Just as UNIT was an integral part of the mythos of Classic Who (continuing, though to a lesser extent, in NewWho), so The Torchwood Institute was to NewWho. It’s first name-dropped a few times in Series 1, and of course Captain Jack Harkness, the central figure of the Torchwood spinoff series, first appeared in “The Empty Child“. But it’s Series 2 that introduces Torchwood as more than a word, starting right off with “The Christmas Invasion“, whose conclusion reveals that Torchwood wields some extremely impressive alien firepower (not to mention The Doctor losing something that we often see in the Torchood series later). “Tooth and Claw” reveals the Institute’s origin in 1879, and it’s name-dropped in “School Reunion“, “Rise of the Cybermen“, and “Love and Monsters“; it’s responsible for the abduction and hiding of The Wire’s victims in “The Idiot’s Lantern“, and its institutional descendant “The Torchwood Archive” will be the sponsor of the 43rd century expedition to “The Impossible Planet“. Of course the season finale “Army of Ghosts/Doomsday” is entirely centered on it. Torchwood One, the main branch housed in London’s Canary Wharf, was entirely destroyed by the events of that story, but that didn’t stop one of its subsidiaries from being the source of considerable trouble in “The Runaway Bride” later. However, the Torchwood series follows the exploits of Torchwood Three, conveniently (for the BBC Wales production team) based in Cardiff.
Everything Changes was the premier episode, introducing a new team member in the person of Gwen Cooper, a cop whose curiosity leads her to pry into Torchwood’s business when the team shows up at a murder scene to test a piece of alien technology, a gauntlet which temporarily raises the dead. The intrusion of a normal into this very secret world is an effective narrative device for introducing the audience to many basics about the organization: who the team members are, where their base is, how they stay hidden, what they’re about, what they’re capable of, and so on. We’re shown that Captain Jack Harkness cannot die (the result of Rose’s heavy-handed use of the time vortex to resurrect him at the end of “The Parting of the Ways“), and that Torchwood has use of a drug with the metatextual name “Retcon” which can erase memories; the villain of the story is actually Suzie Costello, the team member Gwen replaces at the end, who goes on a homicidal (and eventually suicidal) rampage after becoming obsessed with the resurrection gauntlet. It’s not an outstanding episode, but premiers rarely are (“Invasion of the Bane” in The Sarah Jane adventures is a rare exception) because they’re too busy introducing all the characters, situations and concepts.
Since Torchwood was specifically intended to be a more “adult” Who spinoff, the creators wasted no time in demonstrating just how “adult” they could be, with lots of swearing, more gore than usual, and sex scenes (many of them gratuitous). Fortunately, they weren’t completely gratuitous in Day One because the plot involved a gaseous alien who possesses a human host in order to consume the energy produced by orgasm, reducing the victim to ash in the process. I say “fortunately” because I don’t really care for explicit sex scenes; perhaps because I’ve been a sex worker on and off (mostly on) since 1985, I tend to view such scenes with a cynical eye. And I say “consume” rather than “feed on” because it’s pretty clear from the dialogue that she’s addicted, not hungry; there’s no satiation, and she gets less of a high from each hit. But she just keeps chasing the dragon, leaving a trail of human ash in her wake. The concept of an alien hunting for thrills rather than food, profit, or conquest isn’t unique, but explicitly portraying the predation as analogous to drug use is both highly unusual and a good use of the show’s adult classification.
The sexual content in Ghost Machine is less explicit, consisting mostly of a strong undertone in the scene where Jack teaches Gwen to shoot, and an off-camera rape that’s central to the plot: a young hoodlum finds an alien device which allows the user to see ghosts left behind by powerful emotions in the area where it’s activated. Halfway through we discover that there’s actually a second half to the device which also allows the user to see near-future ghosts, and the ensuing events swirl around four main players: the hood, the now-elderly rapist, Gwen, and Owen. The plot is tight, the moral landscape is painted in shades of grey, and the whole is an emotionally-intense drama in which we get to learn more about the members of the Torchwood team.
