...so okay. Since Children of Earth was getting a lot of praise, I decided once again to set my anti-Torchwood bias aside and give it a look.
It was definitely an RTD product: a very good setup ruined by an in-de-SCRIB-ably stupid final act.
Before I get into my litany of complaints against the last episode, let me stress how very much I like the first four. There are a few missteps (too much time spent on Gwen and Ianto's insipid families -- although Jack's dysfunctional one is more satisfying), but by and large it's a gripping, edge-of-your-seat mystery story. I find myself caring about the characters: Frobisher is a great villain, the Cigarette-Smoking Man without the charm, charisma, or gravitas; Gwen's development, while a little heavy-handed, puts the balancing-work-with-family dilemma into a nice relief; Jack reaches the climax of his character arc, finally going from grifter to monster to a stable person trying to atone for his sins; Ianto is a highlight as his conscience. [spoiler]His death is actually moving.[/spoiler] I thought it was great; I watched parts 2 and 3 right in a row and started babbling about the show to people who don't care about it or even know what it is.
And then part 5.
God. What a train wreck. It fails at nearly EVERY level. The aliens' motivation is stupid, the attempt to make the villain sympathetic fails (I actually laughed out loud at the shot where he starts walking up the stairs [spoiler]with a gun behind his back[/spoiler] while the bitchy office lady talks about how great he is -- I really can't think of a bigger failure in conveying the emotion you want than that), the way Jack finally defeats the aliens is utterly contrived and doesn't make any goddamn sense, and when the Prime Minister finally gets his comeuppance he's [spoiler]replaced by the only person in his Cabinet who is actually more reprehensible than he is[/spoiler], so it's a little hard to cheer, and Jesus FUCKING Christ, how many shots can you show of people with a single tear running down one cheek? At least the goodbye scene is, for once in Rusty's life, brief.
So yeah, terrible fucking last act. But quite good up until then!
Where the serial shines is that the writers seem to have finally worked out what it is that makes Torchwood suitable for a mature audience. It's not sex and cursing, it's moral ambiguity. You can actually trace Who and its spinoffs through that principle -- Sarah Jane, which has the youngest target audience, also has the clearest line between good and evil. I've only seen one two-parter, but it couldn't even have a backbiting UNIT agent without having him turn out to be an alien in disguise -- a far cry from Children of Earth's portrayal of the military-industrial complex.
Doctor Who's a little grayer -- the Doctor will damn an entire race of spider-aliens to a death of fire and flood, but you know he'd never try to experiment on a child on the pretense of spending more quality time with him. Jack pulls that stunt in the first ep of CoE, and it turns out to be one of the least terrible things he does over the course of the serial.
The ethical hypothetical at the core of the plot is a heavyhanded reductio ad absurdum, but an interesting one to ponder. It allows you a certain amount of sympathy toward all sides. In a lose-lose situation, what do you do?
Unfortunately, there's no answer to the question, it's a hypothetical. And when the last episode contrives a way of posing it in a directly personal way to Jack -- for a THIRD TIME --, it falls flat. The moral ambiguity beat gets so cartoonish that it takes you right out of the story. I didn't give a crap about Jack or anybody else; the whole thing was just too artificial.
So yes, in summation, this is a Rusty story: a very solid setup with a very stupid ending. (I'm from Arizona, so the analogy of a sports team that plays a great game and then does spectacularly badly at the very end is one that leaps to mind quite naturally.) Worth watching the first four episodes, though you might just want to read a summary of the last one on Wikipedia rather than subject yourself to it.
