They Keep Killing Suzie

Season one of Torchwood has been playing with a weighty running theme of death and resurrection.  They Keep Killing Suzie tackles this straight on, and comes to an interesting conclusion (and effectively hints at where the season is going).  There’s a gaping hole revealed in the final moments that unravels everything, leading to a laughable conclusion. Until then, this is good enough that I’m tempted to give it a good rating. Alas, the last three minutes go all to the blazes anyway. But still, almost is in the upper echelon of this season.

For one thing, it’s great to have the characters written and performed with some semblance of personality. (twice in a row, no less!) All of them seem a little bit more like actual people, and even somewhat likable. Ianto even comes across fairly well, so long as you forget everything he did in every previous episode.  It's especially important in Gwen's case, of course, since most of the story concerns her taken hostage and forced to chauffeur a resurrected Suzie. With solid characterizations, the clever, twisty story is gripping without needing much in the way of outright violence.

But did Suzie seriously have a backup plan in case of her death? One that relied so totally on things going exactly her way? I mean, the plan itself is clever, but that goes beyond a stretch. That’s just ridiculous.  Still, this would be at least somewhat forgivable, but she goes on and on about how she just had to get away from “the darkness.” It’s basically her primary motivation for coming back. Except she planned it all out before she died.  Philosophically, the concept is interesting - there is life after death, but it's just emptiness only interrupted by some Lovecraftian horror.  But wrapping it in such a contradictory story sucks a lot of the power out of the concept.

And the last few minutes are an awful conclusion. Early, Jack makes it very clear that Gwen has just gotten herself completely fired. After saving her, a slow-motion montage to a lousy (and obvious) song where he smiles at her, back at the job. It’s not quite as bad as Ianto still existing after Cyberwoman, but still, it suggests that nothing would get Jack to fire anyone... and gets at a larger problem with this season: there aren't any consequences.  The rest of the season will push that idea to the limit, and then break that limit.

Speaking of which, we finally learn why Jack keeps Ianto around. It’s not exactly a shock (actually, pretty obvious), but still, now it’s explicitly stated. And makes no sense whatsoever. Before this episode, Ianto has failed to accomplish a single thing for Torchwood besides 1) nearly getting them all killed; 2) getting two innocent civilians brutally murdered; 3) making coffee; and 4) ceaselessly whining about whatever comes to mind. (Admittedly, both the coffee and the whine were pretty good as those things go.) So the idea that Jack has even the slightest interest is… well, it’s sort of believable, given that it is Jack, after all, but it’s not credible that Ianto stays in Torchwood for it. Plus, the dialogue? Is that seriously supposed to be innuendo-laced banter? Did Chibnol write the epilogue? He did, didn’t he? That would explain so much.

Nonetheless, it’s yet another episode that gets within spitting distance of being pretty good. There’s a good show hiding in here, if the lead writer would just get out of the way...

RATING:

* * 1/2

Torchwood: Greeks Bearing Gifts

Ooh, I kind of like this episode. Mind you, it falls to pieces on examination, but like Peter J. Hammond from Small Worlds, Toby Whithouse actually seems to have an idea of what to do with this show. You know, with aliens and humor and character development and stuff. Granted, he’s ultimately defeated by the show itself – most of the characters are pretty unsympathetic, even if he does a much better job writing them than most. This means that it takes a good while to get into the story, but once it does, it’s actually entertaining. Like Hammond, he’s definitely on the right track.

This is finally Tosh’s episode, and at last, we get a bit of character development beyond the “Asian, therefore computer person, therefore nerd” sterotype she’s been stuck in on the rare occasions her existence was acknowledged. Whithouse is a bit constricted by it, but at least he does it well, digging into her loneliness and emotional fragility with real depth and feeling. Even though her character has been a total blank this entire series until now, Naoko Mori has given consistently good performances, however weak her material. With some good writing, she nails it.

For a show about an organization that hunts aliens, it’s strange that up until now, the seventh episode, there’s only really been one actual alien (that sex-crazed gas in Day One). Now, finally, there’s a good alien. Daniela Denby-Ashe is a lovely actress, and the effects crew seem determined to make the alien version of her every bit as beautiful, and they pretty much succeed.

Whithouse does a great job with Jack. He doesn’t give us any real revelations, but he goes over the ground very nicely. Ianto still does little but wallow in despair, but at least it’s kept to a minimum. Whithouse can’t undo the affair between Gwen and Owen, but again, he pulls it off with wit and depth. Owen finally comes across as a competent guy in his own areas, and someone who might actually be useful to Torchwood. Whithouse also tempers his douchebaggery with a sort of rougishness that at least makes it vaguely plausible that Gwen would fall for him.

There is, of course, the expected smut, as Tosh and the alien have their own affair, but even though Whithouse can’t raise the material above smut, he at least makes it entertaining.  That's a lot of the problem with the series under Chibnall: on the one hand, he wants to make an ambitious and compelling story, and on the other hand, he turns to bawdy sexploitation at every turn - and immature, PG-13 sexploitation, at that.  The smuttiness tends to undermine the drama - it takes the tremendously steady hand of a Paul Verhoeven or a Jess Fink to do both simultaneously - and the self-serious, highly emotional tone sucks all the fun out of the tendency for all the characters to have sex with each other or whatever cropped up this episode. (or, at the very least, wear a metal bikini for no reason)

The plot itself isn’t terribly original, but it’s not bad. The whole “reading people’s thoughts can be depressing” theme is pretty ordinary, but it is an improvement on what we’ve been getting so far. The climax is nicely done, too, with a good little bit of Jack darkness.

That said, while some of the dialogue is good, it feels like Chibnall got his hands on the script and upped the soap opera dialogue. There are times when the dialogue is genuinely good, which is why the occasional flashes of the usual sort of dialogue ring even more false than usual. And it is a bit slow to draw you in and get going, though again, Withouse is constrained by what the show itself has been doing so far.

In the end, it isn’t great, but it’s decent and fairly entertaining, if not quite compelling. Like Small Worlds, it shows that there’s a good show hiding in here. And unlike that one, at least this isn’t going to be followed by (shudder) another Chibnoll-written episode.  We're actually getting to very watchable episodes in a row.  Normally, I'd still probably stick this with the dreaded "not actually bad, but not good, either" two-and-a-half stars, but after realizing I'm pretty much the only person who found the weak plotting and characterization of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship to overwhelm the sheer whimsy and joy of the overload of concepts, I'm feeling generous.