The nadir of Torchwood‘s fling with gratuitous sexuality was Cyberwoman, in which the titular character, Ianto’s lost love, is a very attractive young woman in a “sexy cyborg” costume that clearly owes much more to the creators’ urge to titillate than to either narrative necessity or established continuity. There’s also gratuitous snogging between Owen and Gwen and between Jack and Ianto, though the latter is passed off as mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and the former as the admittedly-gratuitous side effect of their hiding in a small space from the revived Cyberwoman together, complete with frottage. A lot of the violence is also gratuitous, and while it’s unclear how long this is after the events of “Doomsday“, I find it very difficult to believe that Ianto could hide an entire freaking Cyber conversion unit and a half-converted human in Torchwood’s basement without the watchful Toshiko discovering it ere now. Plus: just because you have the technology to transfer a human brain-in-skull into a cyber body does not mean you can flip a fucking selector dial and fully transplant it into the head of another human and then have them walking around within minutes; the only word for that is “ridiculous”. But the most irritating thing about this whole episode is the completely unrealistic “despite everything that happened today we still trust each other!” shtick which was characteristic of both the JNT era of Doctor Who and the entirety of Star Trek: The Next Generation. If I’d been in Jack’s shoes, I’d have pumped the traitorous butler so full of Retcon he couldn’t even spell “Torchwood” any more, and dumped him in his dad’s back garden, because an organization like this cannot function if its operatives can’t trust one another, and Ianto absolutely shattered that trust.
Torchwood is at its best when it embraces its horror elements rather than merely flirting with them, and nowhere is this more true than in Small Worlds, a more-than-a-little Machenesque tale which depicts the Fair Folk much more like our ancestors saw them and much less like 20th-century popular culture did. Jack shows more fear of these creatures than he has shown of any other enemy to this point, with good reason; the “fairies” of the old tales were masters of the elements with an alien morality and a very different relationship with time than ours, making them perfect villains for a Doctor Who spinoff. Though I think it was a mistake to show them clearly (because shadows, suggestion and humanoid figures only barely visible at the edge of the screen would’ve been far more unsettling than CGI wood-creatures), the show got nearly everything else right about them, including the confusion (especially in Ireland, but Wales too) about what they actually were: living creatures? Shapeshifting monsters? Spirits? Demons? The Dead? The stories never quite agree, but one thing they do agree on (and the show follows) is that the Fay are interested in certain humans, especially children, and will abduct them if given the chance. This is the first episode to unambiguously show that Jack has been around for quite some time, and John Barrowman’s touching portrayal of his enduring fondness for his old WW2 girlfriend, especially in his intense grief at her death, moved me to tears and made me love the character even more.
From a Machenesque tale we go to a Lovecraftian one in Countrycide. Now, I know what you’re thinking; there aren’t any tentacled monsters from Outside in here, just a village of inbred Welsh cannibals. But such communities are just as much a part of Lovecraft’s literary landscape as the monsters are; indeed, the Cult of the Great Old Ones is supposed to have continued down through the centuries in families just like the one depicted here, ignorant and isolated rural communities such as Innsmouth and Dunwich whose degraded inhabitants practice the most loathsome rituals away from the prying eyes of city-folk. This one reminded me especially of “The Rats in the Walls”, not in its plot (which is quite different) but in its portrayal of this same grisly family tradition, stretching back how long, no one can say. This one grew on me; I liked it much better the second time. It’s at least as scary as its predecessor, though in a completely different way; it reminds us that even in a world of malevolent creatures from outer space or the Dawn of Time, humans are still among the worst of all monsters.
Greeks Bearing Gifts is the kind of “small” episode that IMHO should make up the majority of episodes in an adventure series. Not every story has to involve a crisis that threatens the entire world; a villain who goes after only one victim at a time is plenty bad enough, especially when the story allows for considerable character development. This time the focus is on Toshiko, who is seduced by an Arcateenian criminal (possessing the body of a sex worker) who wants to recover the transport device that first brought her to Earth in the first place. In furtherance of that plan, the alien gives Tosh a pendant which makes every thought of every person in the vicinity audible to her, including deep, casual thoughts of which the subject may not even be fully aware; Tosh discovers Owen & Gwen’s affair and finds that Jack’s mind is unreadable, and the viewers discover that not all Arcateenians are gentle poets like the one who visited Sarah Jane Smith.
