A love declaration in four parts: Torchwood: Children of Earth

[selenak]

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

Comments

[elisi]

This is all wonderful. Thank you for writing it.

[selenak]

You're more than welcome.

[kaffy_r]

"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."

I already was caught up in CoE; already thought it was damned good television - and then this scene took place, and I realized I was watching something close to a masterpiece. The way RTD wrote these characters' rationalizations and step-by-step delivery into hell of their own souls showed me that he understood how to write horror: make the abyss obvious, but then render that non-anvilicious by using simple reportorial drama to document the fall, and put your words into the mouth of excellent actors.

[selenak]

There is no "safe" distance in that scene - that the external pressure is provided by aliens doesn't matter, because the falling into euphemisms, the class-based selection criteria, the spin (and who'd have thought the voice of the Daleks could rock the screen like that?) - that is is something you know would happen in real life, because it already has happened, and there is no escaping from that...

[ponygirl2000]

I just watched CoE not to long ago - it's amazing how a series which I disliked in the first season, found greatly improved but not gripping in the second, could completely blow me away in this mini-series. I felt love for our regulars but if Jack never returns and Gwen decides to retire, a re-constituted Torchwood consisting entirely of secondary characters from this mini-series is something I would gladly watch.

[selenak]

Same here. I mean, I don't think it will happen, but I so would watch that.

[iko]

This is really wonderful and does articulate a lot of what I love out of Torchwood: Children of Earth. Thank you!

If we are to never see the continuation of Torchwood Three's stories, I think that would be a huge shame.

[selenak]

I'm in two minds about this - CoE is so great that I think it would make a good ending, yet on the other hand I also love both old and new characters so much I'd love to have them back on my tv. Basically, I guess, that means I'm happy either way...

[kalypso_v]

One thing Children of Earth did was sell me the Jack/Ianto relationship. In the earlier series, it seemed so unequal; in this, from the moment they turned round at the same moment in the hospital to the moment they pushed their way into Thames House, they were a partnership. (It suddenly occurs to me that Torchwood presents Jack as much more of a serial monogamist than one would expect from his appearances in Doctor Who.)

One weakness was that I thought the children, nominally the heart of the story, were undercharacterised; the young Frobishers are the only ones I remember as individuals. I was puzzled they didn't do more with Steven; if they'd inserted a scene in which Jack was teaching him Torchwoodian spy games, and he'd later used one of those techniques independently of his mother, he would have seemed a less passive figure, and I would have had a stronger sense of what it cost Jack to sacrifice him. It didn't really matter, in that Lucy Cohu's performance as Alice conveyed the tragedy very powerfully in itself, but it

[big_n_happy]

One thing Children of Earth did was sell me the Jack/Ianto relationship.

This. It felt like a relationship and not a piece of slash-bait.

[selenak]

re: Steven - might have been simply a question of screentime. Or of young actor age - I noticed that the children in the Whoverse who get to do actual acting scenes, like young Reinette, young Amelia or the Frobisher girls, are all older than that little boy was. In the end, as you say, it's sold to us via Alice (and after all, Jack sacrificing his grandson also means in a very real sense sacrificing his daughter), and Lucy Cohu is certainly up for the job.

Jack and Ianto: I know what you mean. The relationship made no sense whatsoever to me in s1, with it going from "I'm gonna kill you!" in Cyberwoman to "Stopwatch, Sir?" two eps later; s2 contextualized this a bit more with the Fragments flashback which at least to me had the implication that Ianto and Jack already had sex pre-Cyberwoman (since Ianto definitley used flirting to get his job and had no way of explaining he wasn't available without revealing Lisa) and the stopwatch remark was Ianto signalling they could go back to the usual. But I still thought it was mostly there