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Author Topic: Torchwood  (Read 2013 times)

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Thad

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Torchwood
« on: March 01, 2008, 12:45:57 AM »

Well, Martha's guest stint on Torchwood achieved its purpose: it tricked me into spending another 135 minutes watching a show I don't actually like.

The bit where she first showed up and she and Jack exchanged warm greetings like old friends was pretty okay.  By the second episode, she had become a background character completely indistinguishable from the rest of the cast, so it felt like Torchwood again.  To my relief, she managed to beat the odds and make it through three episodes without fucking anyone, so that's an "at least".

So now I get to spend every agonizing second Donna is onscreen in the new season of Doctor Who thinking, "Well, THAT was totally worth it."
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Thad

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Re: New Doctor Who
« Reply #1 on: April 14, 2008, 09:34:43 PM »

Blink, Human Nature/Family of Blood, and Captain Jack Harkness nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form Hugo.  [...]

Haven't seen the Torchwood ep; suppose it's in auspicious enough company for me to give it a look.

It's like Blink, but not nearly as good.  Still one of the best Torchwood eps I've seen; I liked pretty much everything except the part where Annoying got in a fight with Dull and Annoying and they overacted a lot.  Also, was hoping to get payoff on Secret Asian Man, but they want me to watch more episodes of Torchwood to find out what his deal is, and seriously, fuck that.  The preview at the end pretty much just said he was a generic supervillain.

Anyway.  May have impressed me more if I hadn't seen Blink first.  Good character development for Jack; not a bad time travel story, and the "Jack wants to have sex with the first person he sees" bit was handled much more tastefully and sensibly than usual.

But seriously, the only conceivable way it could beat out Blink is if the committee's just sick of giving Hugos to Moffat.  (And even then, Human Nature/Family of Blood is still better IMO.)
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Niku

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Re: Re: New Doctor Who
« Reply #2 on: July 19, 2009, 09:42:26 PM »

Goddamn, Children of Earth.  I know people on here don't really dig on Torchwood but I really liked the miniseries and have no fucking clue how they can possibly continue the series on from this point.  I pretty much hope they just let this be the end, honestly.

[spoiler]I don't know if the 456 basically shooting up kids (in the heroin sense) is hilarious or horrifying so I'm gonna go with both.[/spoiler]
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Mothra

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Re: Re: New Doctor Who
« Reply #3 on: July 20, 2009, 06:49:55 AM »

Yeah, I keep hearing good things about CoE! I kind of loathe that show but I think I'll give it a shot.
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Thad

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Torchwood
« Reply #4 on: September 23, 2009, 05:47:35 PM »

...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.
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Burrito Al Pastor

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Re: Re: New Doctor Who
« Reply #6 on: January 19, 2010, 04:51:39 PM »

So if it's good, it'll be canceled inside of a season?

Fantastic.
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Thad

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Re: Re: New Doctor Who
« Reply #7 on: January 20, 2010, 08:38:31 PM »

Fox is going to ruin Torchwood.

...

... :lol:

...anyway.  Plenty of questions to ask.  There's been some conjecture that this might actually be in-continuity and occasionally have the cast of the British series guest star -- ie not a remake per se but an American branch of the organization.

I also don't see Fox having the balls to have a bisexual leading character.

...

...let me rephrase.

I don't see Fox having the balls to have a MALE bisexual leading character.
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Thad

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Re: Re: New Doctor Who
« Reply #8 on: June 07, 2010, 09:13:56 PM »

So Torchwood's going to Starz, which all things considered is better than Fox.  RTD/BBC still pretty much in charge, but expect a bigger budget and a more global setting.

RTD seems to have realized that Children of Earth was way better than the previous two seasons and is using that as a template.  Which could be a good sign, or could be too much of a good thing -- a season arc worked for CoE, but one-off episodes can be really nice.  (In fact the only sour notes in Captain Jack Harkness were the bits where it tied into the season-ending arc rather than standing on its own.)