The members of Torchwood are nothing like paragons of virtue. We’ve already discussed Ianto; Jack is a con-man with control issues; Owen is more than a little rapey; Gwen is a cop and a cheater; and we’ll discuss Toshiko later. But none of them are nearly as bad as the late Suzie Costello; in They Keep Killing Suzie we discover that she was a deranged villain long before she became obsessed with the resurrection gauntlet, which in this episode Gwen must use to revive her in order to solve the mystery of why she turned an innocent man into a crazed serial killer by overdosing him on Retcon. The revived Suzie, who does not die again in two minutes, then proceeds to sabotage the base as part of her plan to steal Gwen’s life-energy so she can stay alive to keep doing whatever awful things she likes, of which there are apparently many. As usual, the story leaves us with more questions than it answers, but that’s not a bad thing in horror fantasy.
Random Shoes could be described as Torchwood’s counterpart to the Doctor Who episode “Love and Monsters“; the protagonist of each is a lonely young man who becomes fascinated with the show’s main characters, and comes to harm as a result. Said main characters appear only as supporting characters in the respective stories, though in this case Gwen has a great deal of screen time as she investigates the young man’s untimely death. The episode’s title is a comment on its theme: the last photos taken by the dead man’s phone are pictures of apparently-random pairs of shoes, and though both Gwen and the viewer seek some meaning in them, in truth they are merely side-effects of the events leading up to his death with no intrinsic meaning of their own. The McGuffin of the tale is an alien artifact he’s prized since childhood which is dismissed as fake by everyone else, and which is never adequately explained. And all these elements come together to form an odd, sad tale, which is in its own way rather charming and strangely optimistic.
Out of Time is among my favorite episodes of Torchwood. Since I’m much more interested in people than things, character development is probably the most important factor in my enjoyment of a show, and this story is all character development. The only sci-fi element of the entire episode is the space-time rift which allows an airplane from 1953 to land in 2008, permanently stranding an aviatrix and her two passengers (a businessman and his 18-year-old niece) out of their own era. And the only conflict is interpersonal; there are no monsters, aliens, fighting, or even human enemies, just three very real characters reacting to extraordinary circumstances in three different ways, with the help of the three team members who become close to each of them, also in three different ways.
Combat is another story which, like “Countrycide“, reminds that humans are among the worst of all monsters. It owes more than a little of its premise to Fight Club, except it uses the subhuman monsters Torchwood refers to as “weevils”, and in the process of going undercover to track down the villains, Owen (still angry and hurt over the aviatrix from the last episode abandoning him) discovers he has a kind of empathic connection with them.
Captain Jack Harkness reveals the story of the titular character; I mean the real one, the officer whose identity was appropriated by the time traveler we know by that name. This happens when “our” Jack and Toshiko go to investigate strange noises in a dance hall left derelict since 1989, and are pulled through a time warp to 1941. This is a very uneven episode; the narrative itself is interesting, but many of the particulars are so fanciful as to strain credulity. For example, we’re expected to believe that Toshiko manages to hide not one but two messages for Gwen in 2008, both of which are discovered by an ordinary search over a few hours despite having somehow remained untouched for 48 years before the building was abandoned. Furthermore, do the writers not realize the likely result of two men openly kissing in public in 1941 Cardiff? Give that homosexuality was an actual crime at the time, I hardly think everybody would simply have stood around watching them and then the real Jack would’ve gone to his date with Destiny as though nothing had happened. What makes these flaws so annoying is that they could easily have been fixed with more careful writing; it’s almost like nobody could be bothered to think things through and make them more plausible.
End of Days continues directly from the previous episode and has the same main villain, though in the first part he seems relatively harmless despite his ability to step through time. In reality, Bilis Manger poses as the manager of the dance hall in 1941 and the caretaker of the derelict building in 2008 for the sole purpose of tricking Torchwood into opening the rift in order to bring Jack and Toshiko back into the present; this results in a series of crack in spacetime which he successfully fools everyone on the team (except Jack) into believing can be closed by activating the rift manipulator a second time. In reality, this releases another menace from the Dawn of Time: Abaddon, son of the Great Beast previously battled by The Doctor in “The Satan Pit“, a 40-meter tall demon who instantly drains the life of anyone his shadow falls upon; it appears he has been imprisoned in the rift for some time, and perhaps even has something to do with its existence in the first place. Like its predecessor, this is a very uneven episode; it spends so much time on the team squabbling that the battle with Abaddon feels rushed and unsatisfying, and the epilogue, in which Jack hears the TARDIS appearing in the plaza above the Torchwood Hub and runs out to meet him, feels pasted-on and anticlimactic. We don’t actually see that encounter in this episode; instead, it has to wait until the opening scene of the Doctor Who episode “Utopia“.
