Torchwood meta
A decade ago, as Torchwood ‘Miracle Day’ started airing, I wrote out this slab of blurb about why Children of Earth / Miracle Day didn’t feel like kosher ‘Torchwood’ to me. Here’s a C&P from the original post below the line
...I’ve been thinking about Torchwood.
Four eps broadcast so far. I can’t give you an impartial sense of how well they’re doing, my perception is that the media critics are mostly still endorsing it as must-see TV, though there are some naysayers and some complaints about slow pace or lack of story-build. On fandom’s side, mostly I think those who were predisposed to hate it are hating it, those who wanted to love it are loving it, both sides are certainly vocalising their POVs quite widely. Overall, the fandom buzz seems to be far down on what CoE and even S2 were getting back in their day, though equally I think the non-fandom general audience buzz through Twitter looks far bigger and definitely more pro than anti.
There also seems to be very very little being generated so far from the new season by way of fannish creativity, or even meta that goes much deeper than straightforward ep reviews. The new characters aren’t inspiring reams of fic, there aren’t many new icons to be seen. That’s a definite change and one that can, for example, be compared to the fandom response to the last radioplay at the start of this month, after which it fair rained response fic and meta that was less about the actual content and more to do with the impact on individual fans’ feelings and mindsets.
No surprise that I’m in the predisposed-to-hate camp. I watched the first ep straight through, dl’d the second then ended up half-watching it on BBC1. The third ep I downloaded for the shag/s (which even AfterElton had to admit “didn’t please most of you as much as the titillating media foreplay that preceded it” - amazing that anyone is STILL guzzling RTD’s snake oil, honestly). I skimmed to that intercut scene - a bloodless unsexy rip-off of the far superior twinned snog montage of Cyberwoman - and did something else while the rest of the ep was on, which meant half-listening and not actually paying enough attention to grok what was happening. I do know it ended with Jack getting beaten up a lot, and me finding out I was just clean out of fucks to give.
I know those of us in the yah-boo camp have all posted various reasons why we’re not being seduced by this new series, and a lot of them point out the lack of the tangible things we liked about Torchwood in the first place - location, set, Myfanwy, SUV, characters, alien spooky-do, MotW story format, a certain darkly British sense of humour that meant the show could manage absurd high camp one minute, and thought-provoking moral dilemmas or emotional gut-punches the next, without losing grip on either.
At some point in the last week, what I really find repellent about the new series finally crystallised for me, enough so that I didn’t even bother to pull down last Friday’s US ep for mockery purposes.
Now I suspect some of the Miracle Day pompom wavers are putting on a bit of enforced gaiety, and others are so devoted to Barrowman they’d watch him paddle in silage for an hour and still come away perfectly contented. Nonetheless, there are undoubtedly quite a lot of people, fans and wider audience, who are watching and loving the new season of Torchwood. Viewing figures are holding around a tolerable +/- 1m for STARZ, and dropping by about 250k/week on the Beeb, but that’s still four or five million happy campers. What the show is doing now is working for them as satisfying entertainment, and I’m not belittling that in any way. This post is simply about me putting my finger, finally, on why I think it’s unsatisfying as entertainment, and it’s something that surprises me, given it’s something RTD has delivered over and over in previous series he’s conceived and scripted.
For me, the baseline is this: Torchwood Miracle Day is built on a fatally flawed narrative structure and premise, so it fails to engage interest in either the plot or the characters.
Look at Harry Potter. (I know, Ron’s much more fun to look at, but bear with me.) Part of its amazing success springs from J K Rowling either lucidly or intuitively choosing a core concept and narrative structure that pulls in the reader almost irresistibly. The core concept is the journey of a disenfranchised prince towards his pre-destined throne, through a fantastic enchanted kingdom that actually exists at a quantum level, right here in the same place as our own world. The narrative structure is a sequence of individual and effectively discrete stories, all of which fit together in a larger arc - but each being set in the same locations and replicating some of the basic parameters allows space and scope for the characters to change and grow within each story, building that growth layer by layer within a stable backdrop which doesn't need to take up valuable narrative focus.
The magical mysterious world just on the edge of our perception is a myth-staple in practically every culture I know, it has a timeless appeal. Rowling then ensured we as readers would find our way easily into that kingdom alongside Harry, by creating a basic stage set, if you like, and a small cast of characters we would get to know quickly. The main set is Hogwarts, which starts as an impenetrable safe eyrie, with its very specific tangibles: dorms, the Great Hall, the Quidditch field, the classrooms, where the narrative action can take place again and again. And while the POV almost never shifts from Harry, the main cast are fleshed out clearly through his eyes. So we have super-smart but vulnerable Hermione, average but loyal and determined Ron - the three of them brought together, not by Destiny, but pure chance: three in many ways quite ordinary characters, randomly forced by circumstance into uniting and fighting an ever more dangerous battle. Around them, most of the other characters are there from the start: aloof, powerful, mysterious but benign Dumbledore, malevolent Snape, sneering and haughty Draco, bumbling Neville, loveable Hagrid and so on.
