A love declaration in four parts: Torchwood: Children of Earth
These last days I've been rewatching Torchwood: Childen of Earth, and oh, it really is as good as I remember. Bloody brilliant, as Gwen Cooper would say. RTD, John Fay, James Moran, Euros Lyn and all the actors created something great there, and those five hours alone would make me appreciate everyone involved if they had never done anything else in their entire career.
Now I've never been shy about my Children of Earth love, and already wrote my extensive meta on the female characters in particular shortly after it was broadcast, but I feel like indulging in another round of praise. So, in more general terms, four reasons why I loved that five part miniseries so much:
I. If one of RTD's unqestioned virtues in New Who was that he managed to reintroduce Classic Who characters and concepts over time in a way that was interesting to Old Who fans and new watchers alike, then a parallel virtue in CoE is that it both builds on the previous two Torchwood seasons and is a self-contained story. To give some examples: when Gwen early in Day One starts her working day by entering the Hub, sits down on her computer, gently touches the photo of Tosh and Owen and says "hello" before switching the computer on, this takes only a few seconds, and if you've never seen an episode of Torchwood before, you don't have to wonder who the hell this is. If you're familiar with the show, on the other hand, it's both touching (unless you loathed both Owen and Tosh, and I really doubt the later has enemies, even if the former has) and a reminder that Torchwood employees have a very limited life expectancy, even if they're regulars (ahem). Later, when Rupesh Patanjali shows up on the Torchwood screens, Jack and Ianto gloat over having lured him there as a test and Gwen, amused and appalled, says: "You bastards, that's exactly what you did to me, sod that, I'm promoting myself to recruitment officer", the scene works on its own account, but gains if you remember Gwen's original introduction to Team Torchwood, not least because it highlights the way Gwen has developed since then. (Remembering the TW pilot is useful in another regard, too; Suzie Costello = Rupesh Patanjali, is all I'm saying.) Then there's the big revelation at the end of Day Three, about Jack's part in handing over twelve children to the 456 in 1965. Ianto says early in Day Four "the Jack I know would have stood up to them," but then Ianto hasn't watched the show, he's just lived in it. He definitely has not watched Jack's flashback to his recruitment by Torchwood in season 2's Fragments. As
solitary_summer put it: If this is an organisation that will torture and kill innocent people, and you leave in moral outrage but then come crawling back anyway, albeit with a bit of an attitude - not because you suddenly believe in what they're doing, not because they actually made good on their threats and put some real pressure on you, but because you couldn't care less how you spent to next century, and they suited your needs, and actually go on working for them for the next hundred years, that compromises you. The 1965 incident graphically demonstrates how far that compromise went for Jack Harkness, and what happens during Children of Earth is because the consequences catch up with him, just as they do with the British goverment.
II. Which brings me to the virtue of ensembleness Children of Earth has. In addition to the Torchwood regulars plus two recurring Torchwood characters (i.e. Jack, Gwen, Ianto plus Rhys and Andy), we have the new characters, John Frobisher, Bridget Spears, Alice and Steven Carter, Ianto's sister Rhiannon and her husband Johnny, Lois Habiba, Johnson, Decker, Clem, the PM Brian Green and Home Secretary Denise Riley, plus the unfortunate wannabe mole Dr. Patanjali. That is a really big cast, and yet they were all so memorable and interesting that on this rewatch, which is my fourth, all in all (I rewatched it three times directly after the original broadcast), I didn't skip a single scene. Now I've heard the criticism that Children of Earth is really their story, which the Torchwood characters almost superfluos. I don't think so. (And before anyone brings this up, I am aware that CoE is an idea of RTD's which he had long before Torchwood, but let's talk about end results, shall we?) The new and "old" characters mirror, contrast and move each other forward. Frobisher, arguably the most important of the new characters, both is and isn't the Jack of 1965. They're both "the man", representative of the goverment to conclude an unsavoury deal which rests on sacrificing "a few" deemed expendable for what they need to believe is the greater good. Because of that, they eventually both end up between two horrible alternatives. But they are different, and not just because Jack's immortality excludes a suicide option. Frobisher's choice - killing his children, his wife and himself - is nihilistic, with no hope for saving anything beyond sparing the girls a life as a drug supply; Jack's choice, as devastating as it is, is to save millions. Earlier, in Day Three, when Jack makes an attempt to blackmail Frobisher, Frobisher counters by declaring he has Alice and Steven, Jack threatens to go back for Frobisher's wife and children, and Frobisher says he won't "because you're a better man than me." (He still, as we learn in Day Four, sends security to his house immediately.)