By the time Jack vanished from Cardiff with the TARDIS, “Harold Saxon” had already established himself in the UK government; it was therefore a very small matter for him to send the Torchwood team on “a wild-goose chase to the Himalayas” in order to head off any possible interference with his plans. And once he had taken over, it would have been a very small matter to put them out of the way permanently. So it seems likely that, in the alternate timeline negated by The Doctor, the entire team was executed.
In Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang Jack returns from his adventures with The Doctor and Martha just in time to help the team defeat his former partner (in every sense) Captain John Hart, a dangerous psychopath with a working vortex manipulator and a tendency to murder anyone who even mildly annoys him. The episode is full of black humor from the very first scene, but that doesn’t mean Captain John isn’t a very real menace and a very effective villain, not to mention the impetus for pushing Jack to finally share at least some of his secrets with his teammates. Of all the Torchwood episodes, this is probably the Torchwoodiest.
For the most part, I enjoyed Sleeper, a tale of alien “sleeper” agents programmed with false memories so they really, genuinely have no idea what they really are. Each agent’s right arm contains an intelligence-gathering device which also generates a skin-level force field and a long blade which springs out Wolverine-style when activated; the device also contains small contact bombs and is shielded from sensors unless triggered. The scheme comes to light when one of the agents is attacked in a “home invasion” robbery which triggers the unit for self-defense, but the woman doesn’t even remember what happened. The part I did not like at all was the way that Jack easily slips into cop behavior, torturing the woman to obtain a “confession” while insisting that he “knows” she killed the burglars, when in fact he knows no such thing because this is Torchwood, after all; he has no way to be sure that the real killer didn’t teleport away or some such. The fact that he turns out to be right is neither here nor there; it’s not like he was able to read the script as in a Monty Python episode or Looney Tunes cartoon to be sure he wasn’t torturing an innocent. This is just a case of a lazy writer forgetting that his characters do not share his omniscient knowledge, and approvingly depicting an atrocity as a result.
To the Last Man is another of my favorite episodes of Torchwood, and like “Out of Time” it’s because the story is about people rather than things. In this case, it’s about a young soldier in a military hospital in 1918, who is cryogenically frozen at the Torchwood hub so as to be ready to go through a breach in time from the 21st century back to his own time, carrying a “key” with which to seal the breach. He’s awakened for one day per year to ensure his body and mind don’t break down, and for the last four years his guide on each of those “days out” has been Toshiko, with predictable emotional results for both of them. The story is almost flawless, both in its treatment of the time-loop and in its look at the nature of heroism and the human costs of war.
The basic plot of Meat is that of a pot-boiler, so it’s appropriate that it’s used to bring the tension between Gwen and her fiancé Rhys to a boil. The basic conflict could be described with the same synopsis as “Combat“: “Evil humans exploit a vulnerable alien victim.” But in this case the alien is a whale-like being which grows despite not being fed, and can therefore be carved up alive and sold as meat by the villains. But the truck carrying a load of the meat, which overturns in a highway accident, belongs to Rhys’ employers, and he’s on the scene when Torchwood – including Gwen – arrives to investigate, thus revealing what she’s been hiding from him for over a year and forcing her to choose between her loyalties. And in the resolution, the show recognizes that some situations are impossible to slap a happy ending upon.
There aren’t a lot of TV shows which actually make me emotionally uncomfortable, but Adam was one of them. Adam is a parasitic being who, in order to physically exist in our world, must be thought well of and remembered by others, and to that end he implants memories of his supposed existence in the Torchwood team. But he’s not satisfied to merely do the minimum necessary for survival, and so he repeatedly commits a crime far worse than rape: he doesn’t merely violate others’ bodies, but their minds and souls, rewriting their experience to suit himself and, in the process, wrecking their real memories and in some cases severely damaging their personalities, sometimes just because he enjoys inflicting emotional agony. And were it not for his overconfidence proving his undoing, imagine the havoc a monster like that could have wrought had it escaped into the outside world.