Harry Potter’s core ‘pitch’ might not have been a stunning novelty, but that didn’t matter. It’s a universally popular trope, and it was presented through a narrow POV of Harry and the small central cast, within a series of settings that were established quickly and clearly at the start, so that the individual adventures that progressed Harry along his journey could at the same time add little brushstrokes bit by bit to everyone, so we could start to see the impact of Ron’s wobbly self-esteem or Hermione’s vulnerability or Neville’s unexpected courage - all emerging without getting in the way of the plot.
It’s a hell of a good way to tell a story, or many stories, and build the engagement and loyalty of your audience as you do so. You don’t have to have the most innovative story-concept ever, when you’ve got a solid framework and characters who matter to your audience. So hey, at the end of every book Harry defeats the Big Bad: are we surprised? No. Does that matter? Not at all, because we’re there for the whole journey, not merely the punchline.
Now I think the first two seasons of Torchwood followed a near-identical template, and that is why the show grew such a passionately loyal fanbase. What would that original pitch of Torchwood have looked like? “Secret underground team of dysfunctional charmers fight to save the world from mystery menaces!”, maybe? Not in any way a radical concept, there are probably two dozen shows on air in the last five years that could fit into that spec.
But look at the way Torchwood told its story. We had that central set of the impregnable base, the Hub hidden from mere mortals, with its very specific tangibles: invisible lift, the Captain’s office, the Autopsy Bay, that hobo-chic main room with the blinging tech and untilitarian metal floors and gangways. Hogwart’s Express re-sprayed as the SUV. And we had core characters who were introduced to us one by one, with care, in a sequence of individual stories linked by being set within that fixed context, so that we got to know each of them in depth and then carried on learning through them.
Everything Changes is almost fully Gwen’s POV, she’s Harry and Jack is, idk, Hagridore with lashings of pheromones and a very close shave. That first ep spent its first half getting us grounded with nobody but Gwen, and all the Torchwood team are then seen as her fragmented impressions, but none of them too distracting to take our attention away from getting to know her.
Day One does the same thing, except the POV shifts a couple of times between Gwen and Jack, who stays enigmatic but also starts to show his key traits - flirty, frivolous, heartless, dashing, inexplicably passionate about a hand in a jar… Ghost Machine flicks between Gwen and Owen. We already know Owen at that point as the sarcastic, predatory cynic, striking but not terribly likeable - now we start to get some real depth to him, seeing his complicated reactions to a rape and murder victim he shouldn’t really feel responsible for. Cyberwoman springs on us all the almighty surprise of Ianto, but that one hour takes us from barely registering him, to telling a tiny, complete, awful doomed tragedy where he is hero and victim and fool and broken completely, ending with his first shaking steps out of the wreckage.
And look at how that episode also builds on the core concept of Torchwood and what we’ve seen to date. With the Cyberwoman we have the first real alien threat capable of destroying the whole world, a huge step up from the limited impact of Risen Mittens and orgasm gas and memory-toys. But then half the story is also about Ianto and Jack and the unexplained train-wreck of Something going on between them. On the side, Gwen and Owen - the two characters we know most about at this stage - start to reveal their mutual, if fraught, sexual attraction. Poor Toshiko, who isn’t going to be getting her time in the spotlight for another two eps, is discreetly disengaged from the rest of the team for a large part of Cyberwoman, because trying to flesh her out at this point, when there’s too little of her for us to go on, and too much going on in the rest of the story, would be distracting.
After Cyberwoman it’s another Gwen-and-Jack-centric ep, then a whole-team one where for the first time we really do get some sustained interaction between our five leads - by now, we know most of them well enough for that scattering of permutations and connections and reactions to be interesting to us. It’s even safe to take the action completely out of the core set at this stage, for a few hours. After that, Toshiko is the one in focus - again, in a way that is built to maximise our understanding and our empathy. To keep our attention on her, the location shifts back to Cardiff and specifically the Hub for much of the time in Greeks Bearing Gifts.
