Queer as Torchwood, starring Cap’n Ambiguous and a bunch of nobodies.
Eve Myles is nice, though.
“He came and went!”
Well, it’s all a bit bollocks, in’it?
I like parts of it, but it definitely feels oddly small.
Time Rift=Hellmouth is sort of okay, but it takes a big dose of my disbelief pills to get over the rest of it.
And those flashing lights in the car bug the hell out of me for two reasons. One, they’re trying to be stealthy, two they’re inside the car.
I’m up to episode 4 now, and I rather enjoy it. There are a lot of heavy shows on lately, and this is light, popcorn media. This is coming as a person who never really watched Dr. Who, though I am tempted to download the current series.
Edit-
Now I’m up to episode 6, which I think is the most recent. The entire episode, save for the end, felt rather out of place.
What’s with the rampant, OTT lesbianism in British television shows these days? I had the same problem with Hex. It’s really off-putting. because while I won’t deny the titillation, it means that the show itself is shit.
I’ve watched the first 5, and downloaded the 6th but haven’t gotten around to watching it, which basically highlights the “meh” attitude I have to the show. I pretty much agree with Cliffski’s comments above.
The sex and gay sex just seems so superfluous and inappropriate given the context of the show - the whole show could be summed up as a less-polished British version of x-files, where random cast members find inexplicable reasons to get in sexual situations with members of the same or different sex (a seemingly random determination, not based in any way upon previously revealed characterization).
And the action is lame. And nobody ever does what they’re supposed to for poor Captain Jack, and there are no consequences to such rampant insubordination and reckless endangerment of, well, the Earth.
And the glowy lights on the van for a secret organization bug me. And all the redundant helicopter shots, usually of the van driving at night. And the standing perched looking down on things.
I like the new twist to Captain Jack’s character, and that he’s carrying around the Doctor’s hand, and the tie-ins to the Doc’s shows, and the pteradactyl – since it’ll lead into the 3rd season of the doc, in which Captain Jack is going to reappear, I’ll probably keep watching the remainder of the season, but I kinda hope it’s not renewed.
Having watched the first six episodes, I decided to take a quick look back at the London Torchwood shown in the last two Doctor Who episodes.
Suddenly it all made sense to me. The Doctor treats the London Torchwood staff like children and openly mocks them during his time among them. Originally, I thought this was his usual deal with being a pain towards any military or government organization, but then I realized that this was very much different from his dealings with UNIT.
The Doctor was treating Torchwood like idiots who have only succeeded in not blowing up the planet by pressing the wrong button on any alien tech through sheer luck because that’s exactly what they are.
This suddenly made the antics of the Cardiff Torchwood easier to be moderately entertained by. You can’t look at them as a top secret organization that’s out to protect the world that just happens to have poor writers who can’t properly write for such.
You have to look at them as a bunch of buffoons who can’t even sort out their own social lives, let alone save their part of the globe.
After all, according to the first episode, there were four Torchwood branches: London, Cardiff, a small office in Glasgow staffed by a “very strange man”, and a fourth that’s simply disappeared.
If you look at those offices as different parts of a whole organization, it appears that London was the administrative headquarters, Glasgow was probably the records and accounting department and the fourth was probably Research & Development, which probably couldn’t resist touching the shiny red button on the portable black hole generator they found.
Cardiff? Remember Lucius Fox’s basement department in Batman Begins where all the failed test products go? That’s Cardiff. Their responsibility was as cleanup crew, boxing and storing dangerous alien devices while keeping a supply of corpses to cover up the Torchwood London’s mistakes.
After the Cyberman-Dalek battle, however, there’s no Torchwood London, and now Cardiff is free to do whatever they feel like. Except that they’re idiots on the scale of the Scooby Doo gang.
Only with a omni-sexual immortal instead of Fred and a black SUV with blue LEDs instead of the Mystery Machine van.
So that’s how I’m managing to have a little fun with such a poorly written series, and yes, I know full well I’ve just put more thought into the series than its writers.
It really does have the oddest premise for any show I can remember in a long time. As you watch it you can’t help but sit there and wonder what they were thinking, or what were they going for?
