Function at the Junction.
Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Five.
Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Five.
Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Four.
"Six thousand, seven hundred units. Deal or no deal?"
I didn’t cry. Not this time. This time I was shouting at the injustice of it all, as in “How dare they…” (‘they’ being the writers and production team rather than the 456) “How dare they kill Ianto?” I swore, a lot, only pausing to hear his final lines of dialogue ‘enjoying’ the extra resonance provided by Jones’s speech from his final radio appearance, The Dead Line, about Jack remembering him, and the repeated sentiment here. I was waiting for the last minute reprieve, the only testing speech from the 456. Then I remembered that this wasn’t Doctor Who and realised that he was gone. Then we unexpectedly saw the body (as if to give the viewer visual evidence).
Then Gwen straightened his tie. Then I cried. If one were to look for a reason why Torchwood has gone from being a show that you love to hate to must see television (at least this week) it's that it now has the time to include the small moments, imperceptible perhaps, that collectively add to a whole picture. Like the discussion, so beautifully acted, about putting a positive spin on the selling out of the children, which in a few short sentences crystalised the inhumanity of what was being proposed which also happened to be acted by Nick Briggs otherwise voice of the Daleks. Johnson numbed by what she’s just heard realising that she’s out of her depth then taking orders from her former enemy.
There were dozens of similar tiny moments, something in a performance, the music, the direction easily missed by the viewer but collectively adding the kind of texture not often seen in action adventure series. Imagine if in the 1980s JNT had decided to finally spin-off UNIT and after a couple of series of the Brig and pals getting into scrapes he then turned around and delivered something that had all the weight and waft of Edge of Darkness and brought Nigel Kneale in to write it giving him the freedom to inject his concerns. It feels like that. A few people on Twitter have wondered if its possible for a show to jump the shark in reverse – and on the basis of Torchwood it really is.
The closest example I can think of for a show going from being one you love to hate to something you genuinely love is Star Trek: The Next Generation which was reviled for its first few seasons after producing some of the very worst episodes of television in that franchise (Home Soil! Up The Long Ladder! the clip show!) before pitching up at the beginning of the third season with Evolution, a complex, literate story about life's various stages that somehow even managed to turn Wesley Crusher into a likeable unit (though obviously that word has a very different resonance these days).
Regular readers will know that in the past I’ve tended to take great pleasure in yanking the wings off Torchwood even as I defend some of Doctor Who’s wildest excesses and up to about forty minutes into the episode I was sharpening my typing fingers. Because there is no more hackneyed idea than the hero tape recording/videoing the most salacious behaviour of an otherwise publicly respected figure and threatening to make it public. For all of its sophistication it was even the pay off at the close of the environmental legal drama Michael Clayton.
Then as has been so often the case in this series, smug bastards like me (slapping my own back for using the phrase ‘protection racket’ last night) received a well-deserved punch in the nose as Torchwood grand plan didn’t work and in fact, made things worse. There’s an interesting article somewhere about how The Caves of Androzani ruined Doctor Who because it showed that the timelord can lose. I wonder what they made of the hash job Captain Jack made of this situation on the back of the revelation about his nefarious past – for that matter was the not-we audience prepared to meet the dark Jack?
A similar rug pulling exercise happened during the inevitable conversation about how best to select the children. Last night I predicted a lottery and sure enough that’s how it seemed Cobra were headed and then Jackie Smith, Harriet Harmon or whatever the character’s name was proposed a cull of the working classes with the ultimate kiss off line “Well, the league tables have to be useful for something”. At that moment, the show took on a political dimension as it implied how the ruling classes still view the proletariat – an expendable drain on national resources.
Those scenes about the cabinet table, in which even the language used to describe the children was neutralised were all to reminiscent of the Wannsee Conference were Nazi middle men Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich hashed out the Final Solution phase of the Holocaust in which human beings were reduced to numbers to be negotiated on something akin to a commodity market. When that meeting was clinically dramatised in the tv movie Conspiracy with Stanley Tucci and Ken Branagh, the topic of conversation only present in the form of servants (I think). Here, writer John Fay immediately cut to those in question, the children in Ianto’s family’s house, explaining in fact why we’ve kept returning to them the comic relief turning to tragedy.