Lois, the young ingenue of the story (and another example of RTD's conviction that office workers = secret superheroes), is in a similar way a contrast and parallel to Gwen, the TW member who shares the most scenes with her and becomes a sort-of-mentor. She's innocent in a way Gwen isn't any longer, the curious young bright thing stumbling across a grey conspiracy Gwen gets introduced as in the TW pilot, getting a job offer from Torchwood in the course of the story. But the events Lois finds herself entangled in are more complicated and more far reaching, and for her there's no rescue-by-returning-from-the-dead-Jack at a critical moment (the one time she sees him, in passing, Jack plain ignores her); instead, Lois gets Bridget Spears, and the possibility not for saving the day but bringing down one of the people responsible (and refusing to acknowledge responsibiliity) for the ongoing catastrophe, the PM.
The way Jack and Ianto interact with their respective family members are wonderful examples of economic storytelling. Unexpected!relations of established characters showing up, either on tv or in fanfic, are often a tricky business and easy to do wrong (a prime example of how not to do it would be Jack's brother Gray in season 2, btw). Rhiannon and Johnny Davies and Alice Carter, by contrast, are examples of how to do it right. In the scene with Ianto, his sister, and eventually his brother-in-law, you get an enormous amount of information about their relationship without any obvious info dump, starting with Ianto coming in and immediately handing out money to the two children - who evidently expected this from him - without saying anything to them, which tells you in a few seconds a lot about Ianto and children. Rhiannon evidently hasn't seen him in a while, but as opposed to Alice she accepts his pretense for wanting to spend time with Micah and David without questioning it; she just has no intention of saying yes, and grills him about his private life instead, establishing both affection and big sisterly entitlement. Her reaction to his coming out is one of the most realistic I've seen on tv, making it clear both why Ianto didn't want to come out to her at first and why he needn't have worried. (For all the exclaimed "but really?"s, she eventually settles on "he's nice, though, isn't he?", i.e. what counts is that the person Ianto is treats him well.) Similarly, brother-in-law Johnny coming in and promptly making crude jokes without being characterized as malicious and evil at all (on the contrary, he simultanously extends a bear hug and will come through for Ianto in a big way in the next episode) both makes it clear why Ianto is a less than frequent visitor in the Davies household and makes his own choice of exterior (suits) and attitude (polite, with or without sarcastic undertones) a deliberately contrasting choice. As I've said before, the whole kitchen scene made Ianto a real person to me in a way he hadn't been before. Meanwhile, the Jack, Alice and Steven encounter is similarly exquite and layered in conveying so much in so short a screen time. Jack, too, is a less than frequent visitor, but apparantly visits often enough that Steven not only recognizes but joyfully greets him, and Alice isn't surprised to find him at her doorstep at all. Alice asks Jack immediately about the day's odd occurances, revealing that as opposed to Rhiannon, she's informed about the kind of job her Torchwoodian really has. Jack, who is usually good at lying, here doesn't even sound convincing when he says "I don't" (know about the reason for the children's behaviour - he really doesn't at this point, but he totally sounds as if he's lying), Alice's little aside about her ex husband remembering Steven's birthday ("there are worse fathers") reveal Jack can't have been a constant presence in her own childhood and that there is a tenseness in her relationship with Jack, and if one of the reasons for it is addressed openly (the aging factor), so is the reality of the affection between them (when Jack makes her laugh with his grey hair line). And then comes the climax of this particular scene (and evil, evil foreshadowing of the best type), when Jack makes his pitch, suggesting ever so casually to spend some "him and me" quality grandfather time with Steven. That Alice immediately draws the right conclusion about his reason for the request - i.e. that he needs a child for an experiment - not only tells us she's intelligent and distrustful but also the larger reason why her relationship with her father is so tense, which has nothing to do with the fact she ages and he doesn't. Again, this in turn also tells us something about Jack, something we haven't seen before because it's about Jack as a father, and yet it fits with what we know because if you think about it, Jack's behaviour as a leader of his team isn't dissimilar. (His interaction with Gwen in Adrift comes to mind, and also resurrecting Owen in Dead Man Walking.) Whatever he did in Alice's own childhood and adolescence to make her (correctly) conclude that "how about some family time" translates into "need a child for alien-investigating experiment" , it probably wasn't a one time only thing, given that her "you bastard" sounded utterly unsurprised. There is just so much hinted at, and so much fertile ground for fanfiction, that I'm constantly surprised (and frustrated) it doesn't get more written.