RTD is, as always, his own worst enemy, and his perpetual need to top himself will probably mean yet another crappy ending.  (I expect everybody but Jack to die.)  But hey, the season leading up to it could be pretty neat.
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Niku

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Re: Re: New Doctor Who
« Reply #9 on: June 07, 2010, 09:55:56 PM »

I am much happier with an American co-produced fourth season than a weird remake also starring John Barrowman.
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Thad

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Re: Re: New Doctor Who
« Reply #10 on: June 08, 2010, 08:31:43 PM »

It was never going to be a remake.  This is pretty much what they said it was going to be all along.

In point of fact RTD said he's using the same script he pitched to Fox.
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Thad

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Torchwood
« Reply #11 on: July 08, 2011, 10:49:47 PM »

Welp, new Torchwood.  (Worth a threadsplit?  We'll see.)

So far it's just setting up the pieces.  Explaining just what the hell Torchwood is to the Starz audience, setting up the premise of this particular season arc, and introducing three new characters.  Bill Pullman is far and away the most interesting of them.

Other'n that it's a bit early to make any calls, really.  Can't say I know that much more now than I did before I watched it.  It's not as good right out the gate as Children of Earth was, but on the other hand Children of Earth didn't have to spend an entire episode introducing the cast.

There's potential here, particularly with Pullman -- though his story seemed like the dumbest, really; I can only figure it's a parody of the American justice system as seen through British eyes.

(And of course it bears adding that making your bad guy a pedophile is an incredibly lazy storytelling choice, and the story thus far really is Torchwood at its most heavyhanded.  Gwen's father is going to be used as an argument for assisted suicide, Jack is going to be tempted to die while he has the chance but will ultimately make the noble sacrifice of continuing to live, Rex will have to face the fact that when all this is done he's going to die.)

Observation: Rex watches Jack on the CCTV but when he meets him later [spoiler]he only recognizes him from the plane[/spoiler].  Did he get slipped some Retcon offscreen?  And if so, how would Jack have known to give it to him?

Conjecture: [spoiler]Whoever uploaded the malware also went after Rex.[/spoiler]

As for the who and the why, well, if this were still a BBC solo effort I'd expect little bits of Owen to come shambling up, but given that the show has bent over backwards NOT to rely on established continuity I don't think the villain's going to be anybody we've seen before.
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Beat Bandit

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Re: Torchwood
« Reply #12 on: July 09, 2011, 06:15:10 AM »

You left out the important info.

How well does Jack's new coat "flow"? I hear they spent thousands on that.
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Niku

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Re: Torchwood
« Reply #13 on: July 09, 2011, 06:57:52 AM »

I had the horrible realization recently that Miracle Day would not be airing every day consecutively like Children of Earth did.  Goddamn TV.
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Thad

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Re: Torchwood
« Reply #14 on: July 25, 2011, 06:53:04 PM »

You know what I hate?

When media ignore the basic functionality of computers and other assorted technology.

Like how every time there's an important file on, say, one of the DCAU toons, it is stored on a disk and there is only one copy, so if you destroy it you destroy all the information on it, permanently and irrevocably.

Or in Minority Report, which features a futuristic society where in order to access important files, you have to go down to a central repository and get a disk.  Because in the future they do not have the ability to transfer data across networks.

So with Friday's Torchwood.  Leaving aside that it is easier to physically break into someone's office to access the files on her computer, Gwen has to stick a memory stick into it and then wait for files to copy to it, rather than stick a memory stick with preloaded malware on it that will automatically transfer all the files to a remote location so she can get the fuck out of the office immediately -- two scenes later, two scenes AFTER the ol' contact lens bit, [spoiler]Oswald takes Jack's recording from him.  Because in the span of two scenes, the writer has forgotten that there is such a thing as live transmission of a recording.[/spoiler]

On the other hand, if next week it turns out that of course Jack [spoiler]broadcast the recording to a remote location and still has it[/spoiler], then it's forgivable, but Jesus Christ, guys, if you're going to ignore the fact that yes we've been able to transmit audio wirelessly for over a century now, maybe you shouldn't do it in an episode that revolves around cell phones and magic contact lenses.