For the rest of the first season, with the exception of Random Shoes (an ep which, un-coincidentally, most fans dislike or just ignore), every story is told through our team’s assorted POVs. Susie’s return is really not so much about her Machiavellian genius, it’s about Gwen struggling instinctively to connect to her, the discomfort of Owen and Toshiko and in contrast, Jack’s steady, chilly but absolutely essential ruthlessness. Look at Out of Time - the three guest roles are strongly written and delivered, but it’s really all about Owen, Gwen and Jack encountering people who are their spiritual twins, and dealing with having to let each of them go in different ways.
For all that people jeer at Torchwood for cracky plots or supposed character inconsistencies, I think there always was a focus on the characters and their respective developments and interactions, that made everything else about the whole show watchable and compelling. Torchwood was *about* Torchwood - that team, in that magical otherworld right here within our own. It wasn’t ever really about the aliens or the threats or the bombs. Those things were the ideas, the punchlines for each week. But the whole thing was about the characters and how they lived, day to day, what changed them, what strengthened them.
For me, that was why the second season was especially strong. Again, the POV from start to finish is team, team and more team. John Hart has no significance except for his interactions with them. Rhys starts to become a POV character at exactly the same time and rate as he’s drawn into the Torchwood secret circle. Adam feels unsettling and odd right from the start, because the story metas itself - we, like the team, have no idea who this character is or how he got there, even though we’re apparently supposed to know him, like Jack when we look at him we don’t feel anything - no pride, no warmth.
Now, Children of Earth changed the core concept of Torchwood completely. This wasn’t a story about that team in that place, it was a story about a global threat and how the world deals with it, with Torchwood mostly dragged in the slipstream. Of course, it didn’t start like that, though: it started feeling like the established pattern of story-telling for Torchwood, from the POVs of the characters we know, in their safe place, dealing with the kind of anomaly they habitually deal with. As a narrative over the week, CoE was able to engage existing fans because it started from that familiar point. By the end of the week, with so much of that familiar, essential concept literally destroyed, it’s no wonder that the fandom was left reeling. Think of how Harry Potter would have been to read, if Deathly Hallows had kicked off with the obliteration of Hogwarts, Ron killed off before the final battle, and that battle itself taking place in Birmingham, say - some place where we’d never been before in the Potterverse.
The key new POV characters in CoE were Lois and Frobisher, and they were only a tiny part of the initial narrative. And Lois remained essentially a blank character, no more than the human tool that allowed our Torchwood team to Trojan-horse their way into where the London action was happening. With hindsight, nothing about Lois either makes sense or engages our interest: why she was so willing to compromise her job from day one, why she trusted total strangers who were being treated by the whole of Government around her as de facto terrorist menaces. What happened to her after Day Five? Does anyone actually care at all?
I’ve done it again, I know. Five million words to try to explain what is probably a flaw that can be expressed in seven: Miracle Day isn’t about Torchwood any longer. Torchwood used to be that whole collective concept, location and characters and a narrative focus which was about how they dealt with Stuff, not about the Stuff itself. Miracle Day is about The Miracle. It’s all about that one concept pitch - “what if everyone in the world stops dying?”. And that’s what’s being narrated, each week is a new chapter with new locations, new characters, new distraction: worldbuilding rather than character-building. Ten hours of plot about what has happened, how people in general are dealing with it, how the Establishment is dealing with it. The punchline won’t be “Torchwood solves it and saves the day”, any more than that was the punchline for CoE, where it was “bloody hell, people in power are shitty and inhumane! (p.s. - aliens are no better than us, really)”
So already, unless you find that one core concept thoroughly engrossing, MD doesn’t have much of a compulsive narrative pull. I’ll bet you five shiny groats the ‘miracle’ will have been undone by the end of the series, bongloads of people will suddenly die as Nature had intended, and the world will go on largely unchanged, leaving us all with the shocking message that - once again - People in Power Are Venal Selfish Fuckers, be that government, corporations, religion or whatever. So, not even the kind of punchline of an episode like Small Worlds, where we genuinely didn’t know Jack would sacrifice the life of one child without a struggle, to buy the safety of the rest of us.
But the real killer for me is that this concept is being narrated in such a piss-poor amateur, unengaging way. I’m serious. RTD creates characters and they pop to life onscreen in a handful of lines, usually, it’s his best gift. Look at Rose and Martha and the way we see them for the first time, in two stories which are entirely about them and their POV of this freak man-type alien who crashes into their lives. Now when Donna first turned up in The Runaway Bride, the POV initially was the Doctor’s, and there was a fair bit of negative reaction to her brash antagonism. When they meet again, in Partners In Crime, Donna gets the lion’s share of the POV, we see the story through her and we see her for what she is, in all her brilliant, slapdash, nosy, compassionate beauty.
