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.