There’s no context to it, and no rhyme or reason. It’s as if their only real power is invisibility to government oversight, and they’ve cobbled together a vague, half-formed philosophical mission to justify it all to themselves.
They have a dinosaur flying around their ceiling and a sentient alien in their jail. One that they’ve decided to turn into their target practice target.
“Torchwood, outside the government, beyond the police: tracking down alien life on earth and arming the human race against the future. The 21st century is when everything changes, and you’ve got to be ready.”
… at least that’s what Captain Jack believes Torchwood is about. Mind you, his version is a different take on what the director of Torchwood in London stated, that the organization’s mission was to “protect against the alien and keep the British Empire great”.
Hell, Jack is exactly the type of alien (morally and temporally) that Queen Victoria would have wanted Torchwood to protect against. Yet he’s fully in charge of a group of individuals who can’t quite figure the very same out.
The Doctor pondered why he’d never heard of Torchwood before. I suspect it was because they’ve never really been competent enough that they could get past the Doctor’s UNIT handlers during most of his time on the planet.
I also suspect that they were never really that powerful until the London head took a more “corporate” approach to things.
From Jack’s phone conversations in the seventh episode, Torchwood doesn’t appear to be nearly as in “outside” the reach of the government and the United Nations as they’d like to think.
“Torchwood, outside the government, beyond the police: tracking down alien life on earth and arming the human race against the future. The 21st century is when everything changes, and you’ve got to be ready.”
… at least that’s what Captain Jack believes Torchwood is about. Mind you, his version is a different take on what the director of Torchwood in London stated, that the organization’s mission was to “protect against the alien and keep the British Empire great”.
Hell, Jack is exactly the type of alien (morally and temporally) that Queen Victoria would have wanted Torchwood to protect against. Yet he’s fully in charge of a group of individuals who can’t quite figure the very same out.
The Doctor pondered why he’d never heard of Torchwood before. I suspect it was because they’ve never really been competent enough that they could get past the Doctor’s UNIT handlers during most of his time on the planet.
I also suspect that they were never really that powerful until the London head took a more “corporate” approach to things.
From Jack’s phone conversations in the seventh episode, Torchwood doesn’t appear to be nearly as in “outside” the reach of the government and the United Nations as they’d like to think.
I watch Queer as Torchwood when I’ve run out of other forms of entertainment.
They need to make the real Doctor Who seasons longer :/
My favourite part is that they can’t even handle their own mission. Take this week’s. Toshiko* gets a mindreading pendant, described as one of the most powerful things she’s ever had, and DESTROYS IT, because…
…uh, she heard her colleagues say some incredibly, incredibly minor things behind her back. No suggestion at all of ‘Well, use it for interrogations and missions and not to be Nosey Jane around the office…’
(* Note to writers, if your script is crap, along the lines of Countrycide, you really, really don’t want your actors running around yelling ‘TOSH! TOSH! TOSH!’ every few seconds)
Well … “Random Shoes” … not the greatest writing ever, but it was a better “Love & Monsters” episode than the actual Doctor Who “Love & Monsters”.
We need a book of poetry. It’s not funny.
… meanwhile, Firefly is still canceled.
Just watched “They keep killing Susie.”
May I just say… Aaaargh! All this show does is crawl up it’s own ass, and yet I can’t stop myself from watching it.
Yeah, those goddamned Brits, it’s all their fault an American TV show was cancelled!!
I finally watched the rest of this, and it was a staggeringly, toweringly, monumentally stupid show. I swear I’ve never seen anything so badly written, or with such ridiculous leaps of logic in place of genuine plotting or writing.
And then… after all that… we get a giant stupid monster and plan to defeat it that would be embarrassing in a Roger Corman movie.
Seriously loaded with WTF moments from beginning to end. I’ve never watched something that is such a total train wreck before, but it is truly something to see. I want to find a fan of this show just so I can humiliate them.
SPOILER
Looks like Captain Jack is back on Doctor Who…
Only for a bit, unfortunately.
Everyone working for Torchwood is bisexual, and it’s rather odd because that would seem to be a statistical anomaly.