It’s a measure of how complex this series is that I haven’t yet mentioned such things as the other view of the Torchwood of the past, so cold and professional and morally ambiguous, Eve Myles’s ability to seamlessly slip between slapstick and horror, the death of the remnant so bloody confused and alone and bloody, drawing our attention away from the events in Thames House at a vital moment only doubling our attention instead, the reveal of the Lovecraftian alien perhaps the darkest creature yet seen in the tv version of the franchise (though that probably won't stop Character Editions from releasing ten different versions of it) and Lois (so Cush) finally getting her big moment which if it had been Martha might have seemed a tad derivative of the close of The Last of the Timelords but instead through the curious casting issues gained the resonance of speaking up for the common person and put our heroes in the room.
And talking of rooms, lets finally look at that elephant shall we? Was the death of Ianto and viral infestation of Thames House gratuitous? To cover the second issue first, as way of creating instant panic and to show the 456 mean business it’s as good an idea as any and has the irony of the microbe taking down the human race in a reverse of The War of the Worlds; as the swine flu and sars epidemics have demonstrate, us bags of mostly water (Home Soil!) (stop that) have an innate fear of a danger that we can’t see. As for Ianto …
On the one hand, the death of a lead character shouldn’t be that shocking and so soon (in temporal terms) after the snuffing of Owen and Tosh and Suzie before that at the shocking conclusion of Everything Changes. 24 or Spooks has done this often enough that it's begun to lose its dramatic power (unless the method of mortality is particularly horrific). The reason this worked is because it was the last thing we expected because we assumed we’d seen the last of the deaths within the main cast and the pre-publicity had led us to believe that this was the new stripped down version of Torchwood going forward; Gareth’s all over the publicity and gave interviews which generally gave no indication of something amiss
From an in-universe perspective it’s dramatically brilliant. One of the few solid elements running through the first two series was that you might well join Torchwood but you’ll never leave – you’ll die first – it’s the last job you’ll ever have. That was mentioned again during the radio plays and eluded to on earlier days and the Ianto's death simply confirms it. Now the story focuses on Gwen who like Jack during his Fragments flashback has watched almost all of her colleagues die, but unlike her boss she can die too. What are the implications of that? Frankly, about the only thing that could have made this more tragic would have been if the credits had rolled silently over a shot of some coffee beans …
Tomorrow: The claw! The claw! and the death threats start flooding into Cardiff from Jack/Ianto ‘shippers
Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Three.
"Day Three in Thames House. Mr Frobisher is talking to the 456 about nominations."
Riveting. It takes some very good writers (in this case Russell T Davies and James Moran) and excellent performances to make a scenario we genre fans have seen played out dozens of times before, human to alien contact, this suspenseful. This showdown had all of the ingredients. Our heroes out of the room having to witness the action via relay leaving the inexperienced middle manager to do the talking, an inability to see the alien properly, our only clues to its true nature that its behaviour and vocabulary closely mirrored that of a delinquent teenager lashed to the gills on white cider ringed by a halo of marijuana smoke and the slow burn of incomprehension as our very British bureaucracy clashed with a culture that didn’t give a stuff about such things.
Turns out the 456 are running an intergalactic “protection” racket. Give us x number of children each time we visit or we’ll burn the rest of the planet, our massive rocket shaped baseball bat ready to smash up the windows of the world if you don’t have enough takings to cover the debt each time (or whatever it was that happened in that 80s episode of Eastenders with Ali’s Café). The Doctor would taken one look at that scenario and laughed, got his game face on, done something wizzy with his sonic screwdriver, perhaps pressed a big red button, jumped in the TARDIS and visited the mothership and had a speedy shout through there as well before returning to Earth to give everyone a hug before buggering off again.