During the first season of Torchwood one could sometimes halfway forget one was watching a story set in the Doctor Who universe, but that’s much less possible in the second season thanks in part to Captain Jack’s recent adventures with The Doctor, and in part to a three-episode-long visit from Martha Jones, whom we discover now works for UNIT thanks to a recommendation from the Great Man himself. Reset is the first of these; it’s an interesting tale in its own right, featuring a mad doctor who is willing to fatally infect unwitting test subjects with alien insect larvae in hopes of developing a panacea. But it also leads to a climax in which the villain shoots Owen through the heart, thus directly setting up Dead Man Walking, in which Jack uses the mate of the destroyed right-hand resurrection gauntlet to bring Owen back to life (permanently, as it turns out). Unfortunately, while the first part is pretty tight, the second part is full of gaps; it feels as though a lot more was filmed, then edited out for time. How does Jack know where to find the second gauntlet, and why didn’t he look before? Who’s the psychic girl? Where did all these weevils come from, when we usually only see one or two at a time? Even Ianto’s research into the history of the derelict church finds the needed info much too conveniently. The mystery of how the weevils are connected to the gauntlet isn’t a problem, because it’s the sort of unknown element that works in horror (and if you don’t see a story about a magic glove with the power to manifest an actual Grim Reaper as horror, I don’t know what to tell you). But the practical human considerations (“Who is this person?” “Why did he do that?” etc) are something else entirely, and skipping them seriously weakens what could have been a much stronger story.
One very legitimate gripe about the way a character’s being undead (or any other sort of weird fantasy condition, really) is handled in fiction is that all too often, its drawbacks are glossed over in favor of the “cool” aspects; A Day in the Death goes in exactly the opposite direction, focusing on all the myriad problems faced by Owen now that he’s a walking cadaver. As a physician, he’s well-equipped to enumerate many of them: he can’t digest or excrete, so he can’t eat; no heartbeat means no erections, so no sex; he doesn’t age, but he also doesn’t heal, etc. The handling of these problems is somewhat uneven; for example, why can he see and hear, but not feel pain? And even if he doesn’t breathe involuntarily, he can clearly move his muscles voluntarily, which explains how he can speak (exhaled air passing vocal cords), but that also means he should be able to do rescue breathing for the old millionaire (who’s not exactly a nice guy, though Torchwood does classify him as “mostly harmless”). All in all, though, I liked the way these issues were examined in one place so they needn’t be dwelt upon in future episodes, and though Martha Jones exits Torchwood at the end we’ll soon see her again with The Doctor in “The Sontaran Stratagem“.
Something Borrowed is one of those Whonivese stories which manages to evoke several different conflicting emotions in one story (which IMHO is a good thing). While it’s got a carnivorous alien shapeshifter skulking around Gwen’s wedding in order to reclaim her baby, which Gwen is carrying due to a bite from the shapeshifter’s mate the night before, it’s also got Gwen trying to explain to her parents and future in-laws why she’s suddenly full-term pregnant at her wedding. It manages to be both horrific and very funny in turns, and considering what could have happened, the body count is actually pretty low. And Retcon in the champagne ensures a good time was had by all, as far as they can remember.
Some Torchwood episodes barely even bother to come up with a science-fiction rationale for the weird goings-on, leaving them pretty solidly in the realm of what, for lack of a more precise term, must be called “magic”. From Out of the Rain is one of these; it appears to have been inspired by Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, right down to the decade in which the evil carnival is last seen (though Bradbury’s Autumn People come from the dust and are washed away by rain). The extremely creepy idea of evil entities coming out of old films is handled very well, and though the ending is a bit anticlimactic, it’s still a good, spooky take on an unusual kind of malevolent ghost.
Adrift answers a question nobody in Torchwood seems to have asked: if the Rift drops alien beings and machines on Earth when the cosmic tide comes in (so to speak), what happens when that tide goes out? It also dares to point out a fact which many sheltered 21st-century people deny: the universe is actually a pretty hostile place, and not at all “fair”, and actions which may seem kind or cruel may actually turn out to be the opposite. It further reveals that, in general, when Jack presents himself as “hard” he’s usually just being protective, because age gives perspective and there aren’t many humans around who are as old as he is.
In the first few minutes of Fragments, a trap set by Captain John Hart for Torchwood in an old building results in Jack, Toshiko, Ianto and even Owen lying trapped in near-death conditions, and while Gwen and Rhys try to dig them out we are treated to flashbacks of how each of them (including their pet pteranodon) joined Torchwood (we’ve already seen how Gwen joined in “Everything Changes“). This answers a lot of questions (especially about Jack) that we’ve wondered about since the beginning, and sets up the next episode, where the rest of John’s plot unfolds.