Besides, I like Tosh.  We need more Tosh episodes.  Heck, if they somehow managed to make a Torchwood Season 5 starring Tosh, I really could care less about the infinite continuity horror it would create.

RATING:

* * *

• Much as I like Tosh and the episode, it's worth noting that it's Tosh's fault that this gets out of control.  That fact that it's actually handled really well for once makes me want to ignore it, but they really do go to the well of the team screwing up and causing the plot a little too often. I suspect this was entirely unintentional, but by the end of the season it gets hilariously out of hand.
• Number of plots caused by the incompetence of the Torchwood team: 5/7.

Torchwood: Countrycide

I don't like tearing into Chris Chibnall like this.  I mean, I enjoy the part where I sit down and write 1500 words about a spinoff of a cult TV show and then publish it where anyone in the world can read it because I can.  I enjoy analyzing a work of art and why it does or does not work, in my opinion.  And when I'm tearing a movie or TV show a new one, I enjoy coming up with the sarcasm and the fake outrage because I didn't enjoy a TV show.  All that stuff is fun.

But the further I go into this - and it's only going to get worse before it gets better - it feels almost like an attack on an incredibly hard-working writer.  Chibnall has been a fan of Doctor Who since he was a kid, and grew up to get a chance to not only write for that show, but be the lead writer for its spinoff.  And he wasn't lazy about that - he wrote almost a third of the episodes produced while he was there.  Nor are all of them awful.  Two of them are excellent, in fact.  And I can't wait for his Who episode on Saturday.  I mean, it's titled Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.  That's pretty much the best title for any work of fiction since that blind guy improvised a pair of 150,000 word poems about dudes killing each other while their gods screw with them.  So I don't want to come across like I'm attacking Chibnall the guy, or that I hold anything against him personally.  If someone creates a beautiful work of art, it only adds to the beauty of the world.  Chibnall has at least one episode of this very show that qualifies.  And if someone creates art that sucks, it doesn't hurt anything in the world, because one day it's forgotten while the beautiful work shines through.

But bless his heart, he created a lot that sucks.

As always, he starts somewhere interesting.  The idea for Countrycide is to violently yank the Torchwood team out of their comfort zone by having them confront villainy that's neither supernatural nor extraterrestrial.  It's a cool sort of experimental episode to break the mold.  Episode six of the first season is the wrong place for it - the show really hasn't settled down into an actual mold the break.  I mean, despite the opening title being about fighting aliens, so far they've mostly just fumbled around, creating problems by messing with alien tech they should be treating less stupidly.  But still, conceptually, it's a nice idea.

Unfortunately, Chibnall hinges the entire thing on ruining his characters, starting by lobomizing Owen.  Early in the episode, Owen causes the team tremendous grief because he leaves the car keys in the ignition.  Of the high-tech vehicle of a top secret organization.  And Chibnall seems to revel in his stupidity, giving him cartoonish dialogue.

OWEN: What is that smell?
GWEN: That's grass.
OWEN: It's disgusting.

Up until now, Owen was incredibly unsympathetic but seemed mostly competent.  This is now the second time in six episodes the various events of the episode are at least partly his fault.  (and for the record, that's 4/6 where the Torchwood team is partly responsible for the mess they get in)  And he's not the only one.

Ianto is now for some inexplicable reason part of the team out in the field. I mean, it’s not like he was a field guy before, but after Cyberwoman, he shouldn’t even be on this show. But despite the fact that every single thing in Cyberwoman was entirely his fault in every conceivable way, he still tries to guilt-trip the others about it (and succeeds!).

Tosh isn’t much better. Out of nowhere, the episode tries to graft action hero onto her, (which is pretty much the first thing they've tried to graft on her) then throws it right back out the window when, after kicking the villain in the balls, she waits for him to recover rather than, you know, running or capitalizing on it in any way. Then, when she finally does find a moment to run, she trips on a pile of leaves – you read that right – and gets caught again.  Tripping on a pile of leaves is, at this point, far and away her most memorable moment in the series.

But worst of all is Gwen. For most of the episode, she’s sort of okay. It’s not entirely clear why she’s attracted to douchey Owen and his constant sexual harassment that's bordering on assault at this point, but that could be set aside because, hey, sometimes people are just attracted to strange things. But then, there’s the final scene, and in just a single shot, the show kills every likable thing about her. She was one of the only two characters in this whole show I cared for, and now she’s just a whiny little girl who cheats on her perfectly nice, supportive boyfriend just because.

With Owen.

That leaves Jack, and he escapes with his dignity mostly intact. I don’t care for the climax where he rescues the team by kneecapping all the bad guys (with a shotgun, no less) instead of just, you know, killing them. In a gunfight. When they’re shooting at him, too. I mean, this isn’t a guy who has a problem with killing when necessary. It's one thing to put little references to whatever film or show inspired you; it's quite another to just straight rip off one of the most iconic scenes from the most iconic action movie of all time without even making sure it makes sense in context.  And even the Terminator didn't kneecap that room with a frickin' shotgun. (like the occasional shots of the actors having conversations on top of buildings for no reason, it seems to exist to make the characters ultra-cool, and failing because trying to be cool is the one sure-fire way to not be cool)

This is at least partly balanced out by the great revelation about his past when he was well known as someone particularly talented at torture; it adds nicely to his dark, mysterious background.

But all that aside, what is the Torchwood team doing on this mission anyway? The entire purpose of Torchwood’s existence is to fight alien threats. It’s one thing to stretch to the supernatural, but this is just regular serial killer stuff. There’s nothing at the start to indicate this is anything less than human, and it’s then revealed that it is, of course, just humans.

And finally, there's the actual plot.  Basically, the Torchwood team stumbles into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Which, as movies to rip off your plot go, it's an incredibly bad choice.  Not because putting a spin on an old horror movie plot is a bad thing - Brain of Morbius basically approches the plot of Frankenstein with the serio-comic-horror tone of Bride of Frankenstein, and that's one of the greatest Who serials ever.

But Chainsaw is not a great horror movie because of its plot, or its themes, or its characters.  It barely has those.  No, Chainsaw is a great horror movie because after a few subtle but well executed shocks in the first half, the second half is one of the most harrowing, nightmarish cinematic hell rides ever created.  The horrifically discreet violence of the earlier scenes gives way to an endless night of pure terror as the heroine desperately runs, getting steadily more exhausted while a man wearing a human mask chases her through unfamiliar woods and houses with a running chainsaw.  And by filtering the film through a docu-drama aesthetic, Tobe Hooper makes it feel absolutely real.