Because at its heart, as I’ve suspected but tonight’s episode confirmed, Children of Earth is really about what happens during an alien invasion when the Doctor isn’t there (just as I suppose both of these spin-offs are). It can’t help it. It’s Turn Left but with events yet to be seen, known unknowns. That could be inadvertent, though Jack’s brief mention of the timelord must surely be part of a subliminal strategy to keep him in our thoughts. The general expression seems to be – even with Torchwood (and perhaps because of) we’d be pants, jurisdictional infighting or geographical cock measuring getting in the way of dealing with something more important. In the next episode the world’s clearly going to appease the alien’s demands and hold a lottery closely followed by some all purpose civil unrest.
We could have a discussion here about how Martha hasn’t phoned her Gallifrayan friend at the first sign of global trouble just as she did in The Sontaran Stratagem (I means she’s only on her honeymoon and not callous) but like the Sarah Jane question that’s just something we’ll have to suspend our disbelief over – this is one big universe, everything is connected, but for narrative purposes we’re just going to have to assume they’re otherwise indisposed. My assumption is that because of what happened in 1965 the last thing they want is the Doctor showing up to give them a right telling off and that if Captain Jack himself was considering it he’s too embarrassed. Or something.
In Jack himself we see the timelord’s influence. The man who sent those kids to their probable doom is the broken version we greeted in the first season, soiled by the influence of the darker version of Torchwood. We know this because he did much the same thing at the end of PJ Hammonds’s Small Worlds (which much surely warrant a mention in the next episode). The Jack we greet these days is the one who spent a year being tortured on the Valiant for a year, the presumably more heroic version, the one who wouldn’t nab Frobisher’s kids, who jokes around and isn’t really comfortable unless he’s wearing army surplice. Perhaps tomorrow such issues will finally be nailed to the ground.
Elsewhere in those jokier ends of the episode we watched Torchwood regrouping or rather re-enacting an episode of Hustle so that they could empty PC World and spend much of the episode in that warehouse. I used to get a bit annoyed when some newsreader would signal impending doom Torchwood Cardiff’s first reaction would to joke about and find the quietest place for a shag but the writing seemed to make clear that it’s a defence mechanism, a way of dealing with the unbelievable. It helps that the cast have developed their comic timing somewhat; the old watch humour always used to seem a bit forced but the baked bean curtailing pre-charver negotiation was nicely played with Kai Owen’s blistering unawareness a joy.
The guest cast also continue to impress. The surprise in this episode was the burst of action from Alice who has clearly been trained by her father to defend herself; did anyone else think when she was asked by Johnson whether she too was invulnerable that Lucy Cohu was going for the ambiguous beat, that it’s something she herself has pondered despite the fact that she’s growing old? Never mind Lois Habiba, Alice is surely the natural new Torchwood member if Cohu’s free and willing, forever digging into her dad about never having been there for him, assuming there is a new series (and given that Day Two was the most watch programme on Tuesday that’s highly likely – people love this show).
So let’s ask the question again. Who are these aliens? Certain editors of this website on their twitter feeds have made genius suggestions, but I won’t steal their thunder. I’m still convinced they have something to with the children taken in the 60s, the current smoky box presence a more sophisticated version of the Balok puppet the Enterprise tackled in Star Trek’s The Corbomite Maneuver, the face behind the face. Or the Borad. Or the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal. A triffid. Gonzo the Great. A disembodied tendril from the version of the Sarlacc Pit that appeared in the special editions of the Star Wars films. At this point, I have no real idea. And isn’t that the greatest?
Tomorrow: Before the show, Gary in Stockport selected Arthur and set of balls number three...