III. Suspense, suspense, suspense, but never at the expense of character exploration: even during repeated rewatching and knowing everything that is to come, Children of Earth frequently makes me hold my breath. The start of Day Two, Gwen's escape sequence, is on one level a great action set piece, and on another characterisation of Gwen and her relationship with Rhys. We've come a far way from Gwen freezing in terror with a gun in her hand in s1 of Torchwood; here, she uses what she has to free herself, starting with her teeth, and then the gun she gets from the man who tried to subdue her. But she hasn't become the complete opposite of who she used to be, either; she doesn't kill the fake ambulance man but renders him unconscious, and later goes for shooting the wheels (something I'm frequently wondering why it's not done by more people trying to escape in action films) of the car pursuing her, not Johnson and her team. Retrieving Rhys and going on the run with him happens among much yelling as to if he only left the keys at the same place each time, they wouldn't have a problem, which is just so married and so Gwen and Rhys that even if you haven't seen these two before, you get a good sense of what their relationship is like. As is Rhys' offer to carry the bag so Gwen's trigger finger remains free, for which she understandably kisses him. It's suspenseful, funny and touching at the same time, and I love it.
(Sidenote: CoE is a really dark story, but as with most of RTD's writing, the crack and the comic relief moments are interwoven, except, for obvious reasons, at the climax, in Day Five. Rhys following up Lois' shocking revelation that her boss ordered the Torchwood team's assassination with a request for food, Ianto rescuing Jack from concrete the way he does, the Frobisher girls messing with their father via "we want a pony", Gwen and Rhys bickering about smileys in the midst of Lois' spying on the first 456 meeting all being cases in point.)
The most suspense and horror in CoE, however, happens via conversations, not action pieces, and the fact that this is so and works is a case of direction, acting and writing all coming together so fantastically well. Frobisher's negotiatons with the 456 are, objectively speaking, nothing but one man talking to a glass tank to a shape in it carefully only hinted at, but Peter Capaldi is incredible in those scenes (and their aftermaths, as when Frobisher after the first of these conversations leaves the room and only then permits himself to break down in the floor and just sit, silently), and it's a screaming injustice that he hasn't won some kind of award for them already. The COBRA meetings in Day Four are nothing but people sitting around a table, talking, not often raising their voices. And yet these scenes are among the most horrifying I've ever ever seen on tv, with the way the unspeakable becomes rationalized and rendered in euphemisms terribly familiar. Because there is not a moustache-twirling supervillain bent on ruling the world in sight. These are very human beings, and that's the most chilling thing of all.
IV. Character love. In s1, I liked none of the Torchwood team, though I found some more interesting than others. Somewhere during the hiatus and early s2, this changed, and by mid s2 I realized I had come to like the lot and even love some of them. But I've never loved them more than during Children of Earth, both as a team (I'm including Rhys and Andy here) and as individuals. From the easy familiarity, banter and fondness of their exchanges (I already quoted Gwen's reaction to Jack and Ianto's supposed Patanjali scam) to their reaction to the unfolding tragedy (Gwen walking between the corpses at the end of Day Four, uncovering Jack, then Ianto kills me every time, especially that slight straightening of Ianto's tie she does) I really feel for and with all of them, I'm never outside, just observing, which wasn't often the case in earlier seasons. As for the new characters, I'm fascinated even by those I dislike (and am supposed to, as Denise Riley, the class criteria selecting minister), and love many (Rhiannon, Lois, Bridget, Frobisher, Alice and Johnson). That last silent look between Jack and Alice near the end of Day Five is one of the most heartrendering moments in the entire DW and TW verse. I'd never thought it possible Torchwood could make me feel so much; I learned better. Thank you. Thank you, Torchwood: Children of Earth.
