Torchwood: From Out of the Rain
This has to be a very quick review because the BBC are throwing episodes of Torchwood around like confetti at a wedding this week. My personal theory is that they are putting Adrift on later tonight in an attempt to make us forget that the depressingly awful From Out of the Rain ever happened. Scheduling retcon, if you like. In fact, there's a rumour going around that Chris Chibnall's final episode is so disappointing it aired on Sky HD last Sunday at 4am.
As luck would have it, this was the episode that I was looking forward to the most. And I had to fight tooth and nail to watch it. Every Wednesday night in the Tachyon TV volcano the wife and I always end up having a heated row about what we are going to watch come 9 o'clock:
"Oh please, love! I want to watch the programme with the tall, scary man who wants to take over the world!"
"Sod Gavin McCloud!" I cry. "Torchwood's on!"
Oh, if only I had a drum kit...
But, I pleaded, this week's episode would be worth watching. Some of the characters might even remember what happened to them at the end! I pointed out that the trailer looked fantastic and that it was written by a bona fide living legend. Sadly, she'd never heard of PJ Hammond and by the time I'd started gushing over the seminal Sapphire and Steel her eyes had already glazed over. She didn't even want to hear about Midsomer Murders! Luckily, she could tell that I would flounce into a strop if I didn't get my weekly fix of Owen Harper and his rapidly deteriorating fingers, so I won this particular battle.
It will take me weeks to make it up to her.
This was the worst episode of Torchwood that I've ever seen. And I've seen them all. At least Cyberwoman was funny and, more importantly, it didn't piss somebody's reputation up the wall for 50 tedious minutes.
I didn't realise you could take a bunch of psychotic, supernatural clowns and make them non-threatening. I used to wet my pants at the briefest glimpse of Ronald McDonald but this lot exuded about as much menace as Rod, Jane and Freddy. Not so much IT as SHIT. The Snidley Whiplash 'Ghostmaker" and his "erotically dangerous" Mermaid lady (think Mrs Saxon in swimming trunks) looked striking in publicity stills but their villainy was pure pantomime. Julian Bleach gave one of the archest performances I've seen this side of season 24 and I wanted to reach into the screen so I could twirl his mustache for him. His Paul Darrow impression was spot-on, though.
The climatic moment when the "whatever-the-fucks" finally emerged from the cinema screen should have been an iconic tour de force of surreal horror. Instead of an ethereal version of Stars in Their Eyes. "Tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be corporeal!" And when the so-called evil bastards finally emerged into the world after decades of having to share shelf space with John Barrowman (what are the chances?), they celebrated with a lovely group hug and some firm but friendly handshakes. Fair enough but it's not exactly scary, is it? Meanwhile, Ianto and Jack are left peering out from behind the stalls like a couple of teenagers who have sneaked into a porno.
And I'm truly sorry PJ, but no amount of bigging up this so-called threat is going to help.
"They have all of Cardiff to choose from", warns Gwen during one particularly dreary info-dump.
"....and the world." interjects Jack - WITH A STRAIGHT FACE!
Oh fuck off. They were rubbish. That slab of blubber in Meat had more chance of taking over the world than these, er, clowns. But at least the episode managed to evoke some of the magic and charm of early cinema. Admit it, who wasn't thinking about Harold Lloyd during the thrilling chase scene?
HAPPY MUSIC SWELLS MAJESTICALLY. IT IS RUDELY INTERRUPTED BY THE SOUND OF A NEEDLE SCRATCHING VINYL.
JACK: Oh by the way kid, the rest of your family were slaughtered by some magical circus freaks. Sorry about that, kiddo. We fucked up again.
NURSE: Now, where have I heard those words before?
