was almost raped either because she was making no attempt at all to fight him off. I am sure that rape is categorised as forced sex, and there is no way that Gwen was being forced in anyway. If anything she was gagging for it, and quite possible would have shagged him there and then if they hadn’t been disturbed, so how anyone can say that he was virtually raping her is beyond me.

The character of Owen is one of the most hated things about the series it seems but I would say that he is quite typical of some men of his age and to be honest I am not sure why people have a problem with him, there are plenty of blokes out there who are just like him.

Perhaps it is the fact that they don’t like characters like him in a programme linked to a family show, rather than any real gripe against the character per se. Or perhaps it is the fact that he is a worryingly real character when compared to the characters they are used to watching on a regular basis and just can’t accept that fact. I am not sure.

There must be a reason surely? I mean Torchwood isn’t Doctor Who and it’s not pretending to be so why the problem with this show having characters who are more amoral than moral when it’s not even being aimed at the same audience?

I am pleased to say that Tosh had a lot more to do in the episode and to my mind it is about bloody time. I was getting sick of seeing her behind a desk all the time to be honest. The scenes when she was trapped in that cellar with Ianto show that she is more than just a computer geek and I hope that after this we see much more of Tosh in action (that will be next week I think). She even got to play the usual victim type character in all the horror movies by running around in a tight vest top and being all sweaty.

Even Ianto was having a fair bit of the action in this episode. He is certainly the most emotional of the lead characters and seems to be the only one who doesn’t really seem to actually enjoy what they do. Gwen is starting to get more aware of the danger of what they do know but you can tell that she gets the rush of it and actually enjoys her new position in life, well apart from having her house raided last week and now getting shot most of the time, although after this episode I am not all that sure.

To be honest this was really the first episode where all of the characters had an equal portion of the action and it just wasn’t the Gwen and Jack show as it was last week, which was nice, and all of the regular actors gave good performances (particularly Eve Myles in the scenes after she had been shot). We get even more layers to the character of Captain Jack and he is certainly different to the bloke we met in the first series of Doctor Who.

I think people forget that Jack was actually a conman when we first me him and he couldn’t really be like he is at the moment in a programme aimed at a family audience can we. Only here are we probably seeing Jack’s true nature, coupled with the fact that he seemingly can’t die and does seem a little pissed off at the world and I think the Doctor. It is going to be explosive when they do meet again but you know that Jack will be back to his old self in the Who more or less because Jack’s adventures in Torchwood are only going to be, at best, paraphrased in Doctor Who.

At least with Torchwood you get the impression that any of the lead characters could die at any moment and for a while you could have believed that she might not make it out of the episode alive, the same with Tosh when she was nearly throttled! Well if you hadn’t read the synopses for the following episodes anyway! There was plenty of good character work in this episode and, while a lot of people don’t like the lead characters, I actually am beginning to like them more and more as the weeks go by and do find them all very likable.

It was actually nice that the episode wasn’t all about aliens in the end and was just about people doing horrible things to other people. I don’t think it would have been as interesting if they had discovered it to be aliens in the end, it would have been easier to get away with and easier to explain away by Jack at the end, but, because it was humans doing what they were doing it makes it even more disturbing than it otherwise would have been.

I am not going to say that Countrycide was perfect, because it wasn’t; it was tosh yes, but enjoyable tosh at that. However, I did enjoy it and I do believe that the series is going from strength to strength. Long may it continue…

Originally posted on Nov 23, 2006

Girlfriend in a Coma

Lady in Silver
Is cyber-converting me
Torchwood: Cyberwoman

I am going to start by saying that I thought Cyberwoman was the best episode of Torchwood so far and the best Cybermen story in a long while. It was tragic, gruesome, horrific, well acted, fabulously directed and was a really enjoyable 50 minutes of television.

Is it wrong that I found the Cyberwoman sexy?

I thought the opening scenes were great as it really showed the camaraderie that exists within the Torchwood team, but it also showed that Ianto is a bit removed from that team spirit, which might explain how he gets away with things later on in the episode. It also suggests that they have all been together for quite a while now. Apparently something very similar happened in an episode of Firefly (which I have never seen before but which I am reliably informed is very good). Well if you are going to nick stuff then you might as well nick stuff from something good. And you can’t say Doctor Who doesn’t to that.

Is it wrong that I found the Cyberwoman sexy? Admittedly the Cyberwoman looked more like a big breasted woman dressed in a full on fetish suit, complete with gaps to flash a little bit of flesh (and high heels), than what we know of Cybermen but I don’t have a problem with that. I found that it was a far better portrayal of the actual mechanics of Cyber conversion than Doctor Who ever did. Here we actually saw it for what it was and it isn’t pretty. Doctor Who could never do something like this simply because it would have been too much for a family audience but Torchwood can, so I say more power to it. I also want to know how in the hell she managed to run in those heels.