Exit Wounds is the last “regular” episode of Torchwood; seasons three and four each tell one long, connected story. And as one might expect in such dangerous work, two members of the team perish (permanently). Captain John makes such a detestable supervillain that it’s almost a disappointment to discover there’s someone even more damaged behind him, and despite his seeming repentance later the fact remains that he chose to kill a very large number of people, most of them innocents, to save his own skin. Toshiko proves herself the bravest member of the team, and Jack escapes an attempt to condemn him to literally eternal torment by time travel the hard way, revealing in the process that there were four separate iterations of him existing at the same time for at least parts of January, 1941.
After the events of “The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End“, the remaining members of Torchwood have cause to celebrate their victory over the Daleks, and when last seen Jack was trying to talk Martha Jones into joining Torchwood. But she was wise to remain with UNIT, because the very next Torchwood story is the last proper one, the five-episode Children of Earth. And as befitting the darkest series set in the Whoniverse, it’s really, really dark, as dark as any five really dark episodes of the series multiplied by five. When The Sarah Jane Adventures did a story about child-stealing aliens, we got “Day of the Clown“, in which the motive is generating fear and Clyde defeats the menace by telling bad jokes. But when Torchwood does it, their motive is using the kids to get high (a theme we’ve seen in the series before) and defeating them requires the direct, intentional sacrifice of the one child who happens to be handy. Nor is this the first such sacrifice, oh no; Jack was involved in a previous encounter with the same aliens in 1965, and instead of getting rid of these Addicts from Outer Space, it simply encouraged them to come back for more. A lot more. Like tens of millions. And all the governments of Earth decide to use it as a way to get rid of the kids of the poor, minorities, refugees, etc, while lying about it to the public. The UK government in particular decides covering up their culpability in encouraging the monsters to return is worth assassinating every member of Torchwood and blowing up their base. And let’s not forget the lies, cover-ups, conspiring with the aliens, holding family members hostage, raiding housing projects to abduct kids when too many disobey to reach the numbers demanded by the aliens, and too many lesser atrocities to count. Absolutely nobody gets out of this without blood on their hands and sewage all over their faces, except for a fraction of the ones who don’t escape alive at all. About the only less-dark moment I can think of is the black humor of Ianto smashing through the wall of a military facility with a heavy construction machine so as to steal the block of concrete in which the government has imprisoned Jack so he can be freed by dropping said block into a quarry. Oh, and a few of the moments in which they settle into their new HQ in an abandoned warehouse. Peter Capaldi is riveting as the bureaucrat demonstrating the banality of evil in every episode, a performance which I’m sure contributed to his winning the role of the 12th Doctor several years later. And given how lackluster “Miracle Day” turned out to be, I wish they’d ended the series here, with Jack leaving Earth to roam the greater cosmos, because there’s nothing left to hold him here and, as Gwen says of The Doctor, he’s ashamed of the human race.
We next see Captain Jack in the “curtain call” portion of “The End of Time“, sitting in an alien space bar (a la Star Wars cantina) trying to get over his recent traumas. But what happens to him between then and the beginning of Miracle Day is unknown; there certainly isn’t any reference to it in the show, which makes it sound like Jack was maybe as far away as Rome, but still monitoring the internet every day. But that’s par for the “Miracle Day” course, in part because, like the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie, it was a co-production with a US company which did not seem to understand what the show was actually about. If I had to write a two-word review of this 10-part story, it would be “bloated, unsatisfying”. Since I’ve already started on “bloated”, let’s tackle that first; “Miracle Day” consists of 10 episodes of 60 minutes each, 600 minutes total, almost twice the length of “The Trial of a Time Lord” (350 minutes), and nearly as long as the entire “Key to Time” season (650 minutes), wasted on a story which could’ve been told in six 45-minute episodes with room to spare (compare this one to the much-tighter “Children of Earth” and you’ll grasp what I mean). The extra time was spent mostly on superfluous subplots that either went nowhere or were actually distracting from the main narrative, or on the development of nasty characters that I can’t believe anyone actually cared about (such as the truly awful Jilly Kitzinger), but some of it was expended on unusually-gratuitous sex scenes of the sort Torchwood abandoned early in its first season, only worse. Now, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a slower pace of storytelling, but this show doesn’t simply take its time; it meanders. One example is a single scene whose basic plot is repeated no fewer than seven times (that’s when I lost