Now I've never been shy about my Children of Earth love, and already wrote my extensive meta on the female characters in particular shortly after it was broadcast, but I feel like indulging in another round of praise. So, in more general terms, four reasons why I loved that five part miniseries so much:
I. If one of RTD's unqestioned virtues in New Who was that he managed to reintroduce Classic Who characters and concepts over time in a way that was interesting to Old Who fans and new watchers alike, then a parallel virtue in CoE is that it both builds on the previous two Torchwood seasons and is a self-contained story. To give some examples: when Gwen early in Day One starts her working day by entering the Hub, sits down on her computer, gently touches the photo of Tosh and Owen and says "hello" before switching the computer on, this takes only a few seconds, and if you've never seen an episode of Torchwood before, you don't have to wonder who the hell this is. If you're familiar with the show, on the other hand, it's both touching (unless you loathed both Owen and Tosh, and I really doubt the later has enemies, even if the former has) and a reminder that Torchwood employees have a very limited life expectancy, even if they're regulars (ahem). Later, when Rupesh Patanjali shows up on the Torchwood screens, Jack and Ianto gloat over having lured him there as a test and Gwen, amused and appalled, says: "You bastards, that's exactly what you did to me, sod that, I'm promoting myself to recruitment officer", the scene works on its own account, but gains if you remember Gwen's original introduction to Team Torchwood, not least because it highlights the way Gwen has developed since then. (Remembering the TW pilot is useful in another regard, too; Suzie Costello = Rupesh Patanjali, is all I'm saying.) Then there's the big revelation at the end of Day Three, about Jack's part in handing over twelve children to the 456 in 1965. Ianto says early in Day Four "the Jack I know would have stood up to them," but then Ianto hasn't watched the show, he's just lived in it. He definitely has not watched Jack's flashback to his recruitment by Torchwood in season 2's Fragments. As
solitary_summer put it: If this is an organisation that will torture and kill innocent people, and you leave in moral outrage but then come crawling back anyway, albeit with a bit of an attitude - not because you suddenly believe in what they're doing, not because they actually made good on their threats and put some real pressure on you, but because you couldn't care less how you spent to next century, and they suited your needs, and actually go on working for them for the next hundred years, that compromises you. The 1965 incident graphically demonstrates how far that compromise went for Jack Harkness, and what happens during Children of Earth is because the consequences catch up with him, just as they do with the British goverment.
II. Which brings me to the virtue of ensembleness Children of Earth has. In addition to the Torchwood regulars plus two recurring Torchwood characters (i.e. Jack, Gwen, Ianto plus Rhys and Andy), we have the new characters, John Frobisher, Bridget Spears, Alice and Steven Carter, Ianto's sister Rhiannon and her husband Johnny, Lois Habiba, Johnson, Decker, Clem, the PM Brian Green and Home Secretary Denise Riley, plus the unfortunate wannabe mole Dr. Patanjali. That is a really big cast, and yet they were all so memorable and interesting that on this rewatch, which is my fourth, all in all (I rewatched it three times directly after the original broadcast), I didn't skip a single scene. Now I've heard the criticism that Children of Earth is really their story, which the Torchwood characters almost superfluos. I don't think so. (And before anyone brings this up, I am aware that CoE is an idea of RTD's which he had long before Torchwood, but let's talk about end results, shall we?) The new and "old" characters mirror, contrast and move each other forward. Frobisher, arguably the most important of the new characters, both is and isn't the Jack of 1965. They're both "the man", representative of the goverment to conclude an unsavoury deal which rests on sacrificing "a few" deemed expendable for what they need to believe is the greater good. Because of that, they eventually both end up between two horrible alternatives. But they are different, and not just because Jack's immortality excludes a suicide option. Frobisher's choice - killing his children, his wife and himself - is nihilistic, with no hope for saving anything beyond sparing the girls a life as a drug supply; Jack's choice, as devastating as it is, is to save millions. Earlier, in Day Three, when Jack makes an attempt to blackmail Frobisher, Frobisher counters by declaring he has Alice and Steven, Jack threatens to go back for Frobisher's wife and children, and Frobisher says he won't "because you're a better man than me." (He still, as we learn in Day Four, sends security to his house immediately.)
