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Well, I thought it was fucking fantastic - really exceeded even my relatively high expectations. Kvetching about the budget seems so ungenerous to me. But anyway, that's Barbelith, if I hadn't learnt to live with people picking holes in really great telly I'd have left ages ago.
Torchwood steals - sorry, salvages - flotsam and jetsam from other shows, but it knows what to steal: the trick Spooks pulled off whereby a plot twist relies on misleading publicity about who's a regular, the brooding immortal hero and aerial shots of the city from Angel (although Boreanz was never anywhere near as charismatic as Barrowman), and a whole heap of stuff from Ultraviolet (but that's okay, in fact that's more than okay, given how short a run Ultraviolet had and how good it was), and from various sweary, rainy comic books of the last 8 years or so written by bad-tempered Englishmen (but that's okay too, 'cos so far Torchwood is doing that stuff better).
Loads of great potential plot threads, not done too heavy-handedly at all but ripe for exploration: what happened to Torchwood 4, what would the Weevils say if they could communicate... And of course, lots of questions about Captain Jack. For me the most interesting one is "how long has he been working for Torchwood?" - he talks as if the Sycorax invasion and the Cybermen/Dalek battle were recent, but also as if he's been working there for a while. So did he just keep finding out too late that the Doctor had stopped by London on those occasions, or is his relationship with the Doc more complicated than that now - what level of resentment is there? To what extent is his agenda different to the agenda of Torchwood 1 as it's been presented to us, and to what extent does he see that as different to the Doctor's agenda? He can cradle the hand, but could he be face to face if Jack was the guy who pressed the button of the big laser gun that dusted the Sycorax? I think it's implied - and I thought this was done quite subtly - that Jack has hardened again in the time since we last saw him, retreated a little back into a version of that Time Conman pose - and Gwen is starting to bring him out of that by reminding him of the Doctor and Rose. This is what he has to go through before he's ready to see the Doctor again. And let's hope it takes a while, or that when he does see him he's decided that he still has to stay, because frankly this is already shaping up to be a better show.
Another thing: is every member of Torchwood 3 other than Jack in denial about their sexuality? Gwen's over-relieved "Oh yes, the super-pheromones in the atmosphere, that explains it." Owen's ever-so-slightly sneery comment that he knows Jack is gay (but don't ask me what I get up to on my nights off "if it makes it easier"). Ianto's over-protesting "I don't care" about somebody else's sexuality. Toshiko is the exception, I guess - but she's not giving anything away, is she?
Only real concern: let's not have any more level of attempted "social commentary" than we had in the second episode, eh? According to Torchwood Declassified, the Goldfrapp bit - sex is everywhere in the modern Western world, do you see? - was RTD's favourite bit. That's a bad sign, but since so much of the rest of it was great, I'm not overly worried. |
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