count): “Character A, who should know better, unwisely mouths off to Character B, who has the power to seriously harm Character A, and immediately does so, with dire results”. It’s like the titular “miracle” has impaired everyone’s ability to think, to the point where after the second or third iteration of this same scene, Grace declared that all of them must be “taking stupid pills”. The most idiotic of these is Dr. Juarez threatening an armed bureaucrat with what would now be ETERNAL imprisonment (when she simply could’ve left and reported him), and the least-believable one for me was the escort (clearly written by .a person who has never knowingly talked to an actual sex worker in their entire life) mouthing off to Oswald Danes. Any actual escort who made the choice to see a famous psychopath (and believe me, most of us are offered such a date from time to time, usually with some politician, “bad boy” celebrity, or ethically-bankrupt businessman) has already weighed out whether she thinks the emotional labor will be worth the money, and isn’t going to suddenly start mocking the client because what he proposes to do with the time is less and easier work than she expected, certainly not in a way that might potentially get her killed by the psycho (because we are all acutely aware that the cops aren’t going to care if one of us ends up dead). You may feel that I’m dwelling on this one scene longer than strictly necessary, but there’s a reason for that: this scene is a perfect example of the carelessness of characterization and motivation in this story, and because I’m a career escort myself I’m most qualified to point out these specific problems (if you’re a physician, G-man or PR person, there are similarly-shitty scenes throughout, especially in the extra-padded middle episodes). The way the sex worker in this scene is handled is no different from the way the supporting characters, main characters, and even stars are handled: as props to be moved around to advance the plot (or more often, just fill screen time) rather than as characters with actual lives. That may be the norm in American pay-TV productions (I wouldn’t know because I stopped watching US network TV years before many of y’all were even born, in 1980), but it certainly has never been the norm in Doctor Who or its spinoffs. But that’s really not surprising, because a lot of the time this doesn’t feel like part of the Whoniverse at all, not even Torchwood; it’s not until episode 7 that we even see anything alien (other than Jack’s vortex manipulator, which isn’t even explained) or hear any reference to The Doctor or any other part of the Whoniverse. And that’s especially telling because episode 7 is one of the few that IMHO could actually be turned into a decent Torchwood episode by a competent story editor. Of course, said editor would have to tackle the story’s biggest problem: it is much too big thematically as well as literally. All too often, sci-fi series writers have delusions of being novelists, and hurl themselves into painting a huge canvas without the slightest consideration for continuity with the greater narrative universe in which the story is embedded. Any society which underwent a Biblical catastrophe on this scale would be changed irrevocably; it would never go back to basically resembling ours, and yet stories taking place in Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures during the same or immediately subsequent times to when “Miracle Day” takes place (spring 2011) make no mention of this Earthshaking cataclysm at all. The September 11th terrorist attack (which was not even a global cataclysm) was used by the US government (and to a lesser extent, those of the whole Western world) to change society so dramatically that even fictional worlds were forced to incorporate those changes into their narrative universe; in the Whoniverse even UNIT became darker and nastier as a result. And look at the societal impact of COVID, which is no worse than an ordinary flu season in comparison to the medical catastrophe depicted in “Miracle Day”; one positive thing I can say about the production is that it was eerily prophetic of the way modern governments’ go-to “solution” to any problem is more laws, more diktats, more surveillance, more police violence, and more tossing-aside of basic civil liberties we used to foolishly believe were guaranteed. And yet, we get NO reference to any of these events anywhere else. Was it all overwritten when The Doctor “rebooted the universe”, or quietly erased in the aftermath of River Song’s disastrous attempt to change a “fixed point in time”? Maybe it’s just a really bad trip Jack experiences on alien psychedelics while still hanging out in dens of iniquity as we last saw him before this? And why are the American writers so determined to cram Jack into a 21st-century “gay” box when the whole point of the character’s sexuality is that 51st-century humanity has long since abandoned such sexual straightjackets? It’s all so incompetent, and again, bloated and disappointing, that I honestly wouldn’t recommend you bother watching it unless you’re a die-hard completist; other bad stories are a waste of only 45 minutes of your life, or 60 at most; 600 minutes is well beyond the pale. It’s one of the few stories I prefer to simply write out of my head-canon, which is a shame because it could’ve been so much better.
Unfortunately, the very next story Jack appears in isn’t any better.
