Torchwood

[amilyn]

Okay...so iingaartist and I have been watching Torchwood. We've been mostly enjoying it, as our expectations were fairly low. Tonight we got up through #7 ("They Keep Killing Suzie"--good makeup work, there) which I thought was quite a lot better, character-wise, than much of what's come before (which seems to be all about the blood, gore, sex, making out,

Comments

[wiliqueen]

is there a point at all other than to say, "Dood! Look at ALL WE CAN GET AWAY WITH since this isn't 'kiddie television' on this show!!!!

Not that I can tell.

Except maybe this, which I was suspecting all along and which sort of came together for me at the end of the season: Jack is a con artist. No matter how long he's lived or what he's gone through, his talent is in the concocting, executing, and modifying as necessary of complex plans with a finite scope and a specific purpose.

We don't know how he landed up heading TW3 (although my money is still on some form of the inmates taking over the asylum!), but I have real trouble seeing him thinking it was a good idea to be the one responsible for something that sprawling, unpredictable, and open-ended.

For most of the series, I see him spending most of his time and energy maintaining the image of the Effective And Inspiring Leader, but with precious little substance behind it. It works to the extent that the team members are inspired by it, and manage to fit their various competencies together in a way that doesn't make the body count TOO much higher than it would have been if they'd never shown up in the first place.

By "TKKS," that's really starting to break down. The cracks are showing more, the doubts are piling up, and Jack is getting less and less credit for whatever saves they manage to pull off. What blew my mind about the last three or four eps is that all this randomness and disintegration suddenly did seem like a thread of sorts, because Jack is actually becoming a viable leader on a parallel track to the others ceasing to believe in him as one.

The quality jump in those last few is so marked that before it we were going "Why are we still watching this?" And by the time we were done it was like "Damn. We'll have to keep watching this." I still wouldn't call it brilliant by any stretch, and it certainly still has its flaws, but it suddenly feels like there's some there there.