Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the garden
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder and spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

Torchwood: Fragments

Yes.  I've reached the end of my tether.  It's taken all my willpower to stop myself copying out the whole of The Waste Land instead of summoning up the effort to write a review.  I am tired - it's been a long series.  We who were living normal lives a few months ago are certainly now dying after writing so many words on Torchwood.  And in the case of Fragments, there was definitely a lot of agony in stony places.  It was a wildly implausible episode but some of the daftness could have been avoided quite easily.  There was no real reason why each of the protagonists had to be standing directly over a bomb, and the fact that they all survived without a scratch just made it seem a bit stupid.  There were other oddities, but perhaps I'm going soft because in the end I just really enjoyed this episode.  Lawrence Miles has taken exception to the nod towards Abu Ghraib/Guatanamo Bay when Tosh is imprisoned by UNIT, mainly on the grounds that a stupid programme like Torchwood shouldn't go anywhere near that kind of stuff because it patently isn't up to it.  I'd provide a link but Lawrence seems to think that blog entries are perishable goods, so he's already taken down his latest entry and put it in the fridge.  I can't fault his reasoning (about Abu Ghraib not the blog entries), but just as through the rest of the episode, I was too busy laughing at the madness to get worked up about it.

Anyway, I'm running out of time.  Exit Wounds is on at 9pm, and I have a bottle of wine to drink and my Crossroads DVD to watch before then.  So forgive the suitably fragmentary and incoherent nature of my review.

Jack's Story

Back when To the Last Man was on I was rueing the fact we didn't get to see Torchwood: The Bloomsbury Set, so I was ecstatic to see that even in Victorian times Torchwood was pioneering lesbian relationships that were later to be perfected by Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis.  It took a couple of strong women to break through the barrier and just mention The Doctor outright without all of the torturous circumlocutory nonsense typified by Jack and Martha's conversation in Reset.  The fact that one of them was adept at killing a man with her strong thighs was just the icing on the cake.  I also liked the detail that Jack only joined Torchwood as a way of passing the time while waiting for The Doctor.  Which is after all the same reason why most of us watch Torchwood.  For once I felt a certain empathy with Jack.  Unlike the succession of managers at Torchwood during Jack's 100 year wait.  All that time and he still hadn't made boss, and only got the job after his nutty boss went apeshit because he couldn't get a mobile network on millennium eve.  And as we've seen for the last two series, that Peter Principle always gets you in the end.

Tosh's Story

Her attempt to get the Babylon 5 plans reminded me of the jewel theft in Return of the Pink Panther.  And once again top marks for stationery - I loved the string-pull envelopes.  Even more than that it was lovely to see Professor Kyle again, as I still treasure her feeble death-scream from Earthshock.  But this whole section was about UNIT getting all Abu Ghraib on our ass.  Perhaps it is dropping the United Nations part of its name so it can stike out boldly and abuse all human rights in a much more systematic way.  Certainly Tosh's plight in the context of the Abu Ghraib photographs brought some horrifying images to my mind.  A wizened Warrant Officer Benton swigging on a mug of hot sweet tea before pissing it all over a supine Tosh while a decrepit Captain Yates takes snaps and uploads them to UNIT's website.  "Just type buffalo to see our latest jpgs."  But then Jack turned up and ruined the moment by squeeing "Baby you're goooood!" to an understandably confused Tosh.

Ianto's Story

God he's persistent.

Owen's Story

Easily the weirdest one.  Alzheimer's that isn't really.  Brain tumour that isn't really.  It's Crossroads!

Clearly Owen finds it hard to extract the positive from a situation.  When he discovered he was dead he just sat around wistfully, rather than hunkering down to watch DVD boxsets of The Wire all day, and similarly here, he gets sad about the forgetful girlfriend rather than exploiting her disability to the full:  "I did make you some tea!  You've already drunk it!"  But just when Torchwood is getting sensitive, Jack bursts in with his characteristic "I'm sorry. I tried to stop them but everyone is dead".  Why couldn't he have stopped things earlier?  He implies he's known this a while - why not cut the grid to the hospital and send in the SWAT teams if you know people are going to die?  All that aside this section was a magnificent twist on the standard boring episode of a medical drama.  The weirdness and graphic nature of the alien in the brain was a great end to this mini-episode of Casualty.  All it needed was a molested child and it would have been textbook.