All of which is to say, Chainsaw is a classic horror movie because of its style, not its substance. (or, more accurately, the style is the substance.  I'm of the opinion that great style can, in itself, be great substance, though, admittedly, that may just be me trying to excuse what a huge De Palma fan I am.)  So ripping it off gives you nothing to work with, leaving the audience with nothing but a reminder of how much better that thing you're referencing was.

It doesn't help, though, when the plotting is so poorly thought through.  Why does Torchwood stop at the side of the road to go camping? Why do the villains just tie up their victims by the hands, leaving them free to easily escape?  And so forth.

What’s really frustrating is that right in the middle is one superb scene where Gwen is blasted with a shotgun and Owen has to field dress her then and there. It would work even better if Owen wasn’t such a prick, but still, it's tense, dramatic, and crisply written.  And given how good the actors are with bad material, it's no surprise they shine with a genuinely good scene. It’s not really clear why Gwen is so energetic and all running around and such after taking a shotgun blast, even to a less-than-vital area, so the effect of the scene doesn’t last. But still, for one brief, shining moment, it’s great.

It's really not like Chris Chibnall is incapable of writing good stuff. His “Pond Life” shorts last week were delightful, and Saturday brings "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship", which the trailers assure me does, in fact, includes dinosaurs on a spaceship.  How could that possibly be anything less than the coolest thing ever?

RATING:

*

• Without Owen leaving the keys in the car because he was too busy sexually assaulting seducing Gwen apparently, the list continues.
• Number of plots largely caused by the incompetence of the Torchwood team: 4/6. 
• Number of Torchwood Incompetence Plots caused by Owen's douchbaggery: 2/4.

Torchwood: Small Worlds

Small Worlds has a beautiful opening: an old woman walks through a dark forest late at night, speaking into a recorder that she doesn't want to wake "them".   Finally, we see what she's referring to: fairies.  They're a wonderful visual effect, accompanied by Elfman-ish strings, enhancing a truly lovely scene.  And then, the music gets scary, and they morph into laughably bad monsters.  Because we're obviously too stupid to figure out that they're creepy when they start killing people later.  Jumping the gun on the music ruins any chance of creepiness and actually kills the magic, too. The lousy CGI demons are only the final nail in the coffin.

I don't know who, exactly, it was that ruined that opening.  It could have been in Peter Hammond's script, but given what a good script it is on the whole, I sort of doubt it.  My suspicions tend toward Chibnall; in fact, I suspect most of the significant flaws were his additions or changes.  But I don't know that.

And that's sort of how Small Worlds goes.  It's a story both wonderful and terrifying that powerfully delivers on Torchwood's promise for the first time.  But there are massive, fundamental flaws in the execution, many and possibly all of which came not from writer PJ Hammond, but from the production team themselves.  Still, given what leaps and bounds this is above everything before this (and after for a good while), I can't be too hard.  After all, on the whole, I really liked this episode both times I watched it, even if a couple of key scenes are inexcusably blown.  For the first time, this actually feels like we’re somewhere in the Doctor Who universe. (and a good TV show)

First off, Gwen is finally used well.  So far, she's been a good character with little to do except be the new girl.  Here's, she's a full-fledged member of the team, and a good one. She’s whip-smart, totally staying with Jack no matter how ambiguous he’s being about things without being unbelievably clever. Jack has a little too much brooding, but for the most part, he’s also nicely shaded and given good material. The other three members barely appear, but since Owen’s the kind of guy who uses date-rape alien pheremones just for the hell of it, Ianto is apparently a lobotomized 12-year-old girl, and Toshiko has the personality of a particularly dull rock thus far, it’s no loss.

The Fairies are a wonderful idea, and the mythology is fantastic – dark, mysterious, and wondrous. In Fairy mode, they also look quite beautiful. Unfortunately, when they turn into demons, they just look like lazily-designed CGI demons. I'm generally pretty forgiving of low-budget effects when there was no other way to effectively tell the story, but there weren't needed at all.  Every scene they’re in would have been vastly more effective if they weren’t shown at all anyway. The scene near the end where they kill the guy by growing flowers in his throat (a brilliant and uniquely creepy idea) would be terrifying if we simply saw the man struggling,

Not that the script is perfect. It’s never really explained why the fairy-demons kill the old lady, given that their other two victims are a) a pedophile, and b) the little girl’s pointlessly evil stepfather.  Their entire M.O. seems to be to kill those threatening the girl, both of whom are irredeemably cruel. Maybe if they hadn’t gone out of their way to make the stepfather a one-dimensional jerk, it might have worked as they killed anything that threatened the girl in their eyes, innocent or not.  But as it is, the killing of the old lady is just gratuitous.  It's one thing to be ambiguous, it's another entirely to be simply contradictory.

Further, her death is caused when, after not only telling Jack that a bad demon is after her, but being told by Jack to be careful, she walks outside in the dark.

Where the demons are.

As rough as some spots may be, however, it's a compelling story that builds up to a genuinely brilliant final scene.  After all the build-up, it turns out the fairies aren't threatening the girl - they want her to become one of them.  And she wants to.  And while Gwen tries desperately to find a way out, Jack simply holds her back, asks for an assurance that they won't actually hurt the girl, and then lets them have her.

And that's where the show hits its full potential.  In one moment, we have Gwen, arguing to do the right thing, and Jack, arguing to do the only thing they can do.  And then Jack wins, and does something horrific because he sees no better way out.  It's a chilling moment of astounding moral complexity that punches you in the gut.  Hard.  It asks a difficult question and then gives an even more difficult answer.

So why doesn't the rest of the season approach this level of quality?

I think, honestly, it's the flaws in this story that show why.  The Demon CGI should never have been attempted in the first place; clearly they should be off-screen.  It's not like Who, where kids are watching and might be disappointed if a monster didn't pop up every once in a while. (I would dispute that, but it's at least a valid argument) This is adult sci-fi; we can figure it out.  But once it was obvious that it wasn't looking good, they should have cut them out anyway.  Somebody somewhere on the production team - director Alice Troughton, producer Richard Stokes, exec producers RTD and Julie Gardner, or producer/lead writer Chris Chibnall - should have realized that.

