Not Now John

Torchwood: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

Refreshed from their recent sojourn in the Himalayas - where they probably ended up molesting a Yeti - Team Torchwood are back in Cardiff and hot on the heels (well, fins) of a coke-addled blowfish in a stolen sports car. The look on Gwen's face (see right) says it all really: "Yeah, we know this is a bit shit, but what can you do?"

And so begins a pre-titles sequence that neatly encapsulates almost everything that was wrong with season 1 of Torchwood in one bite-sized chunk: there's the SUV that looks like a taxi on New Years Eve; there's a scene with the team yelling at each other with their guns held aloft; there's a bit where Ianto looks like he might cry; there's some blood and gore on the floor; oh, and there's the villain spouting character notes instead of dialogue.

To paraphrase the Brigadier, "Oh, for f**k's sake, here we go again."

Despite the fact that my wife was chomping at the bit about Grand Designs being on t'other side, I somehow persuaded her to stick with it. I missed the bit when the team confronted Jack about his sabbatical on the parent show because we were too busy screaming at each other. However, by the end of the episode we both sported huge, stupid grins on our faces. That's right, I am happy to report that Torchwood is no longer a gritty, angst-ridden, portentous drama with the odd monster in it. Oh, sweet Chibnall, no! Now it's a situation comedy with car chases and the odd monster in it! And it doesn't get much more entertaining than that.

About as useful as Andrew Cartmel on a DVD commentary...

James Marsters didn't just steal the show, he held it to ransom. He even managed to over-shadow John Barrowman and that's no mean feat. Of course, the effortless charm and confidence Marsters exudes is almost certainly down to the fact that he's playing the same character that he played on Buffy the Vampire Slayer for several years. Look, it's Spike dressed as Adam Ant on the roof of a car park in Cardiff! At first, I thought I was watching CCTV footage from a UK convention that had got out of hand, but once I got over the initial disappointment that this wasn't Captain Will (just think of the innuendos they could have mined from that), I felt like I was out for a pint with an old friend. And given that Buffy and Angel have been off our screens for so very long now (I'm practically welling up just thinking about it) it's impossible not to embrace the return of such an iconic and fun character into our living rooms.

And that's the really big difference: Torchwood is suddenly a lot of fun. The team actually look like they'd rather hug each other than shag or shoot each other (the inevitable Tosh/Owen coupling even hints at something romantic rather than pornographic) and you get the sense that the team must have bonded on their trip to Tibet. Ianto looks like he's got a grip on more than just his stopwatch (even if he's still just as useful as Andrew Cartmel on a DVD commentary), and if Gwen can just rein in the misty-eyed doe-eyed nonsense then this could be the start of a beautiful friendship; funnily enough I couldn't remember any sexual tension between Gwen and Jack in the first season, what with her boffing Owen and coming so hard she forgot that she was married to a Paul Cornell look-a-like.

Just cut his f**king arm off!!!

However, while great chunks of this episode are intentionally funny - sometimes riotously so - there's still plenty of unintentional hilarity, just for old time's sake. The one thing we can confirm for sure is that if you get shot in the gut in the Doctor Who universe, all you need to do is find some aspirin and you'll be fine (see Voyage of the Damned for more on this). Just witness poor Owen Harper (an increasingly bizarre amalgam of Terrance and Philip from South Park, Marc Warren and a constipated chimp) who can't quite work out if he's mortally wounded, slightly grazed or just a bit poorly. But full marks to Burn Gorman for trying to remember the extent of his condition as he limped inexplicably from scene to scene, even if the script writer didn't.

Something else Chris Chibnall seems to have overlooked is the unavoidable fact that 99% of all sentient life watching this programme will all be thinking the same thing five minutes from the end: "Just cut his f**king arm off!". If you managed to stop shouting this at your telly you might have caught Tosh mumble something in an ADR booth about how that'll set the bomb off, but that clearly makes no sense at all. How would cutting off an arm stop a bomb stuck to somebody's chest?

Sadly, as soon as the bomb shows up the plot falls apart: why did the woman bother to scatter the bomb across time and space (and Wales) if she wanted to exact revenge on the man who killed her? Why make it so damn hard? And why place so many innocent people at risk? The cow! 

And that ending, when the rift exploded and day turned to night, made me feel far more exhilarated than I had any right to be. I honestly believed that they'd been spat out onto an exotic parallel world, or the far future, and this was going to be two-parter with more Captain Hart shenanigans. Sadly it wasn't to be, and aside from a throwaway gag about the team having to avoid themselves (and all those bodies falling out of the sky), I can't work out for the life of me why they even bothered with a "twist" ending. Perhaps they ran out of daylight after the stunt men had set up the pneumatic catapult?

There's a kid-friendly pre-watershed version still to come. That'll make for a fascinating 15 minutes.

Many of the episode's more, shall we say overt leanings towards the realm of slash-fiction (almost as old-school as Blur) were a little too embarrassing for my sensibilities, but I can't watch Hollyoaks in polite company. Did we really need thinly veiled references to Jack's back-passage? What's next? Some playful banter about Gwen's front bottom? And what's the deal with John fancying a piece of that poodle? Is this the start of the programme's hitherto hidden bestiality agenda? It's hard to believe there's a kid-friendly pre-watershed version of this still to come. That'll make for a fascinating 15 minutes.

The really interesting things in this episode are all left unsaid. We're reminded that Jack used to be a con-man and there's a definite riff on Angel as John solemnly informs Gwen that we don't really know the good Captain at all. Could this tie-into Jack's mysterious "gap year" that hasn't been alluded to since The Doctor Dances? And then there's that enigmatic flashback to some hands being wrenched apart (but given what we've seen so far they were probably just separated on the dance floor of a gay nightclub). What could it all mean? Is this really an attempt at a ...gasp!... story arc?

I really enjoyed Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. I can see serious potential in this show for the very first time and the 'Coming Soon' trailer really grabbed me by the balls: giant wasp death, Richard Briers, an incredibly impressive Children of Men-style explosion on a high street and - best of all - even more Marsters. All we need now is for PC Andy to be given his own show and we'll be sorted; mark my words, he could be the new Juliet Bravo.