In short - the most fun episode of the series.  Now I have 20 minutes before Exit Wounds starts - I'll see you all on the other side.

Vote Result: Fragments

Here are the results for the twelfth Torchwood blog poll, for Fragments:

• 90%: Superb - Flashback
• 10%: Not Good - Flashdance

The thirteenth and final Torchwood poll, for Exit Wounds, will be online later tonight following the broadcast of the episode.

This is the place where peace exists, this is the place where my mind resists

Torchwood:  Fragments

Int.  Bedroom.  Night.

STUART, a rather handsome thirtysomething with cropped hair in a white t-shirt is sitting at a disconcertingly large dining table glowering at his computer monitor.  He moves his mouse cursor across the screen, double clicks a small lime-coloured icon and opens his email software.  After the new emails have arduously downloaded, STUART clicks and opens the top one.

                                    EMAIL:
        Stuart Ian Burns,

        I'd like to invite you to be a guest author on my TypePad weblog,
        Waiting for Christopher. Just follow the instructions in this email
        message, and you'll be able to quickly sign up for the service and post
        within minutes.

STUART grins then clicks on the accompanying link.

And that’s how I ended up writing here, an invite from Neil, which is rather less exciting than having your fiancé’s brain turned into an incubation chamber for an alien but like working for Torchwood it’s been a fine line between pleasure and pain ever since.  I’ve said this before but it's worth repeating, sometimes I’ll sit here at the keyboard after an episode of the many series we’ve covered and not had the first idea what to say.  Sometimes that results in experiments like this, but more often than not I’ll literally bang my head against the keyboard (which is why it’s a good thing that they’re cheaper than they used to be – keyboards, not heads).  Like Douglas Adams, I find it very difficult to write anything, specifically anything sensible and yet here I am day in and out, week in and out cheating myself into the conviction that one day I could be a writer.

But then I look at an episode like Fragments and suddenly my fingers are fluid and those words just keep coming.  That was, screaming out the window, dashing round the park if it wasn’t quite so cold, scrotum tensingly brilliant.  It was the kind of episode which almost makes sitting through the rubbish end of the first series worth it, which proved that actually the production team do have the ability to turn out work which you do want to watch over and over (unlike, as I indicated last week, most episodes).  I can’t imagine ever wanting to see Adrift again.  But I’m already trying to work out when I can sneak another look, a copy of Ahistory in hand with a pencil to fill in some of Lance's more arduous blanks.

That was, screaming out the window, dashing round the park if it wasn’t quite so cold, scrotum tensingly brilliant.

Everyone put in a good performance, Chris Chibnall’s writing was measured and clever and the direction was top notch with Jonathan Fox Bassett (a man whose name is just a consonant and a vowel away from infringing the BBC’s guidelines on product placement) suggesting that his earlier work on From Out Of The Rain was an aberration brought on by an incomprehensible script.  Believe me that it’s a complement when I say that this was the kind of work Whedon’s Mutant Enemy would be proud of, and yet still with a very British, very Cardiffy flavour. 

I’ve gushed already about episodes this series, mostly out of surprise, but as things have progressed there’s no denying there’s been a drop off and a bit of uncertainty.   In point of fact, in hindsight the first episode since the first episode which seemed as though it was made with the same joy as the parent series or The Sarah Jane Adventures, in which everyone seemed to know what they were doing.  For once.  When the only criticism I can really think of is that the ending wasn’t too much of a surprise because this week’s Radio Times rather gave the game away, I don’t know how much more praise I can heap on it.