I await the scene where Sarah has girl-on-girl action in The Sarah Jane Adventures

I guess whether or not you think this episode was ‘adult’ or not depends on your definition of what makes a show adult. If you thought that this was puerile nonsense and the same of Day One then you would probably consider the entire slasher movie genre of horror films to be puerile, which some people do, but most people would not have a problem saying that they were for adults and not children.

As far as I am concerned Torchwood is the same thing. It is not for children and this episode is certainly not. If nothing else will give the DVD an 18 certificate then this episode certainly would in particular the scenes of the Japanese Doctor in his partially converted phase. It wouldn’t be the swearing in this case (as there wasn’t much of it and even then it was in keeping with the situation. I mean you’d tell Jack to fuck himself if he told you to kill your girlfriend, even if she had been turned into a psychotic cyborg killing machine), or the sex, but rather the blood and gore and the scene of the Cyberwoman being pecked to death by a pterodactyl. Having said that if those two episodes were like something you would see on CBBC then I await the scene where Sarah has girl-on-girl action in Sarah Jane Adventures, or shags someone in a toilet.

It did rather make me laugh when they discovered a cyber conversion unit in their basement and never knew that it was there in the first place. One could argue that for a secret organisation they have very lax security if they could allow that the happen without anyone noticing. You could also argue that if Ianto was allowed to get away with this then who really runs the show at Torchwood. It is often said that an organisation would crumble without its administrative staff and perhaps this is just symptomatic of that. Big up the support staff!

It was about time Ianto was given something to do and I thought that Gareth David Lloyd was excellent in this episode. You really felt for him and believed that he would do everything he could he to help the girl that he loved. I mean wouldn’t you? I know I would. Again another reason for the Cyberwoman looking like she did could be a reason to make you believe that Ianto thought that there was still a chance that she could be converted back. I mean if she had been turned into a full on Cybermen he might have thought better of it and it might have had the same effect if she had looked the Japanese Doctor did after his partial conversion. Now that was pretty gruesome but the very idea of Cyber conversion is pretty gruesome isn’t it. He might not have, but you know what I mean.

I know some people can’t believe that Jack let Ianto carry on with his job as though nothing had happened but the way I see it is that you really couldn’t let him go as he knows far too much about the inner workings of Torchwood to be let out into the streets. I guess that Jack could have given him one of those memory draft things he gave to Gwen in the first episode but as was proved in that episode they don’t always work and I really don’t think that Jack was going to kill him. I have also noticed that Jack hasn’t sworn once this series (well not that I have noticed anyway) whereas most of the others have at some point (actually I am not sure that Tosh has either).

Poor Tosh didn’t have a great deal to do in this episode either. She did more than she normally does I will grant you but she still doesn’t have a great deal to do. I hope that she gets her chance later on, I really do. Jack is getting more like the Ninth Doctor week by week. I wonder if that is why some people are having a problem with him as he has changed from a cocky, annoying character into a more introspective darker character whereas the Doctor has gone the other way. Just a thought. Don’t all jump on me at once!

Owen did what all single blokes would do if they had Eve Myles on top of him, and thought they were about to die horribly, and snogged her face off. Gwen didn’t seem to object either did she? Just like she didn’t seem to bother with Jack’s seeming sexual harassment (well according to OG anyway) in the last episode. She loves it. The hussy! It certainly seems like Gwen will end up getting of with Owen over the course of the series. You can just see it happening, there is definitely some sort of spark there. A shame really as I was hoping that it would be her and Tosh!

I actually liked the final scenes with the Cyberwoman-pterodactyl face off. Yes, it was farcical and a bit silly but it just worked. Only in a show like this or Doctor Who can you get away with that sort of thing and it just worked. It was really about the only thing they could do at the time anyway. They had no power and bullets weren’t going to kill her were they. I was a bit surprised with the final scenes to be honest as I expected the pizza delivery girl to have been cyber-converted but no the Cyberwoman somehow managed to transplant her brain into the skull of the pizza delivery girl. Yes that does sound far fetched doesn’t it but you do have to remember this is science fiction and it doesn’t have to make sense. It also showed how far away she had gone from being human at that point and it wouldn’t have been good if she had managed to save herself from the pterodactyl and then convert the pizza delivery girl into a Cyberwoman as well and then escaped from the hub and went around Cardiff trying to cybernise the entire population would it? That would be daft.

I really enjoyed Cyberwoman and I am really enjoying Torchwood, far more than I ever did watching series 2 of Doctor Who. I, for one, am glad they are making this show and hope that it runs and runs.

Originally posted on Nov 09, 2006