Dugong Show

You are what you eat.
Pat Mills and John Wagner are
Just a mite ticked off.

Torchwood: Meat

So these two tossers are having a 'poor man's Cardiff Krays' contest with their wet mate. This huge great wrinkly turd-shaped thing pops out of the sky and lands on their laps. They have no idea what it is, how it got there or where it came from. Which one of them spontaneously decides "I know, let's eat it!", and takes the first bite to establish it as edible? Caaaaaath, The Goodies ended twenty years ago!

Let's get the blindingly obvious out of the way first. The plot, even by this show's meticulous standards, is insane. It requires a farce-theatre level of comic misunderstanding and relies upon Rhys being a total administrative buffoon before it even works at all, and there's no way I'm going to accept for a second that any Quorn-alike this rancid and unearthly is ever going to get past all the health and safety barriers and into the system, no matter what horror stories have been vomited at us in all the newspapers before.

Caaaaaath, The Goodies ended twenty years ago!

Also, you know those big swoopy hydraulic arcade cabinets that used to house games like Afterburner? That's Colin Teague's direction. Somebody hooked up the camera to an R-360 and let it rip - whoosh it goes towards every immediate sound source, wildly overcompensating and having to lurch back every time. And that's in the inactive conversation scenes. I'm convinced now that the only reason they keep Teague on is as a last line of blackmail defense against effects budget cuts, akin to Patrick McGoohan sulking, "Do The Prisoner my way or I'll make the ending unwatchable." Because you can't whip-pan everywhere around a majestic screen-filling CGI behemoth; not that the daft sod wouldn't try if there was any more room to piss about with. The ketamine stopped working at the end because they already wasted it all on the bloody cameraman.

But you know what? I bloody loved it anyway. There is something very '60s Marvel comic' about Meat; Stan Lee, flying in the face of industry-wide, self-imposed creative apathy, proved that a good story doesn't have to be original or even particularly well-written (though this is doing Treganna a massive disservice), so long as it's 'real' on a fundamental gut-level. Rhys completely and utterly won me over here, as every reaction Kai Owen gives - the realistic underplayed shock at his driver's death, the off-the-cuff lines ("Is he gay by any chance?") to mask his overwhelmed fragile grasp of the situation, the simple childlike joy at being alive, marred by the fear of responsibility that could bring it all crashing down at any time - is utterly convincing and genuine. No Neil, it is. Maybe you have just witnessed a giant, shapeless thing being cut up alive in a warehouse. But if you've just twigged that your fiancee has been telling you fairy stories for the last twelve months, are you honestly going to be damned to let her in on what you know, before you finally needle the truth out of her first?

This complaint about Meat being 'heavy-handed'; well, count your blessings as it could have been a lot worse. Denis Leary said, "Eating meat is an instinct; not eating it is a decision." At no point do the butchers believe their prey to be anything more than a lump of protein, but this is just what human beings do, to distance themselves from the food they eat by not putting a face on it. As far as they're concerned, the only thing they're doing wrong is bypassing all the bureaucratic rules; if anything, the 'message' is then undermined by their need to wave their guns around and show us that they're bad people, and to bring the wet one's change of heart - which is as much squeamishness as conscience - into sharp relief. If the bovver bruvvers had sank to their knees in realisation and wailed "WHAT HAVE WE DONE", that would have been heavy-handed. Or Jack spouting "What have they done to you, my poor friend?"... Oh.

But this is missing the point. Take the CGI out of the equation, and you're left with a number of different script elements that don't really need to jockey for position to grab your attention. To The Last Man was deliberately structured as a journey, but the giant space manatee is an incidental catalyst, and the 'humanitarian' aspect of its plight isn't really much more important here beyond a pang of sympathy and guilt, any more than Out Of Time was bothered with the cosmic anomaly that brought the three travellers to Torchwood's door before it all started going to hell for all concerned. You're not really expected to empathise with this thing, as the script makes it clear through the human protagonists how difficult this is, and Jack is fundamentally larger-than-life different from us anyway. (Jack's quip on eating alien meat would have been worth an extra fifty points alone if it had been a genuine Dish Of The Day reference; alas, we know from Rhys' Foon van Hoff secretary that he really will hit on absolutely anything with a hole and a heartbeat, and the chamber cut into the beast that's great for doing Pinocchio impressions with still probably isn't large enough.)

No, if anyone's going to have a beef (pun not intended) with the episode's politics, it's going to be over Catherine Treganna's apparent thing for euthanasia, though Owen administers the lethal dosage in a more pragmatic fashion this time. Personally, I love the way she makes us squirm with this, as there are no easy answers, no bullshit cop-out solutions, that it's an alien space-cow instead of a human being ultimately makes no principle difference (and if it had, something would have gone badly wrong with the production somewhere), everyone ends up hating themselves for what they have to do, and in that way showing us once again why they're so fundamentally bad at their jobs. The creature is dead, and the 'baddies' have basically got away scot-free in a way that leaves Voyage Of The Damned's 'that would make you a monster' moment looking particularly vapid.

Ianto: he's back, and this time he's got an erection

Mainly though, Meat is about the awkwardness of human relationships, this being the one area in particular where Catherine Treganna is absolutely head and shoulders above the rest of the scriptwriting meat-puppets; the two-way incompatibilities here play out in a resonating way, rather than being stilted and forced as Tommy and Tosh were in To The Last Man. It's about recognising when things have gone too far and knowing when to quit or come clean instead of hanging on grimly like Wile E. Coyote. It's about loyalty ultimately winning out over common sense. But most of all, it's about Rhys' wonder at his exposure to a new world. If Gwen had actually stolen that uplifting humanity at the end with the retcon pill, that would have all but killed the series' potential for character development for me right then and there, as an admission that it either simply can't be bothered, or isn't prepared to take risks; and her impassioned speech about Rhys being a 'better man' for involving himself voluntarily, instead of out of any sense of 'job duty' which deep down Torchwood all know is a crock of shit, is this season's true punch-the-air moment for me thus far.

It hasn't quite come off before now, but this is what season two has been leading up to; a self-assuredness that almost makes you wish that season one could be retconned out of existence altogether, even if it means losing Eugene and Captain Jack Harkness. It's going to take more episodes of this standard before we can finally throw off the instinct to shout 'no' every time Ianto throws a one-liner or does something totally pissed-off cool (he's back, and this time he's got an erection), or Owen is genuinely nice, because it's so out of character with what's gone before. It's a bit like watching a film made by a couple of media student friends as part of their final thesis; they really want an honest critique from you, but you can't quite get over the hurdle of them being your own pathetic mates.

But has anyone advocating the nationwide mass-application of Retcon stopped to consider the minor side-effect of it driving people bananas?