One of the problems I’ve had with this series is its boring attempts to divorce itself from the parent show.  In Fragments that all went out of the window and it’s not really a surprise that continuity king Gary Russell was the script editor, as each flashback was clad  with a thick layer of squee.  A certain timelord was name checked properly for the first time – not just a doctor, but The Doctor, a man very much on the minds of the We newly created Victorian Torchwood.   We were introduced to the new baddaass edition of UNIT who probably use the pulling of naval hair as part of their arsenal let alone solitary confinement and this 'appearance' no doubt foreshadowed their appearance in The Sontaran Stratagem.  Martha works for these guys?  And look Ianto's talking Torchwood One!  No explanation as to how Ianto managed to get Lisa into the basement!  But confirmation that Jack had cut Torchwood 3 off from the lot of them!

In Fragments that all went out of the window and it’s not really a surprise that continuity king Gary Russell was the script editor, as each flashback was clad  with a thick layer of squee.   

All this and the reveal that Natasha Kaplinsky was already working for the BBC at the millennium in the Whoniverse and not only just finding her feet on the Sky News version of breakfast telly – in a section which was entirely consistent with Gary’s own recent novel The Twilight Streets.  About the only thing this scene lacked was a break down of the molecular structure of the planet, an alert that some Autons were attempting to take over a company, a computer on the Thames was trying to change the laws of physics and that Prime Minister Brooks was attempting to declare martial law despite the power cuts hitting most of the country.  What – you thought I was joking about Ahistory?  I’ve got it in my left hand already and I don’t think I should say what I’m doing with the right one.  Typing obviously.

But setting aside its somewhat accurate approach the nu-Whoniverse, the episode did exactly what it set out to do – rationalise exactly how the regulars found themselves working for this organisation (oh and give Eve Myles little to do so she could be off filming Adrift, probably).  So what if each of the sections resembled some other genre pieces – it’s a flashback scene from Angel, it’s the interrogation scene from the Alias pilot, it’s the solitary confinement from V For Vendetta, it’s La Femme Nikita, it’s a gay The X-Files, it's Primeval, it’s House, MD (sort of -- but considering that man’s abilities with deductive reasoning I’m surprised he hasn’t put at least one illness down to alien influences).  It homaged from the best (with one notable exception) and for once it didn’t feel like kleptomania.

Of course the freewheeling Jack wouldn’t volunteer to work for Torchwood, despite the enticement of Cardiff’s equivalent of Dru and Darla (sorry I can’t be more original comparison than that but Damon’s already used my Tipping The Velvet line.  Tipping The Velvet indeed), but with the thirteen thousand odd deaths which ensued, the constant loss of work colleagues probably hardly ever through natural causes, the fact that being stuck in that basement usually sent them insane and an apparent lack of promotional prospects, no wonder he was a crabby bastard by the time we met him in the opening episode of Torchwood.  As I think Mr. T Davies said in Torchwood Declassified afterwards, there are so many holes in Jack’s past which would be worth filling, although I hope this doesn’t herald a propensity for him to look far off and for a Highlander-style flashback to come crashing in (speaking of which – can Jack be beheaded?  Would that sort him out?  Or would he simply grow a new head?  Ewe!).

can Jack be beheaded?  Would that sort him out?  Or would he simply grow a new head?  Ewe!

Solitary confinement explains why Tosh always seemed so nervous and eager to please and decided that a character like broken Owen should be the object of her affections.  We were promised an explanation as to why she would turn up pretending to be a doctor in Aliens of London, but perhaps that’ll happen next week.  Similarly, no wonder Owen’s attitude to women could best be described as disposable when his fiancé died in such a horrific manner – why commit to a proper relationship if there’s always the possibility that the quasi-Dalek that’s latched onto her cranium could kill all the surgeons.  About the only inconsistent character was Ianto who seemed far more in-keeping with the new version with added bounce than the rather dower winger we encountered last series.  But then as he walked away, those tears signaled that actually he wasn’t quite right in the head, a breath of relief suggesting to him that he might be able to help his cyber-girlfriend.

Next Week:  Jack deals with some unresolved issues and Cardiff Council have a reason to bid for EC funding so that they can remodel parts of the city centre.  Again.