Now that the Doctor Who Forum becomes a members only club after a ‘major event’ like the broadcasting of a new episode, I decided to search Twitter to find out what other people thought of Planet of the Dead. Unsurprisingly, even though a percentage of twittererers are the 'not we' or 'casuals', the comments are much the same a mix of ‘it was the shits’ and ‘it was shit’ along with people wanting to communicate the fact they recorded it/forgot it was on and that Russell T Davies is rubbish/God that David Tennant should/shouldn’t be going and that Michelle Ryan is well fit/too posh (I’m paraphrasing). In fact the only different I can see between Twitter and the discussion board formerly known as Outpost Gallifrey is that people tend to use their own faces as their avatars rather than a shot of Beacon Alpha Four and no one’s asked in which year it was set and the UNIT Dating implications.
My initial tweet was “Doctor Who, short review: ****.” Here is the longer version.
Given his propensity to turn the Christmas episodes into seasonal extravaganzas, you could almost forgive Russell for repeating the formula here, perhaps with Earth invaded by a killer bunny flying a battle egg like some evil mammalian Mork from Orc or inviting controversy by borrowing the plot of Garry Kilworth’s short story Let’s Go To Golgotha! (in which some time tourists insight Pilate to save Barabbas instead of the other guy). You have to imagine that the man who resurrected the Macra must have considered for at least a few seconds the return of Bassetts copyright bater The Kandyman with a mission to rot children’s teeth (if the saccharin conclusions to some recent episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures haven’t done the job already).
Perhaps realising that Easter is difficult holiday to cater for (especially now that Woollies is closed), the egg was chocolate, the Jesus reference was veiled and what we got was something more akin to a standard season opener extended out to an hour with the introduction of a cool new companion (sans family for a change), some foreshadowing and a vertical action sequence. I can see why some might be disappointed by this stand alone antidote to the continuity heavy previous episodes, with only four episodes to play with this year and only three left now until the new Doctor comes calling, but for production reasons it’s difficult to see how a proper story arc could be built with at least seventh months between the first and second. Plus, most of Russell's stories have been powered by a bunch of random elements crashing into each other -- why stop now?
Their strategy seemed to be to create what looked like a screen adaptation of one of the BBC Books with some real money thrown at it to try and create what might be going on in the reader's head. That’s not a criticism, since in recent times some of those have been very good indeed, invisibly extrapolating the television series into prose. Most of their stories, like this special, and in spite of their own medium, do tend to keep their timescale short and their locales spare, often beginning with a chase who’s relevance only becomes apparent later before settling down into introducing some humans in need, some alien bystanders and a massive threat that needs to the avoided by the two hundred and fortieth page.
As we discovered in The Writer’s Tale, most of the Doctor Who scripts are ‘collaborations’, in some cases page one rewrites, so it’s difficult to know, despite them sharing the credit, how much of this was tapped out by Davies or Roberts. Either way, having chosen a relative simple premise of 'bis in peril', the execution was the expected clever mix of screwball comedy and running about usually at the same time. If, as Chris Bidmead suspects in that amazingly mean-spirited interview from this month’s party newsletter all of these scripts are first drafts, they’re still fairly well structured for all that, even if it was a bit exposition heavy in the middle on that ship. But weren’t they always, even in the old days, even in a Bidmead script, which had to work without the pretty pictures. I'd take The Mill over Quantel any day.
Sensing that simply having the story stuck on the planet with the bus would be a repeat of Midnight’s claustrophobia, the writers brilliantly also included what was happening on the other side of that wormhole, offering a kind of faded photocopy of the 70s Pertwees if The Brig was a disloyal loony and the Doctor played by Norman Wisdom with a Welsh accent. The debate’s already raging on Twitter (well I’ve seen one or two tweets, Neil) about just what Lee Evans thought he was doing, but it’s ages since we’ve had a genuinely offbeat, offcentre, slapstick benign character in the series and well, if you’re going to have flying vehicles, wormholes and time travel, you have to have a Doc Brown.
Malcolm was an example of the old fashioned straightforward characterisation that ran through the script. The writers just didn't feel the need to flesh out the inhabitants on the bus, again in contrast to Voyage of the Damned where they arguably had too much. Just a bunch of humans in need of saving, the Doctor presumably warming to them because unlike in Midnight his fellow passengers thought him charming, trusted in him and did what they were told -- and that moment in which they talked about what they had to go home to was lovely, like that scene in Father’s Day talking about what the timelord can never had which makes it even more important.