AND CUT
Proceedings, if you can even call them that, are capped off with an unexpected cameo by Steve Roberts from the Restoration Team. There he is, minding his own business at a car boot sale, when he stumbles upon episode 3 of The Web of Fear. "That's handy," he thinks. "The Yeti are due to appear in one of next year's specials and we could do a tie-in release. If only we did that kind of thing. Which we don't". However, instead of unleashing more VID-Fired goodness on the populace he inadvertently sets free the evil whatchamacallits from ghostly ga-ga magic-land. The bastard!
Of course the coda was nothing at all like Blink. Not a bit of it. I mean, statues are pretty terrifying at the best of times and kids encounter them all the time. But film canisters? What are the chances of a kid coming across one of those, unless they're being dragged around a car boot sale by Steve Roberts? The youth of today can barely recognise VHS tapes let alone dusty old reels of film. And what would they play it on? Their PS3 isn't that backwards compatible. What's next? Fear white dog shit?
Is nothing sacred anymore?
In the shadow of Damon's review.
Torchwood: From Out of the Rain
You're
at the travelling circus. You've seen the pinheads, torso man and the
chicken lady. What next? "The Man Who Couldn't Die". Imagine the
disappointment when a man with no freak deformities other than a
massive desire to be on television stands in front of you, tops himself
amusingly (i.e. he smiles when he's doing it), and then you wait ten
minutes before he comes round looking troubled. Great. Give me
a decent bearded lady anyday. Or a zombie doctor who keeps forgetting
he can't breathe or feel. That'd be good. Mind you any of those acts
would be better than watching From Out of the Rain. PJ Hammond's Sapphire and Steel
still holds up very well as far as I'm concerned, and this was such a
pale shadow of his earlier work that it was almost painful. The only
charitable explanation I can think of is that working on Midsomer Murders must be severely damaging to the brain and body.
I don't want to dwell on Sapphire and Steel, but it brilliantly fucked up a whole generation of children. In the same way that in Blink
Steven Moffat splendidly and gratuitously did his best to give kids an
irrational fear of statues, so Hammond caused the little ones to
shudder in terror at the prospect of being photographed, quail at the
thought of spending time on a railway station, and above all never to
trust walls made of living meat. The outstanding thing about Hammond's
writing was that you were thrown in at the deep end and never given
much of an explanation as to what the hell was going on. The central
characters were unexplained. Their motives were unclear, and while
they could be quite nice sometimes, they were equally likely to
sacrifice you horribly in order to keep things 'balanced'. When they
did explain what they were doing, you almost wished that they hadn't.
For instance in the assignment featuring the entity that was in every
photograph that had ever been taken (an obvious precursor to From Out of the Rain)
Steel explained that the creature was now trapped in a kaleidoscope
that they would shortly put into a ship that was due to be sunk under an
iceberg. End of episode, and cue the young me to start whimpering and
ask for a cold flannel to be applied to my feverish brow.
no-one can do anything but spout expository dialogue
But back at the circus and it seems that no-one can do anything but spout expository dialogue. And not just that, but redundant expository dialogue. After watching the bloke getting spooked by the film, then taking it to the cinema and getting freaked by the runaway projector, I didn't then need a scene where he recounts the exact same action, at length, to Jack and Ianto. It could have been a couple of lines. And Jack's repetitive lines about the Night Travellers' habit of popping up at the circus made them seem more like annoying neighbours than fearsome projections of evil. The flipside of the recent good, scary stuff from Moffat is that everyone thinks they can write something as disturbing as "Are you my mummy" or have a threat as weird as the Weeping Angels. The frustrating thing about From Out of the Rain is that Hammond's early work was of massive importance in creating a genre of television that treated children with enough respect to feel free and give them The Fear. In a deeply psychological and traumatic way. So it's a shame to see him reshaping his old ideas through the prism of his successors' work. The characters manifesting themselves from within the film looked like an old-hat rip-off of Ringu, a film that reeks of PJ Hammond even if Hideo Nakata has never heard of him. The whole sorry mess is akin to Bram Stoker writing an episode of Moonlight.