As for the characters, once the team is reduced to Gwen and Jack, everything clicks much better.  No douchebaggery or incompetence or sexual harassment from Owen, no whining from Ianto, and the two competent, intriguing characters get to do their thing.  And the one-dimensional stepfather?  Honestly, that's something Chibnall or script editor Brian Menchin should have weeded out.  (Honestly, I half-suspect Chibnall made him so awful in the first place.) 

So the problem, actually, is that this show has the wrong production team.  Chibnall has the Terry Nation problem of great ideas but an extremely uneven ability to accomplish those correctly.  For ever clever line he writes, he writes a dozen plodding ones.  RTD seems to indulge in his flaws.  RTD has a great concept here, but the only time they really get a solid hit is when they outsource it to old pro Peter J Hammond.

Oh well.  Again, Chibnall has the ability to write well.  Maybe he'll get the next one right.



RATING:

* * *

SIDENOTES:

• The cinematography is a minor detriment - the colorful opening scenes look nice, but afterwards, it's just a generic grayish that doesn’t really tell anything storywise. This is very much an X-Files sorta story, and could have taken a cue from that show and used deep shadows in the colorful settings.  But no, it takes a too-modern popular tact of looking as bland as possible.  Granted, shooting on video is never going to look as good as the high-quality film used on X-Files, but it could at least try.

Torchwood: Cyberwoman

Excuse me a moment.

Torchwood: Ghost Machine

Okay, so, let's be fair.  Sometimes, episode 2 doesn't quite work out.  The show's still trying things out, fumbling in the dark.  I mean, Doctor Who had The Cave of Skulls trilogy, and even people like me who like it aren't exactly crying out that it's a lost classic.  But eventually, you've gotta settle on something.  For its third story, Doctor Who came up with the Daleks.  And with Torchwood, the signs should be good: it's written by Helen Raynor, who was a script-editor on the very strong first two seasons of New Who and was now script editor on Torchwood, and the director, Colin Teague, went on to do a very nice job directing The Fires of Pompeii and the second and third parts of Last of the Time Lords.  So it should at least be decent.

It's not.  Not only do we have a lead writer who has good ideas and is completely lost at actually getting those ideas working properly, but we have a script editor whose contribution to the season is a muddled, boring set of the usual cliches.

What's striking to me on the second viewing is how all the little details are wrong.  Every now and again, there's a nice touch, like Owen finding the "ghost" in the phone book.  But mostly, it's just really sloppy.  Take the opening, when Gwen takes the mysterious alien object that could be a weapon or a bomb and just immediately pushes one of the buttons at random.  Yes, she's new, but she's not stupid, or at least she's not supposed to be when she's written correctly.

There are other ways to get to this point.  You could be simple, and she touches it accidentally when she picks it up, though that veers a little toward the incompetence scale.  Better, she could bring it in, and they could all examine it in their various ways, allowing for nice character development and interaction in a plot-driven scene.  After looking at it, they could eventually decide that it's definitely not directly dangerous, and then decide to push the button.  Done that way, they come across as professionals.

As it is, they come off as amateurs.  Gwen actually is, but Jack pretty much lets it slide, which would be fine if he didn't let everything slide. (This will only get worse.)

A story can get all the little things wrong and still work if it's slick and compelling in the big picture - Revenge of the Sith is a good example.  For all the flat dialogue and uneven characterizations, it still offers a complex, human, and deeply powerful story with a truly staggering sci-fi/fantasy backdrop.

But Torchwood is a fledgling, low-budget show.  It can't afford to be slick (or it hasn't figured out how yet).  So it has to rely on good stories, good characters, and things that set it apart from every other sci fi show out there.  But this story goes through the most basic motions of a ghost story with a sprinkling of sci-fi without ever coming up with its own twist on things.  The characters are still good actors in search of a script worth half their talents.

And if all it can do is serve up are the same old cliches, it's not terribly compelling.  Up to this point, the show has yet to come up with a single idea that sets it apart from any of a hundred other sci-fi shows, possibly excepting its approach to sexuality.  Which, as we saw last episode, it doesn't really pull off the way it means to.

Ghost Machine isn't bad.  It's basically competent.  There's just nothing interesting here.

The next episode, though, is definitely... interesting.


RATING:

* *


SIDENOTES

• Yeah, the scene where Jack teaches Gwen to shoot, and there's supposedly all that sexual tension and stuff?  Incredibly forced and way too obvious.  Look, conceptually, the concept isn't that bad, but it just plays out terribly.

Torchwood: Day One

Jack: "We all make mistakes.  Get over it."

If the first episode of a show is about introducing what the show is and who the characters are, the second episode is about showing off what this shiny new show can really do.  We know the characters, we get the premise, we slogged through the exposition.  Now we can really get down to business.  So what sort of program do we have?

The Torchwood team investigates a meteorite strike that releases a gaseous creature who feeds on orgasmic energy.  So, naturally, the gas inhabits a young woman and starts sexing men to death.

Which is the sort of thing you'd expect from a Cinemax sci-fi show, but Chris Chibnall approaches it from the right directions: he focuses on the emotions of the possessed girl, Carys.  Her confusion and loneliness after her boyfriend leaves her drives her under the power of the alien being to embrace its power and later to use it against her ex.  It's an intelligent way to make it an actual story.

Except Carys, for all Sara Lloyd-Gregory's impassioned acting, never becomes a character defined beyond "girl who just got dumped."  She gets in a nice line about that - "I wish I was dead.  No, I wish you were dead.  Call me back."  But there's nothing else to her, keeping us from actually feeling the emotional roller-coaster she goes through.

The episode would still basically work, though, as long as the stuff with the Torchwood team itself was solid.  Again, Chibnall's underlying idea is an old but solid-enough concept: Gwen saves Carys by understanding who she is as a person instead of treating her as just another case, like the others do.  But his writing is completely ham-fisted, as though he doesn't trust us to understand what's going on.  He shows how Gwen is still connected to humanity by basically just giving Gwen and Jack a couple of speeches saying exactly that, and then having her tape up a bunch of baby pictures of Carys to remind everyone that she's a person. 

Which might be somewhat forgivable if Chibnall got it all basically right, but other than fitting Gwen into the team because she's the only one still connected to humanity, he pretty much fails to make the team compelling even on a basic level.  Gwen comes off as a pretty ordinary heroine.  Owen continues to be an incompetent ass.  Toshiko and Ianto can't have a dozen lines between them, none of which are remotely interesting.

