purplecat

I've been trying to organise my thoughts in a coherent fashion about season 2 Torchwood. In particular I've been trying to work out if I'd be watching it if it weren't for the Doctor Who connection.

I thought season two was far, far better than season one. However, season one had me engaging in long rants with almost anyone who cared to listen, so that isn't much of a recommendation. My main criticism of season 1 revolved around the fact that the majority of episodes would never have occurred if a member of Torchwood hadn't been disobeying (perfectly sensible) orders, a further set of episodes wouldn't have occurred if they'd actually been competent and in most of those that were left they were basically helpless. Furthermore the team appeared to have little cohesiveness and Jack no leadership qualities.

( Season 2 spoilers, just in case )

I feel about this episode much like I feel about the first in the season, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It was nicely done, there is nothing much wrong with it from a logical perspective (( minor spoiler )) but in the end it all added up to a big "meh" for me. I can't even work up the energy to get upset about the portrayal of UNIT which I gather is exciting much of the rest of fandom, but which doesn't actually seem that offensive to me unless you get offended by criticism of the modern approach to counter-terrorism in general (( another minor spoiler )).

Flashback episodes, especially origin flashback episodes, are the staple of many TV series but, in my opinion, they work best when the flashbacks are restricted to exploring just one character's past allowing that character to actually get fleshed out a bit and work even better when the content of the flashback is relevant in some way to the framing story. Neither is the case here. As such it worked out as four mini-Torchwood episodes and I suspect the lack of internal inconsistencies derives in part because its harder to lose track of plot and character logic in a 10 minute story than it is in a 45 minute one. It does suffer from Torchwood's overall lack of consistency. Tosh and Owen's stories should have been pre-figured in Adam, at the very least, if not in the season 1 finale.

This is an episode of Torchwood where they get very little wrong but, at the end of the day, they don't get a great deal right either.

I have commented elsewhere, somewhere, I think in a response to one of parrot_knight's posts that I don't resent NuWho for not being Classic Who but I do somewhat resent it not being Firefly. Even though that is clearly an idiotic attitude to take up.

I don't really have any problems with From out of the Rain as a Torchwood episode. But I do rather resent the fact that it wasn't a Sapphire and Steel story. It makes about as much sense as most Sapphire and Steel stories, in that it relies quite heavily on making an association of ideas into an association in reality. It's resolution was no better nor worse than the resolution of a lot of Sapphire and Steel ones (resolution was frequently not their strong point) and it was certainly as full of startling images as any Sapphire and Steel episode. But... but... but... while David McCallum and Joanna Lumley are hardly the creme de la creme of British thesping they put John Barrowman and Gareth David-Lloyd to shame. There were portentious lines here about things "breaking through" which McCallum and Lumley would have delivered with chilling conviction but which Barrowman failed to raise above pomposity. Where Lumley would have exuded a detached but nevertheless heartfelt compassion David-Lloyd gave us mawkish sentimentality. This was the ideal opportunity to showcase the Jack/Ianto relationship and I still got no real sense of genuine attachment between them in scenes where McCallum and Lumley would have sizzled*. Sapphire and Steel thrived on the slow build-up, a luxury Torchwood, and modern television in general, simply does not have. We needed more time for the threat to evolve. We needed, frankly, more time to explore the nature of Jack as a side-show freak and we needed more time to establish Ianto's emotional involvement with the unfolding events. I found watching this, knowing it was from the pen of P. J. Hammond, an instructive exercise in seeing how important the execution of a script could be because (apart from the fact it wasn't restricted to a small location) this script could have been translated easily into the older show.

This is another good Torchwood episode. It hangs together better than many, providing you are prepared to enter the sort of dream logic world of Sapphire and Steel. The team retain a basic level of competence (though they still fail to convince as an elite unit). It had startlingly ideas and creepy images. But it would have been so much better as a Sapphire and Steel story.

* Of course on screen sizzle is greatly aided by a bit of unresolved sexual tension. Since it was doubtful Sapphire and Steel had anything resembling real bodies and half the time we got the impression their relationship was based on elaborate assumed personas, unresolved sexual tension was pretty much built into the format. Jack and Ianto, however, are already shagging like bunnies so any sexual tension is pretty much well and truly resolved.

Somehow, while carefully not reading anything containing spoilers, I'd got the impression that this episode was going to be worse than last week's, so I was pleasantly surprised. That's not to say it was without flaws. I think a big plus was that all its does not make senseness was distilled into two specific areas - firstly, I do not think you understand dead bodies, nor have you thought zombieness through with sufficient care, secondly, a paranoid rich eccentric in need of 24 hour care would not have his house set up like this. The Torchwood team's treatment of Owen was stupid too but hey! they're Torchwood.

Good as Burn Gorman is, and this time he was not only the best thing about the episode but basically carried it, I'm beginning to feel a little "enough already" about this arc. This revealed the episode's pacing problems, B actually left the room halfway through the angst with instructions to fetch him if anything interesting started to happen. I'm also a little dubious about the decision to bring Martha Jones in apparently entirely in order to tell a story about Owen, rather than to tell a story about Martha. I can see that you don't want too much focus put on a guest character from another show, but presumably part of the point of the exercise was to bring Martha fans across to Torchwood and you don't want to leave them feeling she's been short-changed.

On the plus side, Gwen (for what little we saw of her) was great, revealing a new and more promising take on the character (in my opinion) as the 2iC she is supposed to be, especially given Jack's flaws as a leader. The framing rooftop narrative while, frankly, a hoary old cliche, was well done and Maggie came across as an interesting individual rather than the line-feed she could easily have been. In fact the guest cast, Christine Bottomley and Richard Briers, acted the socks off everyone else in the episode (bar Burn Gorman, of course).

Ultimately though this was a competent but slight episode lumbered with drawing a character arc out past its sell-by date. It was a vast improvement on last week and the show, particularly the team dynamics, continue to develop promisingly but, as parrot_knight has pointed out, inconsistently.

Sometimes I get really irritated with that part of my brain that watches something like Reset and goes: Have these people never heard of animal testing? giving someone twice the dose of mayfly lavae does not make them mature twice as fast and she knows to be careful why not type something she doesn't know onto her eyeballs? because really, these are all minor niggles in what was, in my opinion, one of the best Torchwood episodes we've seen.

Something about the need to integrate Martha into the Torchwood team obviously focused the minds of production crew because suddenly they look functional and competent. It must be said season 2 has been working hard at this but Reset was the first time they really all seemed to gell together, from my point of view anyway, and became a bunch of people I was actually interested in and cared about. ( spoilers under the cut )