Welcome to my 50th blog, and the chosen subject for today is Torchwood. I have a habit of only doing blogs on things I dislike, people I'm not keen on, the media and how it's run and finding the negative points in human nature, such as love. I thought, for a bit of a change, this cynic would do a blog on something I did rather like, thus why Torchwood is the chosen subject.Last week Torchwood did a week long story line for Series 3. Monday's episode was entitled 'Children of Earth - Day One', Tuesday's episode was 'Children of Earth - Day Two' and so on, until Friday with 'Children of Earth - Day 5' being the finale. I really wanted the voice of the Geordie guy who does the Big Brother voiceover, or Marcus as his mother named him, to come on say the title of each episode. That would have made me chuckle, but he didn't so I had to do an impression of him saying that myself, everyday.
The story line was, to put it simply, the children of Earth being controlled by drug-dealing aliens in an attempt to scare the world into giving them 10% of the child population of Earth in return for not killing everyone and Captain Jack Harkness being killed and resurrected many a time. This is his party trick really, someone will shoot him, and then he'll come back to life. Essentially his life would be a real-life version of Grand Theft Auto, if he was real, which he isn't.
I actually don't like this. I think everyone who watches Torchwood or Doctor Who, knows that Jack can't be permanently killed, and he will always come back to life, so we don't need to keep having it demonstrated to us. I didn't count how many time he was killed last week, and I wish I had, because to me, it seems that the writers are not the most imaginative bunch; keep using the same bit time and time again. They would kill him off for the suspense of 'Would he come back to life?' which we all knew he would. It just gets boring. It ended up very similar to this - "Oh Jack's Dead, Alive again, he's dead again, no wait, he's alive, oops he's died again - clumsy fellow, what a surprise, alive again" and so on and so forth.
Anyway, forgetting that, I did actually thoroughly enjoy the short but sweet series. The story line was actually very good, apart from the occasional boring bit which just dragged on for too long. The series also gave the viewers a chance to practice a whole range of emotions from disgust to sadness and confusion to shitting ourselves. Pretty much everyone can agree that the scenes in day two, after Jack had been blown apart and his body started to grow back, was rather shockingly, confusingly disgusting.
After that the viewing girls were giving a treat as some would call it, and got to see his penis, if only for a few seconds. Every woman with Sky+ would surely have used it.
I think everyone can also conclude that the finale was a very emotionally based episode, and I'm not afraid to admit, I actually got a bit tearful. For me, I think the most emotional bit was when John Frobisher (The Secretary to the Home Office) got a gun and shot his family then himself, to stop them from having to suffer being taken by these Aliens. Other emotional bits in the series finale were when the army were taking the kids and the parents screaming, as well as when Jack's Grandson died, as a result of Jack saving the world again.
That's right, in this series; we also found out that Jack had a daughter and also a Grandson, just to make the series that bit more emotional. And as if that wasn't enough, Ianto dies in the arms of Jack, before Jack dies again that is, but don't worry, he did come back to life, but Ianto didn't.
There really wasn't much Alien action in those five episodes, which was a bit of let down really. For a sci-fi drama, there really wasn't. A lot of emotion, that makes it a drama yes, but otherwise it was just a lot of people sitting around tables talking, talking to silhouette of an Alien in a glass container, people with Welsh accents running and Jack dying. You see, I find it really hard to like anything on TV these days because I'm just too cynical about everything. I read too much into everything, and I'm very good at 'Knit-picking'; picking holes in everything.
I even found a continuity error, albeit a small one, but towards the end of episode 3, Mr Dekker, or the guy who was always wearing the brown coat as he may be more commonly known, was in one camera angle counting on his hands, but in another angle, he wasn't.
It seems the credit crunch has hit the big BBC dramas. With Doctor Who being put down to 3 episodes this year and Torchwood being put down to 5, without a huge amount of special effects. That's why it's been more emotion based rather than the normal action-packed episodes where they run around shooting Aliens or having sex with them as the previous 2 series have been. If you think about it that way, it was a bit of a cheapskate really, but hey, nether-the-less, it wasn't too bad.
That was blog 50 then m’lovelys, but blog 51 shall come soon.
Toodles m’dearys
xXXx
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