But
there was still enough to raise a wry smile. Jack had so much
expository dialogue that Ianto had to perform a very wide range of
'listening acting'. Pursing his lips here, a slight chin stroke there,
he ran the gamut of all the reaction shots that the Central can teach
you. Jack seemed to be telling him that music hall was taking its
ironic revenge through cinema, the medium responsible for destroying it. I must admit that when I watched a documentary yesterday called Auntie's War on Smut
I was vaguely disconcerted by scratchy old footage of Max Miller who certainly looked like a
man who wanted revenge. He was apparently banned from the BBC for
telling a joke about a man on a narrow mountain path who encountered a
beautiful young woman
coming towards him. “I didn’t know whether to block her passage or toss
myself off.”
I digress. Much like this review, the episode was a dislocated load of mumbo-jumbo. Trying to gum it all together with interminable scenes of old ladies trying to explain the back-story didn't work. I'd like to blame the production team, but I suspect it was just a bad script that somehow made it past the usually impeccable and rigourous quality control unit. In fact they probably only use PJ Hammond as a sop to old tossers like me in the hope that at least one episode will get a free pass from the ming-mongs. But no-one in this day and age is scared by a piano playing itself. Even ming-mongs. "They all died so suddenly" intoned a random nurse. Some of us weren't so lucky.
Torchwood: From Out of the Rain
Often one of Torchwood’s problems is its inability to expand upon an interesting idea that’s tucked away amongst the generic nonsense that fill out the rest of an episode. The main plot here seemed like an attempt to bring the kind of characters from films like the German Expressionist silent The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to life and use them as a cause for murder and mayhem. The problem is that it all seemed rather inauthentic, as though PJ Hammond was imagining what those films are like without having actually seen them and using his own Chinese whispers version instead.
But lost in the midst of that was the idea that, undercover or not, Jack worked in a travelling circus as ‘The Man Who Couldn’t Die…’ shooting himself in the head on a nightly basis for the enjoyment of paying customers. That to me is far more shocking and horrific than the two constructs whipping around Cardiff city centre stealing people’s breath whilst philosophizing esoterically like a steampunk Roy and Priss from Blade Runner. A clever scriptwriter could use it to parallel some modern practice or an alien perhaps who’s being forced to do much the same thing.
The problem with From Out Of The Rain was that it lacked that kind of invention and went the easy route. Hammond himself admitted during Declassified that one of his mainstays is people going in and out of photographs so he thought he’d try it with film and whilst there’s nothing wrong with returning to the well, on this occasion it just seemed old. Buster Keaton was using the gag in the early part of the last century for goodness sake. Of all people I should be excited by the idea of old film holding secrets, but at the climax when Jack wondered in the Blink-a-like finale (serious, Moffat should sue) what else might be hiding in old film cans in people’s basements and attics, all that gave me shivers was the prospect that The Space Pirates might be found.
The episode felt like a hold over from the first series. Jack’s mean and moody? Tosh is hardly in it? Gwen’s acting like a giggling dimwit? Ianto’s crying? About the only character that’s clearly still dead is Owen, even though when the Ghostmaker tried to steal his breath and exclaimed with surprise that he couldn’t breath in the next shot we heard him breathing. Like many of those first series stories, this was essentially a thin chase plot, dipped in some style and served in false emotion. Only one life saved? No! Oh good it’s a small child! Look at the little poppet … flaaagahaagha ...
There’s no denying that Julian Bleach did his best to turn the Ghostmaker into a creepy figure, even to the point of renting out Paul Darrow’s voice for the duration. Some of the production design, particularly in the circus was really well conceived and atmospherically photographed. And the short scene with the old witness in the home particularly touching. Unfortunately, some by-the-numbers direction, annoying acting choices and incessant music undermined all of that and in the end, From Out Of The Rain, was something this kind of television should never be. Boring.
Next week: Good Torchwood returns. Hopefully.
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