Whose POV dominates Miracle Day? I honestly can’t tell you, because nothing seems to be happening through any of these characters, old or new: it’s all just happening to them, or around them, and they’re bobbing along in it all like so many little rubber duckies, just reacting in ways that don’t tell us enough about them for us to start caring about them. We should at the very least have some idea of how this is all happening from Gwen’s POV, and Jack’s - but I can’t see that myself. Jack seems to have closed off into new depths of enigmatic obscurity. He’s back to protect Gwen, is he? From where? Why doesn’t he do just that, then - get her out of this danger, and deal with the miracle by himself.
Like CoE, we’re getting hints that Jack knows more than he’s letting anyone know, including his whole bloody audience. Now, when did he ever do that in the first two years of Torchwood? He might have been reticent about his immortality, but Gwen witnessed it, so we knew about it. He didn’t discuss the dark old days squandered with John Hart, but he took care to let them know what they needed to know - that Hart wasn’t to be trusted. CoE pulled that bad crime novel trick of having one of our POV characters fail to tell us vital information he clearly knew all along. When the secret of Jack’s complicity is revealed, it breaks our engagement with him as a POV character - not because he’s done something reprehensible, but because he’s no longer a reliable narrator for us. And I’ll bet the same thing will be happening around Ep 7 or so on MD.
Too many duckies in MD too. Jack and Gwen, Rex and Esther, Vera and Danes and Jilly. Too many new characters introduced too soon, with not enough unobstructed focus on any of them to start building them into people we are introduced to properly. I’d said in another post that the characterisation is weak, and it is, for me: none of these new characters make any coherent sense. Look at how we saw Toshiko being built up - smart, smart, shy, smart, tough and competent under threat, crush on Owen (hm, romantic yearnings + dodgy judge of character?) - so then her faux pas with Mary makes perfect sense, that she longs to be loved and recognised and valued, as much as she’s curious about what makes the people around her tick. How does Esther read at this stage? Smart, smart - no wait, dumb, naïve, dumb, (the phones? The sister?), crush on Rex which… oh well, doesn’t really mean anything actually. Is there going to be a Mary for Esther? I’ll bet you five more groats there won’t, because knowing more about what makes Esther tick is not relevant to delivering the core concept of MD.
I don’t know, maybe it's hindsight talking, but a few eps into the first season and I could have written you drabbles about all the main characters. Hell, four eps in and I’d written my first Torchwood fanfic, that bugger just shot fully-formed straight out of my head, I could extrapolate a Ianto who would think Jack had brought him back to his flat to kill him and fake his suicide, as well as the Ianto who advises Jack on how best to do it so as not to cause too much of a mess.. For love nor money, I could not write you a word about any of these new characters - frankly I think Jack would stump me at this point - and Gwen is just this sort of swiss army girl now, like the old Gwen (ooh, domestic bliss is lovely BUT I CRAVE EXCITEMENT AND DANGER!!!) but with a billion new super-smarts and ninja fighting skills and Ianto’s dry wit and a BABY who…. hasn’t changed her in one single discernable way whatsoever. Thus making her quite unique amongst every baby-making friend and family member I’ve ever known.
Alright, time for me to shut up. Miracle Day is failed story-telling, for me: the core concept is one-note, everything in the script is only about the ramifications of that one note on a world full of strangers. None of the lead characters are being developed with anything like the necessary craft of care to make me start to find them engaging or intriguing as individuals, so I don’t give a shit how they relate to each other or what this miracle means for them. To top that off, of course, the last six eps for Torchwood before MD taught me something the previous 25 never had - that engaging with any “Torchwood” character is a waste of time anyway, because they’ll be dead soon so why bother?
And all of that put together seems to me to be a really atrocious way of making a drama that is supposed to be entertaining and engrossing. Torchwood used to tell stories about Torchwood, a tangible thing I knew and understood and empathised with and liked. Torchwood Miracle Day is telling a story about Miracle Day, a flashy ~edgy idea, and it’s telling it in a way that leaves me skidding across its glassy, greasy surface and shooting right off the other side. It’s crass bad storytelling, and I am actually a bit boggled that people actually enjoy this kind of drama, yes. But honestly more boggled that this is the best that RTD can manage at this time in his career, even with two years of development time, a bigger better budget, creative free rein and a team of experienced scriptwriters at his beck and call.
Well, he’s 47 like me. Maybe his creative mojo has just fizzled out at last?