Lois, the young ingenue of the story (and another example of RTD's conviction that office workers = secret superheroes), is in a similar way a contrast and parallel to Gwen, the TW member who shares the most scenes with her and becomes a sort-of-mentor. She's innocent in a way Gwen isn't any longer, the curious young bright thing stumbling across a grey conspiracy Gwen gets introduced as in the TW pilot, getting a job offer from Torchwood in the course of the story. But the events Lois finds herself entangled in are more complicated and more far reaching, and for her there's no rescue-by-returning-from-the-dead-Jack at a critical moment (the one time she sees him, in passing, Jack plain ignores her); instead, Lois gets Bridget Spears, and the possibility not for saving the day but bringing down one of the people responsible (and refusing to acknowledge responsibiliity) for the ongoing catastrophe, the PM.
The way Jack and Ianto interact with their respective family members are wonderful examples of economic storytelling. Unexpected!relations of established characters showing up, either on tv or in fanfic, are often a tricky business and easy to do wrong (a prime example of how not to do it would be Jack's brother Gray in season 2, btw). Rhiannon and Johnny Davies and Alice Carter, by contrast, are examples of how to do it right. In the scene with Ianto, his sister, and eventually his brother-in-law, you get an enormous amount of information about their relationship without any obvious info dump, starting with Ianto coming in and immediately handing out money to the two children - who evidently expected this from him - without saying anything to them, which tells you in a few seconds a lot about Ianto and children. Rhiannon evidently hasn't seen him in a while, but as opposed to Alice she accepts his pretense for wanting to spend time with Micah and David without questioning it; she just has no intention of saying yes, and grills him about his private life instead, establishing both affection and big sisterly entitlement. Her reaction to his coming out is one of the most realistic I've seen on tv, making it clear both why Ianto didn't want to come out to her at first and why he needn't have worried. (For all the exclaimed "but really?"s, she eventually settles on "he's nice, though, isn't he?", i.e. what counts is that the person Ianto is treats him well.) Similarly, brother-in-law Johnny coming in and promptly making crude jokes without being characterized as malicious and evil at all (on the contrary, he simultanously extends a bear hug and will come through for Ianto in a big way in the next episode) both makes it clear why Ianto is a less than frequent visitor in the Davies household and makes his own choice of exterior (suits) and attitude (polite, with or without sarcastic undertones) a deliberately contrasting choice. As I've said before, the whole kitchen scene made Ianto a real person to me in a way he hadn't been before. Meanwhile, the Jack, Alice and Steven encounter is similarly exquite and layered in conveying so much in so short a screen time. Jack, too, is a less than frequent visitor, but apparantly visits often enough that Steven not only recognizes but joyfully greets him, and Alice isn't surprised to find him at her doorstep at all. Alice asks Jack immediately about the day's odd occurances, revealing that as opposed to Rhiannon, she's informed about the kind of job her Torchwoodian really has. Jack, who is usually good at lying, here doesn't even sound convincing when he says "I don't" (know about the reason for the children's behaviour - he really doesn't at this point, but he totally sounds as if he's lying), Alice's little aside about her ex husband remembering Steven's birthday ("there are worse fathers") reveal Jack can't have been a constant presence in her own childhood and that there is a tenseness in her relationship with Jack, and if one of the reasons for it is addressed openly (the aging factor), so is the reality of the affection between them (when Jack makes her laugh with his grey hair line). And then comes the climax of this particular scene (and evil, evil foreshadowing of the best type), when Jack makes his pitch, suggesting ever so casually to spend some "him and me" quality grandfather time with Steven. That Alice immediately draws the right conclusion about his reason for the request - i.e. that he needs a child for an experiment - not only tells us she's intelligent and distrustful but also the larger reason why her relationship with her father is so tense, which has nothing to do with the fact she ages and he doesn't. Again, this in turn also tells us something about Jack, something we haven't seen before because it's about Jack as a father, and yet it fits with what we know because if you think about it, Jack's behaviour as a leader of his team isn't dissimilar. (His interaction with Gwen in Adrift comes to mind, and also resurrecting Owen in Dead Man Walking.) Whatever he did in Alice's own childhood and adolescence to make her (correctly) conclude that "how about some family time" translates into "need a child for alien-investigating experiment" , it probably wasn't a one time only thing, given that her "you bastard" sounded utterly unsurprised. There is just so much hinted at, and so much fertile ground for fanfiction, that I'm constantly surprised (and frustrated) it doesn't get more written.
