Mark’s TV: TORCHWOOD
When all the hype surrounding the latest series of Doctor Who has died down, it’s always nice to see the Torchwood team hanging around in the shadows, porking aliens and killing each other (if you think I’ve got that the wrong way round, then you’ve never seen Torchwood). Whereas Doctor Who has moved away from David Tennant and Russell T. Davies’s broad spectrum appeal ,and is instead increasingly setting its sights on a target audience who really should be learning their multiplication tables, Torchwood has slowly but surely graduated into proper event television; no mean feat for what remains a wholehearted science fiction show.
Nowadays Doctor Who still gets all the plaudits, but it’s lost a lot of its heart by reverting its eponymous, albeit questionably qualified, physician into an altogether alien being, unwilling to grasp human behaviours and bouncing around like a child in his granddad’s clothes.
Torchwood on the other hand has had the confidence to grow and grow in its own right, barely ever mentioning its links with Who. When it started, Torchwood was a saucy, seaside postcard style, alien romp, with Doctor Who recurring character Capt. Jack Harkness (the usually shiny teethed and shinier suited, Tonight’s The Night host, John Barrowman) and a team of good looking alien hunters going up against randy spirits and cannibals. It was Buffy-like really, and if it had stuck to that tone it would not have lasted. Thankfully the second series darkened the tone, with two lead characters dying (one died twice, after being a zombie for a while and bemoaning the fact that he could no longer raise his mizzen-mast). That was nothing compared to Children of Earth though, which spanned a whole week’s worth of programming and saw the usually light hearted Jack sacrificing his own Grandson. It was heavy stuff, but looking back the tone perfectly set-up the more American styled fourth series, Miracle Day.
Miracle Day has been made by show runner, and ex-Who scribe, Russell T. Davies but marks the first time the series, or indeed any established UK show, has been made in conjunction with an American Network, in this case Starz. Of course there was always the danger that pairing a distinctly British sci-fi show with American money and effects would work about as well as an answering machine endorsed by Rupert Murdoch, but it looks Miracle Day could be a miracle in its own right, as so far this joint venture seems to be working remarkably well.
With the original core Torchwood cast now whittled down to just Jack and feisty Welsh lovely Gwen (Eve Myles, who can, er, Torch my Wood anytime? Nope that didn’t make sense, but she’s cracking). The path is clear for this international story to introduce a new set of previously unlikely new Torchwood members. The interesting premise of Miracle Day is that, just after the word Torchwood has flashed across every government computer in America and deleted all mentions of the group from the internet, humans stop dying. Now, this has thrown up a few logistical problems, such as when an exploded man’s head moved its eyes (not to mention how all the old people will get around Asda on a Saturday), and, disappointingly, nobody has tried a Groundhog Day style inventive death tournament, but we’ll let those minor niggles slide because Miracle Day is looking like it could be something special indeed.
The main reason that it seems to be working is that the Americans haven’t tried to remake Torchwood outright, because as we all know, The Office aside, US remakes of UK shows have traditionally gone down about as well as pissing in the swimming pool from the diving board. Torchwood though has done a good job of taking its small regular cast and transplanting them not only to another country but also into the American style of writing drama. For a start there are far more characters flitting around, with none of them seemingly connected by anything more than the loosest of threads, for example there’s a doctor and a murdering paedophile who’ve both met the same PR agent and an ever increasing mystery with ever more duplicitous figures at the tops of various organisations.
With a series length of ten episodes, Torchwood is clearly going to take its time to settle into its new groove, and to tease out its central mystery in the same way as many other genre shows such as Lost and Fringe, so don’t expect it to solve the mystery of why no-one is dying anytime soon, that explanation will probably come in episode nine or so. All signs point to a thoroughly satisfying mix of British storytelling with American flair, so the conclusion should be well worth the journey.
Unfortunately, the mystery that Torchwood can never hope to solve is just how it manages to make a matinee style, sequins and teeth presenter like John Barrowman into a bona fide, swashbuckling legend. It would seem that some phenomenon are simply too bizarre even for science fiction to tackle.
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Guess