I’m 56 now ofc and haven’t changed my view on this in the slightest, and RTD is probably every bit as stubborn and convinced of his own rightness in every creative decision he’s made. Even ‘Years and Years’ #hahahagsaahagshhaaaha!
...I’ve been thinking about Torchwood.
Four eps broadcast so far. I can’t give you an impartial sense of how well they’re doing, my perception is that the media critics are mostly still endorsing it as must-see TV, though there are some naysayers and some complaints about slow pace or lack of story-build. On fandom’s side, mostly I think those who were predisposed to hate it are hating it, those who wanted to love it are loving it, both sides are certainly vocalising their POVs quite widely. Overall, the fandom buzz seems to be far down on what CoE and even S2 were getting back in their day, though equally I think the non-fandom general audience buzz through Twitter looks far bigger and definitely more pro than anti.
There also seems to be very very little being generated so far from the new season by way of fannish creativity, or even meta that goes much deeper than straightforward ep reviews. The new characters aren’t inspiring reams of fic, there aren’t many new icons to be seen. That’s a definite change and one that can, for example, be compared to the fandom response to the last radioplay at the start of this month, after which it fair rained response fic and meta that was less about the actual content and more to do with the impact on individual fans’ feelings and mindsets.
No surprise that I’m in the predisposed-to-hate camp. I watched the first ep straight through, dl’d the second then ended up half-watching it on BBC1. The third ep I downloaded for the shag/s (which even AfterElton had to admit “didn’t please most of you as much as the titillating media foreplay that preceded it” - amazing that anyone is STILL guzzling RTD’s snake oil, honestly). I skimmed to that intercut scene - a bloodless unsexy rip-off of the far superior twinned snog montage of Cyberwoman - and did something else while the rest of the ep was on, which meant half-listening and not actually paying enough attention to grok what was happening. I do know it ended with Jack getting beaten up a lot, and me finding out I was just clean out of fucks to give.
I know those of us in the yah-boo camp have all posted various reasons why we’re not being seduced by this new series, and a lot of them point out the lack of the tangible things we liked about Torchwood in the first place - location, set, Myfanwy, SUV, characters, alien spooky-do, MotW story format, a certain darkly British sense of humour that meant the show could manage absurd high camp one minute, and thought-provoking moral dilemmas or emotional gut-punches the next, without losing grip on either.
At some point in the last week, what I really find repellent about the new series finally crystallised for me, enough so that I didn’t even bother to pull down last Friday’s US ep for mockery purposes.
Now I suspect some of the Miracle Day pompom wavers are putting on a bit of enforced gaiety, and others are so devoted to Barrowman they’d watch him paddle in silage for an hour and still come away perfectly contented. Nonetheless, there are undoubtedly quite a lot of people, fans and wider audience, who are watching and loving the new season of Torchwood. Viewing figures are holding around a tolerable +/- 1m for STARZ, and dropping by about 250k/week on the Beeb, but that’s still four or five million happy campers. What the show is doing now is working for them as satisfying entertainment, and I’m not belittling that in any way. This post is simply about me putting my finger, finally, on why I think it’s unsatisfying as entertainment, and it’s something that surprises me, given it’s something RTD has delivered over and over in previous series he’s conceived and scripted.
For me, the baseline is this: Torchwood Miracle Day is built on a fatally flawed narrative structure and premise, so it fails to engage interest in either the plot or the characters.
Look at Harry Potter. (I know, Ron’s much more fun to look at, but bear with me.) Part of its amazing success springs from J K Rowling either lucidly or intuitively choosing a core concept and narrative structure that pulls in the reader almost irresistibly. The core concept is the journey of a disenfranchised prince towards his pre-destined throne, through a fantastic enchanted kingdom that actually exists at a quantum level, right here in the same place as our own world. The narrative structure is a sequence of individual and effectively discrete stories, all of which fit together in a larger arc - but each being set in the same locations and replicating some of the basic parameters allows space and scope for the characters to change and grow within each story, building that growth layer by layer within a stable backdrop which doesn't need to take up valuable narrative focus.
The magical mysterious world just on the edge of our perception is a myth-staple in practically every culture I know, it has a timeless appeal. Rowling then ensured we as readers would find our way easily into that kingdom alongside Harry, by creating a basic stage set, if you like, and a small cast of characters we would get to know quickly. The main set is Hogwarts, which starts as an impenetrable safe eyrie, with its very specific tangibles: dorms, the Great Hall, the Quidditch field, the classrooms, where the narrative action can take place again and again. And while the POV almost never shifts from Harry, the main cast are fleshed out clearly through his eyes. So we have super-smart but vulnerable Hermione, average but loyal and determined Ron - the three of them brought together, not by Destiny, but pure chance: three in many ways quite ordinary characters, randomly forced by circumstance into uniting and fighting an ever more dangerous battle. Around them, most of the other characters are there from the start: aloof, powerful, mysterious but benign Dumbledore, malevolent Snape, sneering and haughty Draco, bumbling Neville, loveable Hagrid and so on.
