So I was thinking, as you do, about some of the criticisms levelled at Torchwood. Specifically the one more personal to those of us who are fans of the show, but still feel the need to point out that Countrycide/Random Shoes/Small Worlds/pick your episode, aren't what we call intelligent science-fiction
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I would agree with that, and add that if a show's good enough, you'll tolerate being clueless for a little while. If it's interesting, and the characters are well-drawn, you're okay being not quite sure of what else is happening. And in Torchwood there actually isn't that much plot carrying over, so I'm not sure how much of a problem it would be. Once you know roughly what Torchwood do, most of the episodes are fairly stand-alone ( ... )
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Exactly - if we saw them 'on the job' as it were, how much effort would it take to at least set up who our main characters are? Owen-as-doctor, Ianto-as-glorified teaboy (*hugs Ianto*), Tosh-as-tech!girl, Suzie-as-2IC, Jack-as-boss. Which is, pretty much, what ep1 of West Wing does. Or a lot of the early but not pilot eps of Firefly for that matter - mention enough that the audience knows who everyone is, without losing your plot, and without exposition dump.
Given how flaky and 'human' the rest of them are, we hardly need Gwen as the 'human' element:*g* Too true. I suppose the contrast is meant to be Gwen at the beginning thinking they've all been down there too long, with Gwen at the end and the retcon etc. But I don't think Tosh, Ianto, or even Owen are as 'alien' as Gwen seems to think. They seem to me just humanly screwed up, with the added problem of being able use alien tech to try, badly, to make their lives better. ( ... )
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Also, as risky as any show is, the writers/producers still want to get it renewed for another season - so, unless they be David Lynch, they are never going to push it too far ( ... )
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I was going to babble on about the differences between Gwen and Rose in a character arc kind of way, but that really has nothing to do with this post. Suffice to say that I too am glad that Gwen has a little more bite/conflict to her transformation, and also that the show played around with all of its ensemble cast. I wouldn't have minded a little more of an arc, especially with the bad-guys, but, yeah, life is indeed messier than that :-)
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This is probably right, though I do think it would have been more shocking than Eugene's death, in that he was set up as a one-episode character, and Gwen was set up as a POV. But yeah, a few episode in would have been worse/better. Upsetting, anyway, and possibly more trust-destroying than doing it in ep1.
The information part, at least information other than just how Torchwood works, we probably would have had problems with. Especially with Jack, who is not a man for revealing his secrets. But then we found out about Ianto's independently of Gwen, and Tosh is the one told about Jack in the end, when he thinks they're stuck. I'm not saying it wouldn't have been harder to do, but I do think the show could have managed it. And the "Jack keeping secrets and thus provoking his team to betray him and nearly end the world" arc would have been interesting to play with when we really knew nothing about anyone else.
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Oh, I do think we could have gotten what information we do have about them without Gwen. More like...if we put everything we know about all the characters into a pool and average it out, without Gwen, the average would come out a bit smaller.
Though Jack keeping secrets and not knowing anything about anyone else--definitely interesting, IF they were able to pull it off.
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