But it's Jack who suffers most from Chibnoll's pen.  One of the things that made Jack interesting in the first place was his completely uninhibited pansexual promiscuity - he was even a little shocking to Rose, who comes off as pretty sexually liberated herself.  But if every character is a promiscuous pansexual, it kinda takes away the entire point.  And Owen showed himself to be far more so than Jack in the previous episode; while Gwen's makeout session with Carys is apparently motivated by pheromones, she seems pretty comfortable with what almost happened.  When the show finally gets around to remembering that Tosh and Ianto exist, the same goes for them.   Torchwood is so bent on being a sexually liberated show that it fails to show any actual range or depth in its sexuality, making it in a way just as close-minded as the cultural norms it tries so hard to upend.

Even with that in mind, Jack should still be a cool antihero for us to follow.  But his actions here don't speak well for him as the Torchwood leader.  He sends brand-new team member Gwen to interrogate a murderous prisoner completely unsupervised or even observed.  Even after the events of Everything Changes, he can't keep Owen's paws off the alien tech, nor does he do anything about his behavior toward Gwen, which is clearly harassment.  Harassment can be difficult to define sometimes, but Owen's clearly way, way over even a somewhat nebulous line.  And Owen's harassing Gwen directly causes the events of this story.  Jack either doesn't notice or doesn't care.

And then there's the whole business with the hand in the jar, which is not only Anthony Perkins-level creepy if you know where the hand came from, but leads to Jack letting the murderous alien get away because it threatens to harm a dismembered hand.  And his strategy for getting her to back down?  "That's valuable to no one except me!"  That's gotta be the single worst negotiation ever.

All in all, Jack is a portrait of an incompetent leader whose team actually makes things worse, then sloppily cleans up their own messes only after several deaths.  It's a waste of a good character and a charismatic actor.  I love Jack on Doctor Who, but here, the only things he's good at are standing in dramatic poses and dying.

Chibnall's plotting is pretty sloppy, too.  After getting captured, possessed Carys secrets insane pheromones that lure Owen in and then doesn't have sex with him or kill him because... he's one of the main characters, I guess?  I know she's desperate to escape, but she's also starving and insane, and it's literally the only way she'll survive.  (also, where did the handcuffs come from?) It just seems like a cheap contrivance to make jokes about a naked dude.  Which might be forgivable if they were really, really clever jokes, but they're incredibly lazy.  ("Are you all right now, or are you still feeling a bit of a cock?" is really the best they could come up with?)

The details, in general, aren't well thought out.  Carys secrets pheromones that attract woman, but her mating doesn't work with them?  Even though she gets her charge from "orgasmic energy"?

Finally, the tone never really clicks.  Parts of it are trying to be a fun romp (and failing, mostly because of the weak characterizations).  Other parts are going for an X-Files-ish serious sci-fi yarn both creepy and sad (and failing for largely the same reason).  In all, it's a mess.  Without particularly competent characters or interesting dialogue, the lazy, cliched plotting thuds along pretty uninterestingly.  It takes a Skinemax premise, approaches it from fundamentally the right angle to make it a compelling story, and still ends up as a dull, self-serious softcore porn without the actual porn.

It does have very strong acting in its favor, both from the regulars and guest star Gregory, but there are good shows with that.  It's obviously a very low-budget show, but it uses what little money it has wisely, focusing on good actors and making the important effects - in this case, the gaseous form of the alien - really good.  But without good storytelling, those are utterly wasted.  If this is the best the showrunner can do to showcase what will make Torchwood cool and interesting and unique, we're in trouble.

RATING:

* *



SIDENOTES:

• Owen complains “The amateurs got here before us.”  Having seen Owen’s contributions to the rest of the season, that’s absolutely hilarious.

• Owen's harassment causes Gwen to release the alien.  After the plot of Everything Changes also came directly out of the actions of the Torchwood team, we might as well start a counter:
• Number of plots directly caused by Torchwood’s incompetence: 2 out of 2.
• Number of Torchwood Incompetence Plots in which Owen’s douchbaggery is at fault: 1 out of 2.

• How does Gwen get cell reception in the Hub's Silence of the Lambs prison?

• Good Jack line: "You know, strictly speaking, throttling the staff is my job."

Torchwood: Everything Changes

Pilot episodes are hard.  You have a very short amount of time to introduce the characters, build the world and mythology well enough to get the premise across without getting bogged down in details and exposition, and somehow find time to tell a compelling, self-contained story.  There are a handful of shows that actually did open with a brilliant first episode - The X-Files comes to mind, and, oh yeah, Doctor Who - but it's usually a struggle to actually pull all that together.  Even shows that ended up being really good - say, Dollhouse - start on the wrong foot.  Many shows opt to make it a as a 60-minute or 90-minute special, which helps a little, but still usually results in a deeply flawed program.

And honestly, rewatching Everything Changes, I'm going to have to take back what I said in 42 about Torchwood's first season only having one good episode.  While this has its problems, it's a perfectly respectable pilot with some good touches.

The best and most important element is the heroine, Gwen Cooper.  Gwen has everything you need for a Sci-Fi heroine - she's brave, resourceful, clever, human, and played by an actress with tremendous personality.  Eve Myles is just wonderful, and makes Gwen the perfect center for the show.

Jack Harkness doesn't do too much other than be charmingly mysterious, but John Barrowman plays the charm to the hilt.  And while he doesn't do much in this episode, he's an inspired hero for the show - a charismatic action hero with a dark side.  While it's not dwelt on, Everything Changes gives him a level of depth he never had on Doctor Who, dealing with his immortality and the pain it causes.  He doesn't brood too much, just enough to make it compelling.

Given the show's sexual politics, he's obviously exactly the guy you want, and his moral ambiguity allows the show to attack moral questions in ways most shows wouldn't dare.  As for how those elements actually play out, we'll explore that in Day One and Small Worlds, respectively, but it's a good choice.

The rest of the characterizations are uneven at best, but the actors can't be faulted in the slightest.  Often, it takes a show's cast an entire season or more to fully slip into their roles, however well chosen they were.  But Burn Gorman (Owen), Naoko Mori (Tosh), Gareth David-Lloyd (Ianto), Kai Owen (Rhys), and Tom Price (Andy) all play their characters like they've been doing it for years.  And in some cases, they're way, way ahead of the writers.  Heck, the writing for Ianto doesn't catch up to David-Lloyd until Children of Earth.