Harry Potter’s core ‘pitch’ might not have been a stunning novelty, but that didn’t matter. It’s a universally popular trope, and it was presented through a narrow POV of Harry and the small central cast, within a series of settings that were established quickly and clearly at the start, so that the individual adventures that progressed Harry along his journey could at the same time add little brushstrokes bit by bit to everyone, so we could start to see the impact of Ron’s wobbly self-esteem or Hermione’s vulnerability or Neville’s unexpected courage - all emerging without getting in the way of the plot.
It’s a hell of a good way to tell a story, or many stories, and build the engagement and loyalty of your audience as you do so. You don’t have to have the most innovative story-concept ever, when you’ve got a solid framework and characters who matter to your audience. So hey, at the end of every book Harry defeats the Big Bad: are we surprised? No. Does that matter? Not at all, because we’re there for the whole journey, not merely the punchline.
Now I think the first two seasons of Torchwood followed a near-identical template, and that is why the show grew such a passionately loyal fanbase. What would that original pitch of Torchwood have looked like? “Secret underground team of dysfunctional charmers fight to save the world from mystery menaces!”, maybe? Not in any way a radical concept, there are probably two dozen shows on air in the last five years that could fit into that spec.
But look at the way Torchwood told its story. We had that central set of the impregnable base, the Hub hidden from mere mortals, with its very specific tangibles: invisible lift, the Captain’s office, the Autopsy Bay, that hobo-chic main room with the blinging tech and untilitarian metal floors and gangways. Hogwart’s Express re-sprayed as the SUV. And we had core characters who were introduced to us one by one, with care, in a sequence of individual stories linked by being set within that fixed context, so that we got to know each of them in depth and then carried on learning through them.
Everything Changes is almost fully Gwen’s POV, she’s Harry and Jack is, idk, Hagridore with lashings of pheromones and a very close shave. That first ep spent its first half getting us grounded with nobody but Gwen, and all the Torchwood team are then seen as her fragmented impressions, but none of them too distracting to take our attention away from getting to know her.
Day One does the same thing, except the POV shifts a couple of times between Gwen and Jack, who stays enigmatic but also starts to show his key traits - flirty, frivolous, heartless, dashing, inexplicably passionate about a hand in a jar… Ghost Machine flicks between Gwen and Owen. We already know Owen at that point as the sarcastic, predatory cynic, striking but not terribly likeable - now we start to get some real depth to him, seeing his complicated reactions to a rape and murder victim he shouldn’t really feel responsible for. Cyberwoman springs on us all the almighty surprise of Ianto, but that one hour takes us from barely registering him, to telling a tiny, complete, awful doomed tragedy where he is hero and victim and fool and broken completely, ending with his first shaking steps out of the wreckage.
And look at how that episode also builds on the core concept of Torchwood and what we’ve seen to date. With the Cyberwoman we have the first real alien threat capable of destroying the whole world, a huge step up from the limited impact of Risen Mittens and orgasm gas and memory-toys. But then half the story is also about Ianto and Jack and the unexplained train-wreck of Something going on between them. On the side, Gwen and Owen - the two characters we know most about at this stage - start to reveal their mutual, if fraught, sexual attraction. Poor Toshiko, who isn’t going to be getting her time in the spotlight for another two eps, is discreetly disengaged from the rest of the team for a large part of Cyberwoman, because trying to flesh her out at this point, when there’s too little of her for us to go on, and too much going on in the rest of the story, would be distracting.
After Cyberwoman it’s another Gwen-and-Jack-centric ep, then a whole-team one where for the first time we really do get some sustained interaction between our five leads - by now, we know most of them well enough for that scattering of permutations and connections and reactions to be interesting to us. It’s even safe to take the action completely out of the core set at this stage, for a few hours. After that, Toshiko is the one in focus - again, in a way that is built to maximise our understanding and our empathy. To keep our attention on her, the location shifts back to Cardiff and specifically the Hub for much of the time in Greeks Bearing Gifts.