...but aside from the usual Torchwood-sticks-the-landing shenanigans and some bad-even-for-Torchwood dialogue, it was pretty good really; the mystery's finally getting some focus.  And some good tightrope walking around existing continuity; Ianto's namedrop says enough for new audience members to know who he was, and [spoiler]Jack's accosting Oswald about guilt for murdering a child[/spoiler] has an extra resonance for people who saw Children of Earth while not requiring any explanation to people who miss the added significance.  (For all that Davies got a little too deep into Who continuity over his tenure, I think he always kept it accessible to new fans; that IS one of his skills.)
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Mongrel

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Re: Torchwood
« Reply #15 on: July 25, 2011, 07:48:09 PM »

That reminds me of something I saw just today:

Quote
elementary

I watched two episodes of Sherlock, the new BBC series that puts Holmes and Watson in the modern day and emphasizes Sherlock’s twitchy sociopathic nature. The first one was pretty good! The second one was… well, the first one was pretty good!

However, it nags at me that even though Holmes is constantly dicking around with smartphones, either texting or looking up regional weather patterns to match the mud on someone boots or whatever, when he does his trick of figuring out everything about someone based on their scars, mannerisms and dress habits, nobody thinks “Oh, he probably googled me just now.”

On the other hand, Sherlock’s enemies seem to keep tabs on him through his website, so there’s a nod to our compulsively public lives.
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Thad

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Re: Torchwood
« Reply #16 on: July 25, 2011, 09:19:30 PM »

Think he usually does it without looking at his phone, though, often with people he's just met and hasn't had time to do background on.

And [spoiler]he totally whiffs it on Moriarty[/spoiler] in the third episode.
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Thad

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Re: Torchwood
« Reply #17 on: July 30, 2011, 03:19:32 PM »

Torchwood sticks the landing again.

First of all: what the fuck is Gwen doing at the patch panel?  Leaving aside that there is absolutely no reason to recable for a drop-in replacement, it makes zero sense in the context of swapping out a computer as [spoiler]a decoy that they're then going to deliberately burn up.  "Phicorp will think it was destroyed by a fire!  And that the fire also moved a bunch of fucking cables to different ports!"[/spoiler]

And, um, wouldn't Jack have had to climb the exact same 38 flights of stairs as Rex?  And why doesn't he stop to wonder why the door is open?

Also, we're back into the damn "RTD really wants us to give a fuck about the characters' families" schtick.  I've grown to kind of like Rhys over the years, but I don't care about any of the new ones.  Not Gwen's dad, not Rex's dad, not Esther's sister and nieces.  (Niece and nephew?  Do they even specify sexes?)  Honestly the last time I actually liked somebody's family member it was Wilf.
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Mothra

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Re: Torchwood
« Reply #18 on: July 30, 2011, 06:17:49 PM »

Also, we're back into the damn "RTD really wants us to give a fuck about the characters' families" schtick.  I've grown to kind of like Rhys over the years, but I don't care about any of the new ones.  Not Gwen's dad, not Rex's dad, not Esther's sister and nieces.  (Niece and nephew?  Do they even specify sexes?)

Oh for christ's sake
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Thad

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Re: Torchwood
« Reply #19 on: August 06, 2011, 11:27:44 AM »

Welp, halfway through the season and Torchwood's finally done it: it's used up all the benefit of the doubt I had left over from last season and restored me to my default setting of "Jesus Christ, what the fuck is wrong with me that I am watching this show?"

"Spoilers" follow, but I am not going to tag them because every single one of them is blisteringly obvious.  If you wish to be unsurprised by the show instead of being unsurprised by the rest of my post, stop reading now.

We're into full-blown Idiot Plot mode.  As in, nobody in Europe knows what a fucking concentration camp is.  I know Brits are supposed to be all polite and civilized, but when a minority population starts getting carted off to heavily-guarded locations for vague, unexplained reasons, I'd like to think they'd do a little more than mill about politely harrumphing at the unarmed guards.

And that the Type 1's are being burned is supposed to be a big, shocking twist ending?  Let's assume, for a moment, that it wasn't totally telegraphed in the first fifteen minutes of the first episode.  It's STILL enormously fucking obvious, because THESE ARE FUCKING CONCENTRATION CAMPS.

Oh, and I love RTD taking advantage of having a brand new audience that doesn't know he's already done this "character dies while other character watches, helpless, on the other side of a sealed door" schtick TWICE.

Anyway.  Doctor Who's back in a few weeks with a World War II episode.  Maybe it will have some timeline-altering shenanigans and explain why nobody on Torchwood knows what the fucking Holocaust was.
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