But actually looking at them as characters, most of them don't work properly.  Owen is a disaster.  His introductory scene involves him using an alien date-rape drug on a couple, so he's obviously a terrible human being.  It's also unclear exactly how he could contribute to the team, since he actually orders pizza to the top-secret organization under the name "Torchwood".  (in the episode itself, this sounds like it could be sort of a joke, but based on his characterization later, it seems to be serious)

Although Gwen delivering the pizza to sneak in is a nice scene.

He comes off as the sort of incompetent, self-involved jackass who is more likely to cause the end of the world than save it.  Still, he only has a couple short scenes here, and Gorman makes every line of dialogue shine.  As long as he either becomes very useful very fast or is a minor character as he is here, he can't cause much damage to the show.

Tosh... likes computers, I guess?  She barely appears at all, and we don't get any reading on her as a character whatsoever.  (This would be less annoying if the show didn't basically ghettoize her as a glorified extra until episode seven.)  Ianto apparently gets the coffee.  The idea seems to be that his true role is really mysterious or something.  The actual effect is to make us wonder why he's here at all.

Rhys, Gwen's good-natured boyfriend, and PC Andy, her colleague, are both extremely likeable characters, and, quite frankly, I kinda wish they had been on the Torchwood team instead of reduced to occasional guest stars.

The last character, Suzie Costello, played by Indira Varma, is successful in a plot sense but doesn't quite come off in an actual character way.  Like Tosh and Ianto, we don't get any real sense of who she is.  I like it when she fumbles around clumsily and politely in her purse for her gun, but her motivation makes no sense whatsoever.  I mean, really?  There aren’t any murders ever unless she commits them?  I mean, Cardiff is a city of around 350,000 people.  Also, they’re only about 130 miles from London.  There's gotta be a murder scene our top-secret organization the cops know all about can get to in time.

The point of her character is great, though - she's not only introduced as one of the team members, gets her name in the credits, and until the end is treated just like one of the regulars.  It's only at the climax that we learn this "regular" is actually the murderer the heroes are looking for.  And then she kills herself.  Suzie’s guilt and death is a clever twist in the Whedon/Nation tradition, and while it has neither the gut-wrenching emotional punch Whedon would have given it (because we don’t care about her in the slightest, though Indira Varma is stunningly beautiful and a superb actress) nor the ruthless creativity Nation would have used (dude had a serious knack for killing characters imaginatively), it’s still fairly effective at communicating that this show is not joking around.

The plot is extremely functional in a good sense - nothing terribly original or striking, but it's a solid enough foundation that works because Gwen works.  And when a really good scene comes along, everything clicks beautifully.  In particular, the Torchwood team makes the apparently strange move of letting Gwen walk right into their base and introduce themselves and everything they do.  Gwen notes that this probably means she's about to die.  Jack instead gives her his whammy and happily tells her that her memories are wiped.  "When you wake up tomorrow, you’ll have forgotten all about Torchwood.  Worse, still, you’ll have forgotten me.  Which is kinda tragic.” But she proves herself nicely - she's so dedicated and clever that she manages to embed her memories deeply enough that they're triggered again.

And that makes it work.  A lot of the little details don't quite come off - the Weevils are about the most generic aliens ever, Torchwood's actual level of top-secretishness is hilariously inconsistent, the characters constantly saying "Torchwood" like it's the awesomest word ever pretty much accomplishes the opposite, and the scenes where Jack and Gwen stand dramatically on random rooftops for no reason whatsoever are just trying way too hard to look cool.  But the core of the story is Gwen, and she makes it a pretty entertaining start to the show.


RATING:

* * *



SIDENOTES

• The title theme isn't exactly a make-or-break thing for a show, but a really memorable title sequence and music just adds so much to a show - think Andy Griffith, or The X-Files, or, you know, Doctor Who.  Torchwood starts with a cool underlying sound, but it never actually puts a theme on top of it.  The opening credits are okay but generic.  It's too bad - the actual music for the episode is pretty effective.

• So, people seriously deluded themselves into believing the events of Christmas Invasion and Doomsday didn’t actually happen, or were some sort of terrorism?  Seriously?  I can understand dismissing Aliens of London, and while it’s a stretch, something like Spearhead From Space at least seems like a coverup, while suspicious, could at least throw people off the Aliens track by having too many confused conspiracy theories out there. 
  
  But a city-sized spacecraft appears over London and hypnotizes a fourth of the population to stand on the edge of a precipice, and then, a few months later,  there’s an invasion by evil robots (who, presumably, converted hundreds, if not thousands) who then battle a group of murderous alien trashcans, and most of the population convinces themselves these things didn’t happen? SERIOUSLY?  Even in The Invasion, which is a ludicrous stretch, at least everyone was technically asleep for the alien invasion. And here’s the thing: there wasn’t actually a coverup.  Harriet Jones came on air and admitted there were aliens.  Presumably other leaders did the same.
  
  To be honest, it’s ridiculous in Doctor Who as well, but since we only pop in here every once in a while, it’s not that big a deal since we’re off to Karn next week.  But when the entire show is based in a modern-day earth that dismisses Independence Day actually happening, it's difficult to believe in the world-building.
• This is supposed to be the "adult" Doctor Who spinoff, but so far, they just use it to toss some swear words in.  That's kinda lowballing the definition of adult.

Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways

[2005, Season 27/Series 1, Episodes 12 & 13]

Russell T. Davies' writing for Doctor Who is highly inconsistent.  When he does small-scale character drama, he does it beautifully.  When he really swings for the fences with wild abandon, he very often pulls it off, and even when he doesn't quite hit, the sheer ambitious audacity is dazzling.  Stuff in between, like plot and resolutions, on the other hand, are uneven at best.

But in Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways, he gets everything right.  The character stuff is superb; the big, sweeping ideas are stunning; the plot is involving and surprising; and the resolution brings everything together brilliantly.  The story begins small and strage, but builds carefully and gradually to a work of tremendou emotion.  The double-act finale of his first season rises among the finest Doctor Who stories, and is a great piece of science fiction and fantasy.

The opening is really bizarre as the Doctor wakes up in some sort of futuristic version of Big Brother.  Apparently he was transmatted there right out of the TARDIS.  This is strangely involving enough, but it's mostly gripping because of Eccleston's reaction -- his face is the perfect expression of "... the hell?"

Not that Rose's is far behind as she finds herself stuck on a version of The Weakest Link run by the Anne-Droid. 

Jack's reaction to inexplicably waking up in some sort of fashion show, on the other hand, is hilarious.

"Ladies, your viewing figures just went up."