For the rest of the first season, with the exception of Random Shoes (an ep which, un-coincidentally, most fans dislike or just ignore), every story is told through our team’s assorted POVs. Susie’s return is really not so much about her Machiavellian genius, it’s about Gwen struggling instinctively to connect to her, the discomfort of Owen and Toshiko and in contrast, Jack’s steady, chilly but absolutely essential ruthlessness. Look at Out of Time - the three guest roles are strongly written and delivered, but it’s really all about Owen, Gwen and Jack encountering people who are their spiritual twins, and dealing with having to let each of them go in different ways.
For all that people jeer at Torchwood for cracky plots or supposed character inconsistencies, I think there always was a focus on the characters and their respective developments and interactions, that made everything else about the whole show watchable and compelling. Torchwood was *about* Torchwood - that team, in that magical otherworld right here within our own. It wasn’t ever really about the aliens or the threats or the bombs. Those things were the ideas, the punchlines for each week. But the whole thing was about the characters and how they lived, day to day, what changed them, what strengthened them.
For me, that was why the second season was especially strong. Again, the POV from start to finish is team, team and more team. John Hart has no significance except for his interactions with them. Rhys starts to become a POV character at exactly the same time and rate as he’s drawn into the Torchwood secret circle. Adam feels unsettling and odd right from the start, because the story metas itself - we, like the team, have no idea who this character is or how he got there, even though we’re apparently supposed to know him, like Jack when we look at him we don’t feel anything - no pride, no warmth.
Now, Children of Earth changed the core concept of Torchwood completely. This wasn’t a story about that team in that place, it was a story about a global threat and how the world deals with it, with Torchwood mostly dragged in the slipstream. Of course, it didn’t start like that, though: it started feeling like the established pattern of story-telling for Torchwood, from the POVs of the characters we know, in their safe place, dealing with the kind of anomaly they habitually deal with. As a narrative over the week, CoE was able to engage existing fans because it started from that familiar point. By the end of the week, with so much of that familiar, essential concept literally destroyed, it’s no wonder that the fandom was left reeling. Think of how Harry Potter would have been to read, if Deathly Hallows had kicked off with the obliteration of Hogwarts, Ron killed off before the final battle, and that battle itself taking place in Birmingham, say - some place where we’d never been before in the Potterverse.
The key new POV characters in CoE were Lois and Frobisher, and they were only a tiny part of the initial narrative. And Lois remained essentially a blank character, no more than the human tool that allowed our Torchwood team to Trojan-horse their way into where the London action was happening. With hindsight, nothing about Lois either makes sense or engages our interest: why she was so willing to compromise her job from day one, why she trusted total strangers who were being treated by the whole of Government around her as de facto terrorist menaces. What happened to her after Day Five? Does anyone actually care at all?
I’ve done it again, I know. Five million words to try to explain what is probably a flaw that can be expressed in seven: Miracle Day isn’t about Torchwood any longer. Torchwood used to be that whole collective concept, location and characters and a narrative focus which was about how they dealt with Stuff, not about the Stuff itself. Miracle Day is about The Miracle. It’s all about that one concept pitch - “what if everyone in the world stops dying?”. And that’s what’s being narrated, each week is a new chapter with new locations, new characters, new distraction: worldbuilding rather than character-building. Ten hours of plot about what has happened, how people in general are dealing with it, how the Establishment is dealing with it. The punchline won’t be “Torchwood solves it and saves the day”, any more than that was the punchline for CoE, where it was “bloody hell, people in power are shitty and inhumane! (p.s. - aliens are no better than us, really)”
So already, unless you find that one core concept thoroughly engrossing, MD doesn’t have much of a compulsive narrative pull. I’ll bet you five shiny groats the ‘miracle’ will have been undone by the end of the series, bongloads of people will suddenly die as Nature had intended, and the world will go on largely unchanged, leaving us all with the shocking message that - once again - People in Power Are Venal Selfish Fuckers, be that government, corporations, religion or whatever. So, not even the kind of punchline of an episode like Small Worlds, where we genuinely didn’t know Jack would sacrifice the life of one child without a struggle, to buy the safety of the rest of us.
But the real killer for me is that this concept is being narrated in such a piss-poor amateur, unengaging way. I’m serious. RTD creates characters and they pop to life onscreen in a handful of lines, usually, it’s his best gift. Look at Rose and Martha and the way we see them for the first time, in two stories which are entirely about them and their POV of this freak man-type alien who crashes into their lives. Now when Donna first turned up in The Runaway Bride, the POV initially was the Doctor’s, and there was a fair bit of negative reaction to her brash antagonism. When they meet again, in Partners In Crime, Donna gets the lion’s share of the POV, we see the story through her and we see her for what she is, in all her brilliant, slapdash, nosy, compassionate beauty.