This is a story in which no one is specifically evil (or misguided or whatever Russell’s opinion on the subject is this week) just caught up in one of the spectacular natural processes of the universe with the Doctor as their only way out. I always thought I’d probably like Voyage of the Damned a bit more if the disaster had only been caused by the meteors and not another alien nutter in a mobility chair and on this occasion it led to some good old fashioned five rounds rapid with the beautifully rendered giant space mutant plankton finding the sharp end of a UNIT canon and the back end of a flying London bus. Only in Doctor Who.
That sequence demonstrated that James Strong’s become rather more comfortable with directing big action since his slightly off-kilter Dalek New York stories and he was ahem strong in other areas too. At time of writing I’ve not seen Confidential or heard the podcast, but I’m willing to bet someone mentions Star Wars or Lawrence of Arabia and all of that sand (not to mention the certificate defying skeleton). Time was that desert worlds in Doctor Who amounted to some hopefully forced perspective employing some polystyrene hills and a painted studio wall. Not any more.
No matter what some might have thought beforehand about the wisdom of going somewhere else to shoot sand when there’s enough beaches around the Welsh coast, the Dubai jolly really paid off with some amazing pictures of the leads silhouetted against the landscape, the sheer heat of the planet expressed rather more forcefully than the crew of Star Trek managed in their Final Mission (the one in which Wesley left). The series has always had a certain filmic quality, but in HD now it genuinely does, and offers plenty of material for the Currys showreel.
But of course, all this is merely a rambling preamble to the real reason the episode worked. Michelle Ryan as Christina. For years she’s been near the top of the list of actresses I’d like to see as a companion and Lady De Souza’s exactly the kind of character I’d hope for, similar in temperament to Jeckyll’s assistant Katherine than Zoe Slater. Ryan's performance channelling Margaret Lockwood in The Wicked Lady (ask your granddad), Christina was a human aristocratic enough to look as incongruous on a London Bus as The Doctor, her teaser antics underscoring that she’s a larger than life figure, genuinely different to the shop girls, trainee doctors and temps.
Tricked out in Bionic black, Christina’s really was one of the best companion introductions ever and the script cleverly did everything you’d expect a script introducing a companion to do before that final rejection which showed that the Doctor really does want to travel alone, that he’s had enough of the tragedy of loss, of turning his friends into soldiers, Davros’s words having hit home. Imagine as ever the impact that rejection scene might have had at the beginning of a series with the pre-publicity suggesting that this new companion would be with the Doctor for the whole thirteen.
Which is why there’s no fifth star. Because in a perfect world, we’d have another twelve episodes of Tenth and Lady Christina flying around time, the Doctor trying to tame all of her thievery, passing back and forth their witty banter like the new Tom and Lalla. But I am willing to add a quarter for the random ROBOT and Quatermass references. No chance the third special is about The Doctor teaming up with Bernard at the British Experimental Rocket Group with Jason Flemyng as his nibs? And another quarter for the message of foreboding from the soothsayer of the episode. I almost expected a cutaway to a tall man dressed head to foot in cream material.
@twitter Not classic, not that original, but lovable, funny, grin inducing & just enough 2 tied me over until xmas which seems lk a win 2 me. What more cud U want from a 200th story?
Next: I’ll be reviewing Torchwood for five nights in a row. Oh yes. Just try and stop me. Doctor Christina San Helious.
You've probably seen this already, but just in case:
Looking for older reviews? Behind the Sofa Volume 1 is the place to go for Doctor Who series one, two and three. Along with reviews for Torchwood series one and The Sarah Jane Adventures series one.
And if that weren't enough then indulge yourself in six whole series of classic Doctor Who reviews and a selection of other Doctor Who oddities from the last 4 decades.
Recent Comments