This is a tricky idea, setting modern-day Reality Shows in the year 200,100, but for some reason, I'm oddly forgiving of this.  Partly because the explanation sort of makes sense, which I'll get to later.  But more than that, it's really, really well done.  The Doctor's situation works best: he's totally sarcastic about it, barely noticing everyone's horror at his laid-back reaction.  But then, somebody is voted off, goes outside... and is disentigrated.

He immediately gets dead serious.  One of the "roommates", Lynda (with a y), is intrigued by him, and he takes her with him once he escapes.  Lynda is incredibly likable; totally sweet, full of starry-eyed wonder and joy, and when it eventually comes down to it, nervous but brave.  Bravo to both Davies and to Jo Joyner.

The Weakest Link scenes take a lot of intensity from the dark lighting of the actual show.  This is a superbly lit and shot story all around, but this segment is one of the best.  Rose laughs at the weirdness of materializing in the middle of a futuristic version of an old show, but is silenced when the Anne-Droid suddenly turns out to be almost as evil as the real Anne Robinson when she shoots a disentigration beam out of her mouth, atomizing the Weakest Link.

Man, that show would be so much cooler if the Robinson really had a disentagration gun in her mouth.  She wouldn't even have to use it often -- just once or twice a season, to keep everyone on edge.

Jack's story is more of a humorous side story, but it is pretty funny.

When they do get out, the plot starts twisting.  This is actually only 100 years after the episode The Long Game, and it smacks the Doctor hard when he realizes that this happened largely because he simply abandoned Station 5 once he took out the Jagrafess, not stopping for a moment to consider rebuilding.  That's how he's been from the beginning, and it's always compelling to see those rare moments when it comes back to haunt him.

"I created this world."

But what comes back much stronger in these two episodes is the positive influence he's had on people.  RTD has created a great theme through this series, manifested beautifully here: even when the Doctor doesn't do things himself, he influences others to be heroes.  Yes, there were many stories this season where he didn't solve the problem, but his example inspired others -- Rose, Jabe, Gweneth, and as we see in Parting, even Mickey and Jackie all become heroes because of him.  It may have been a weakness in those episodes, but Davies turns that into the great strength of these episodes.  It turns out that this Doctor is every bit the manipulator he's always been, but in an entirely different way: he's helped others reach their potential.

Davies gives us four other particularly memorable supporting characters.  The first is Roderick, played by Paterson Joseph, one of Rose's Weakest Link contestants.  He's a smug, self-centered character, but his motives are understandable (if not admirable), and he shows hints of sympathy and humanity; he just has himself as the highest priority.  Joseph does a great job of making him unsympathetic but human.

Next is the Controller, who looks and feels like she came out of Star Trek: TNG.  Not that it's a bad thing in the slightest; she's written, designed, and acted exceedingly well, overcoming the lack of originality.  Martha Cope's voice is wonderfully eerie, saying untold fathoms of the sadness of her isolated life.

The other two are the Programmers played by Jo Stone-Fewings and Nisha Nayar, two minor characters given more than enough personality for us to care about their plight.  The actors deserve a lot of credit for how much they bring, but so does Davies for giving them good material in their limited time.

And it's here that anyone who hasn't seen the episodes should leave, now, and watch them.  The rest of this spoils a series of terrific plot twists, and you should go no further.  In other words --

SPOILERS

You have been warned.

The Doctor, Jack, and Lynda break into the Weakest Link room and rush towards Rose.  Rose runs toward them, yelling to watch out for the Anne-Droid and --

Ooh.  Did not see that one coming.

It's a stunning, beautifully done sequence.  Lynda's presence helps us fall for it -- Rose appears to have a replacement, so for a moment, you actually believe she might be gone.  By the time her true fate is revealed, the episode has already transformed from gripping weirdness to an emotional knockout, and her survival only raises the stakes.

It turns out that it's not a disentegrator, but a transmat.  Which transports the victims directly onto a Dalek ship, where they are mutated into Daleks.  So it turns out the Anne-Droid is equally as evil as the real Robinson.

And things suddenly get very, very real.

The Daleks are at their absolute best here.  They are terrifying.  Seeing not just a few, but literally thousands is a dazzling sight.  And everything keeps building and getting worse.  They move through Jack's makeshift defenses with even more ease than he anticipated.

Worse, they travel down to the bottom of the station, far out of their way, and massacre all the civilians down there just because.

And then they kill sweet Lynda with a y.

You bastards!  She was cute!

It just gets worse and worse.  The defendors fight bravely and sacrifice their lives with true heroism, but they accomplish little more than slowing them down briefly; only a single Dalek is even injured for all their efforts.

These scenes are directed by Joe Ahearne spectacularly and totally cinematically.  It really feels like watching a big movie, not a TV show.  But it's a big movie full of risks, thematic depth, and superb characterizations.

Eccleston's Doctor is amazing here.  His vow to save Rose at the end of Bad Wolf is inspiring; his dialogue with the Dalek Emperor riveting.  But above all, it's the moment when he tricks Rose into being sent home, safe, away from certain death, that finally makes him truly the Doctor.  His torment and loneliness have permeated every episode.  But by being around Rose, he's regained his ability to live, and what he believes to be his last act of compassion is saving her life.

After all this intensely powerful action and drama, it's truly astounding that the climax is not only satisfying, but really is stunning.  First, the Doctor has a second chance to do what he did at the end of his last life and the beginning of this one: destroy the Daleks completely, but in doing so, destroy another species.  The Dalek Emperor asks him what he is -- "Killer or coward?"  The Doctor stands with his weapon, but looks up to the Emperor and says, "Coward.  Every day."  The Emperor orders his minions to execute him, and he responds, "Maybe it's time."

And then Rose comes back, having absorbed the heart of the TARDIS to save her Doctor.  It's a Deus ex Machina, very literally, and it works magnificently because it builds out of not just an episode, but an entire season's worth of plot and character setup.  The dialogue and imagery are truly beautiful, the ideas mind-boggling.  The power of this sequence is almost unmatched in Who.

And then, finally, there's the regeneration.  It's one of the best.  The dialogue is perfect, the acting outstanding.  For the first time, the Ninth Doctor looks happy and joyous without irony or sadness behind it.  He is happy to have died saving Rose -- nothing could have made him happier.

And then he turns into David Tennant, and everything becomes a whole different kind of awesome...

The acting is phenomenal all around.  Eccleston and Piper are wonderful throughout; Barrowman is as charismatic as ever, but seeing Jack trying to face his mortality with the same casual charm as he faces everything else is touching.