Whose POV dominates Miracle Day? I honestly can’t tell you, because nothing seems to be happening through any of these characters, old or new: it’s all just happening to them, or around them, and they’re bobbing along in it all like so many little rubber duckies, just reacting in ways that don’t tell us enough about them for us to start caring about them. We should at the very least have some idea of how this is all happening from Gwen’s POV, and Jack’s - but I can’t see that myself. Jack seems to have closed off into new depths of enigmatic obscurity. He’s back to protect Gwen, is he? From where? Why doesn’t he do just that, then - get her out of this danger, and deal with the miracle by himself.
Like CoE, we’re getting hints that Jack knows more than he’s letting anyone know, including his whole bloody audience. Now, when did he ever do that in the first two years of Torchwood? He might have been reticent about his immortality, but Gwen witnessed it, so we knew about it. He didn’t discuss the dark old days squandered with John Hart, but he took care to let them know what they needed to know - that Hart wasn’t to be trusted. CoE pulled that bad crime novel trick of having one of our POV characters fail to tell us vital information he clearly knew all along. When the secret of Jack’s complicity is revealed, it breaks our engagement with him as a POV character - not because he’s done something reprehensible, but because he’s no longer a reliable narrator for us. And I’ll bet the same thing will be happening around Ep 7 or so on MD.
Too many duckies in MD too. Jack and Gwen, Rex and Esther, Vera and Danes and Jilly. Too many new characters introduced too soon, with not enough unobstructed focus on any of them to start building them into people we are introduced to properly. I’d said in another post that the characterisation is weak, and it is, for me: none of these new characters make any coherent sense. Look at how we saw Toshiko being built up - smart, smart, shy, smart, tough and competent under threat, crush on Owen (hm, romantic yearnings + dodgy judge of character?) - so then her faux pas with Mary makes perfect sense, that she longs to be loved and recognised and valued, as much as she’s curious about what makes the people around her tick. How does Esther read at this stage? Smart, smart - no wait, dumb, naïve, dumb, (the phones? The sister?), crush on Rex which… oh well, doesn’t really mean anything actually. Is there going to be a Mary for Esther? I’ll bet you five more groats there won’t, because knowing more about what makes Esther tick is not relevant to delivering the core concept of MD.
I don’t know, maybe it's hindsight talking, but a few eps into the first season and I could have written you drabbles about all the main characters. Hell, four eps in and I’d written my first Torchwood fanfic, that bugger just shot fully-formed straight out of my head, I could extrapolate a Ianto who would think Jack had brought him back to his flat to kill him and fake his suicide, as well as the Ianto who advises Jack on how best to do it so as not to cause too much of a mess.. For love nor money, I could not write you a word about any of these new characters - frankly I think Jack would stump me at this point - and Gwen is just this sort of swiss army girl now, like the old Gwen (ooh, domestic bliss is lovely BUT I CRAVE EXCITEMENT AND DANGER!!!) but with a billion new super-smarts and ninja fighting skills and Ianto’s dry wit and a BABY who…. hasn’t changed her in one single discernable way whatsoever. Thus making her quite unique amongst every baby-making friend and family member I’ve ever known.
Alright, time for me to shut up. Miracle Day is failed story-telling, for me: the core concept is one-note, everything in the script is only about the ramifications of that one note on a world full of strangers. None of the lead characters are being developed with anything like the necessary craft of care to make me start to find them engaging or intriguing as individuals, so I don’t give a shit how they relate to each other or what this miracle means for them. To top that off, of course, the last six eps for Torchwood before MD taught me something the previous 25 never had - that engaging with any “Torchwood” character is a waste of time anyway, because they’ll be dead soon so why bother?
And all of that put together seems to me to be a really atrocious way of making a drama that is supposed to be entertaining and engrossing. Torchwood used to tell stories about Torchwood, a tangible thing I knew and understood and empathised with and liked. Torchwood Miracle Day is telling a story about Miracle Day, a flashy ~edgy idea, and it’s telling it in a way that leaves me skidding across its glassy, greasy surface and shooting right off the other side. It’s crass bad storytelling, and I am actually a bit boggled that people actually enjoy this kind of drama, yes. But honestly more boggled that this is the best that RTD can manage at this time in his career, even with two years of development time, a bigger better budget, creative free rein and a team of experienced scriptwriters at his beck and call.
Well, he’s 47 like me. Maybe his creative mojo has just fizzled out at last?
I’m 56 now ofc and haven’t changed my view on this in the slightest, and RTD is probably every bit as stubborn and convinced of his own rightness in every creative decision he’s made. Even ‘Years and Years’ #hahahagsaahagshhaaaha!