III. Suspense, suspense, suspense, but never at the expense of character exploration: even during repeated rewatching and knowing everything that is to come, Children of Earth frequently makes me hold my breath. The start of Day Two, Gwen's escape sequence, is on one level a great action set piece, and on another characterisation of Gwen and her relationship with Rhys. We've come a far way from Gwen freezing in terror with a gun in her hand in s1 of Torchwood; here, she uses what she has to free herself, starting with her teeth, and then the gun she gets from the man who tried to subdue her. But she hasn't become the complete opposite of who she used to be, either; she doesn't kill the fake ambulance man but renders him unconscious, and later goes for shooting the wheels (something I'm frequently wondering why it's not done by more people trying to escape in action films) of the car pursuing her, not Johnson and her team. Retrieving Rhys and going on the run with him happens among much yelling as to if he only left the keys at the same place each time, they wouldn't have a problem, which is just so married and so Gwen and Rhys that even if you haven't seen these two before, you get a good sense of what their relationship is like. As is Rhys' offer to carry the bag so Gwen's trigger finger remains free, for which she understandably kisses him. It's suspenseful, funny and touching at the same time, and I love it.
(Sidenote: CoE is a really dark story, but as with most of RTD's writing, the crack and the comic relief moments are interwoven, except, for obvious reasons, at the climax, in Day Five. Rhys following up Lois' shocking revelation that her boss ordered the Torchwood team's assassination with a request for food, Ianto rescuing Jack from concrete the way he does, the Frobisher girls messing with their father via "we want a pony", Gwen and Rhys bickering about smileys in the midst of Lois' spying on the first 456 meeting all being cases in point.)
The most suspense and horror in CoE, however, happens via conversations, not action pieces, and the fact that this is so and works is a case of direction, acting and writing all coming together so fantastically well. Frobisher's negotiatons with the 456 are, objectively speaking, nothing but one man talking to a glass tank to a shape in it carefully only hinted at, but Peter Capaldi is incredible in those scenes (and their aftermaths, as when Frobisher after the first of these conversations leaves the room and only then permits himself to break down in the floor and just sit, silently), and it's a screaming injustice that he hasn't won some kind of award for them already. The COBRA meetings in Day Four are nothing but people sitting around a table, talking, not often raising their voices. And yet these scenes are among the most horrifying I've ever ever seen on tv, with the way the unspeakable becomes rationalized and rendered in euphemisms terribly familiar. Because there is not a moustache-twirling supervillain bent on ruling the world in sight. These are very human beings, and that's the most chilling thing of all.
IV. Character love. In s1, I liked none of the Torchwood team, though I found some more interesting than others. Somewhere during the hiatus and early s2, this changed, and by mid s2 I realized I had come to like the lot and even love some of them. But I've never loved them more than during Children of Earth, both as a team (I'm including Rhys and Andy here) and as individuals. From the easy familiarity, banter and fondness of their exchanges (I already quoted Gwen's reaction to Jack and Ianto's supposed Patanjali scam) to their reaction to the unfolding tragedy (Gwen walking between the corpses at the end of Day Four, uncovering Jack, then Ianto kills me every time, especially that slight straightening of Ianto's tie she does) I really feel for and with all of them, I'm never outside, just observing, which wasn't often the case in earlier seasons. As for the new characters, I'm fascinated even by those I dislike (and am supposed to, as Denise Riley, the class criteria selecting minister), and love many (Rhiannon, Lois, Bridget, Frobisher, Alice and Johnson). That last silent look between Jack and Alice near the end of Day Five is one of the most heartrendering moments in the entire DW and TW verse. I'd never thought it possible Torchwood could make me feel so much; I learned better. Thank you. Thank you, Torchwood: Children of Earth.