And Davies, somehow, miraculously, achieves every wild ambition he aims for, and ends up with a masterpiece.  It's as good as it gets.

RATING:

* * * *




SIDENOTES

• Okay, it's not totally perfect.  "I think you need a Doctor."  Really?  Really?  That would be embarassing in a Pip & Jane Baker script.
• I love that after planting all those hints about "Bad Wolf" throughout the series, and then having that awesome scene in Boom Town where the Doctor actually talks about it and then dismisses it, Davies actually calls the 12th episode "Bad Wolf"... and still doesn't explain it.  When he does finally explain it halfway through "Parting of the Ways", the build-up has been phenomenal, and thankfully, he pays it off.
• Okay, so do 21st century reality shows in the 2001st century even begin to make sense?  The answer is simply "Daleks."  The Daleks aren't known for plans that make sense; their ideas are absolutely insane... and yet, somehow, they're intelligent enough to actually pull them off, barring only the Doctor's interferrence.  All of which is to say, enslaving the human race in crazed versions of their own past makes perfect sense coming from characters whose ideas make no sense.  I'll complain about the distant future looking like today from now until eternity, but this one time, I couldn't care less.  This is too awesome to worry about such a little detail.
• Murray Gold's score is magnificent.  For all the episodes or scenes he's done too much or unecessarily or whatever, he's got at least as many of these.  This is awesome music, always used perfectly.

Boom Town

Boom Town

[2005, Season 27/Series 1, Episode 11]

The setting: Cardiff, modern days.  The plot: return of the Slitheen.

Yeah.  I could not be more unenthused.  But within 10 minutes, I was totally won over, and except for the anticlimactic ending, I think Boom Town is a strong, undervalued story that gives a refreshingly low-key and mostly light-hearted reprive from the darkness and epicness of the surrounding episodes.

At the beginning, we get to see The Doctor, Rose, and Jack, visiting with Mickey, and it’s a joy to watch them all together.  The earlier three make a terrific team, and seem like they’ve been travelling together for years (and perhaps they have…).  It’s too bad we don’t get to actually, you know, see all those wonderful adventures in time and space, instead having a fourth of the season centered on the Slitheen, but hey, at least it’s fun here.  The more screen time Noel Clarke gets as Mickey, the more likable the character gets, and the better RTD gets at writing him.  All the stuff with these four interacting is just wonderful.

Annette Badland returns as the only survivor of the Slitheen, and she’s even better than the was before, making the creature both sympathetic and deeply, deeply evil.  She’s also hysterically funny; her explanation for all the mysterious deaths is hilarious.  And since she’s only out of the “human costume” and in the rubber suit briefly (and the fart jokes are subtle and restrained to the opening scenes), you get the full force of a great character.

The first section of the story is fun, but the mid-section is the highlight.  The Doctor insists on bringing her back to her home planet of Raxacoricofallapatorious to be tried by her own people.  But she argues (very persuasively) that by bringing her for trial, he’s condemning her to her own death, and in doing so, is murdering her.  She’s wrong, of course, but it’s a point she makes very well.  The verbal and psychological duel between the two is fascinating (and made more fun by her constant attempts to kill him and the Doctor casually thwarts all of them):

Margaret: Public execution’s a slow death.  They prepare a thin acetic acid, lower me into the cauldron, and boil me.  The acidity is perfectly gauged to strip away the skin.  Internal organs fall out into the liquid.  And I become soup.  And still alive.  Still screaming.

Doctor: I don’t make the law.

Margaret: But you deliver it.

Doctor: You’ve been in that skin suit too long. You've forgotten. There used to be a real Margaret Blaine. You killed her and stripped her and used the skin. You're pleading for mercy out of a dead woman's lips.

Margaret: I promise you, I’ve changed since we last met, Doctor.  There was this girl, just today, young thing, something of a danger.  She was getting too close.  I felt the blood-lust rising, and just as the family taught me, I was going to kill without a thought… and then, I stopped.  She’s alive somewhere, right now, she’s walking around this city because I can change, I did change.  I know I can’t prove it…

Doctor: I believe you.

Margaret: Then you know I’m capable of better!

Doctor: It doesn’t mean anything.

Margaret: I spared her life.

Doctor: You let one of them go, but that’s nothing new.  Every now and then, a little victim spared.  Because she smiled, ‘cause he’s got freckles, ‘cause they begged.  And that’s how you live with yourself.  That’s how you slaughter millions.  Because once in a while, on a whim, if the wind’s in the right direction, you happen to be kind.

Margaret: Only a killer would know that.

This is terrific stuff.  You can see her manipulations starting to crack him just a little, even though he knows he’s being manipulated and is right.  He’s not going to give in, but it’s difficult.  It’s great drama.

And then… and then the climax happens, and instead of getting to see whether the Doctor would truly go through with the justice or give unearned and dangerous mercy, it turns out she was just playing for time, and there’s a bit crisis and special effects and this scene:

Yes, that's a 55-year-old woman in heels on an intergalactic surfboard.

And it all goes for nothing.  Yes, Joe Ahearne executes all the effects and action very well, but it’s a cop-out, leading to a ho-hum monologuing villain bit and a senseless Deus ex Machina that does pay off in a couple of episodes, but which tramples all the build-up in the story.  It makes that entire dinner conversation totally pointless.  What a rip-off.

That climax is bad.  Really, really bad.  It's difficult to believe that the writer responsible for such a brilliant scene as the dinner sequence is also responsible for such an awful finale.

It’s frustrating, because until the last 10 minutes, it’s really, really good, full of strong character work, great dialogue, and thoughtful moral dilemmas, and totally excuses wasting yet another episode on a modern-day Earthbound story.  I like it a lot, and find the solid execution of the finale at least a minor consolation.  But still, there’s a great episode here that gets away because RTD is afraid to stick through to the end.

* * *

SIDENOTES:

·        You know what would really would have improved this season?  Collapse Aliens of London and World War III into one episode, and then use the leftover budget to give us a 45-minute off-world adventure with Nine, Rose, and Jack.  Even if it had to be done on a restricted budget, it would have added immensely to the show. 

·        The relationship between Rose and Mickey is superbly written here, and Piper and Clarke perform it beautifully.

·        I want to note one more time how great Joe Ahearne’s direction is.  This was a low-budget episode, but he frames everything so well and gives it enough energy that it doesn’t feel it at all.