It’s An Odd World…
…. when by a very long measure the best television you’ve seen all year is Torchwood. But even allowing for the fact that I haven’t seen much TV this year anyway, let alone much quality stuff, nevertheless, the first two years of the series, while entertaining in places, were also terrible in others and generally you’d have to say they were fairly lightweight fluff at best.
Series three - Torchwood: Children of Earth is a significantly different matter. And note some spoilers follow, so if you haven’t seen it yet come back when you’ve found a way to do so. Seriously - watch this.
Stripped over five days, Executive Producer Russell T Davies said that he wanted to create a TV event, and by most sensible measures you’d have to say he succeeded. The ratings were amazing for;
a) a sci-fi series,
b) airing in the summer, and
c) a transfer from BBC2 and BBC3 at that.
In fact, the ratings barely wavered from the first night’s, which is unusual enough, but some nights they went up, and the Audience Appreciation numbers were above 80.
Torchwood has always been touted as the ‘adult’ Doctor Who spin-off, but it managed to get a bad rep as assuming that adult had to equate to sex and swearing. This year I think they’ve managed to keep a focus on the idea that ‘adult’ = ‘about adults’. The story is nominally about aliens coming to Earth having taken over the planet’s children as a communication channel, and demanding one tenth of those children as a ‘gift’.
I say ‘nominally’, because what it’s really about is how humanity deals with that situation. And it’s not pretty. The first couple of days are largely occupied with action scenes as the British government decides that the imminent arrival of the aliens, known as The 456 and who secretly visited Britain back in 1965, requires the assassination of Captain Jack Harkness and the Torchwood team as well as several others we never meet. The impending alien menace is kept vague but given increasing power by the undeniably creepy messages delivered through the children. This is against a backdrop of Gwen discovering she’s pregnant and Ianto wondering how to deal with the fact that his relationship with Jack is shifting from just a bit of fun into a full-scale Thing.
Once the 456 arrived on day three, everything changed, and the core theme; “how we would deal with this situation” kicks in. The politicians have to deal with an apparently superior species that wants to take millions of children away or it will wipe out the human race. Watching the British cabinet meeting on day four was the point at which the growing sense of “Bloody hell is this really Torchwood?” exploded into “Bloody hell is this the best television in years?”. Watching the discussion and the hellish rationalisations the politicians adopt was the kind of viewing that you simply can’t look away from.
And then, just when a ray of hope appears in the form of the Torchwood team managing to re-assert themselves, it all finally goes to hell, with the death of a regular at the end of day four making the prospects for day five as bleak as you think it’s possible to get.
And then day five itself dawns and things just get worse.
Let’s face it, Torchwood isn’t where you go expecting mature relationships and intense political drama. But it is now. One of the things that I think this year’s run achieved was to make a brilliant job of showing how sci-fi can be used as a framework within which to explore ‘real’ issues. It’s what all the best sci-fi does, and I honestly think (though I couldn’t imagine ever saying this) that these five hours absolutely represent some of the best sci-fi.
The final resolution of the 456 problem has been criticised for being too quick, but the point here is that the 456 weren’t really the problem. We were. The reason for the assassination attempts was to keep the events of 1965 (which Jack was part of) secret, when the clearly better strategy would have been to work with the experts to try and resolve the crisis. Politics didn’t allow that. The emotional conclusion forces one of the team to confront exactly the same dilemma as the politicians faced on a different scale, and while the politicos are clearly meant to be the bad guys, it reinforces the fact that sometimes there isn’t a perfect answer. Though as I just noted, if the politicians had acted better in the first place maybe no one would have faced that grim choice.
Torchwood: Children of Earth: Gripping, chilling, warm, human, dramatic, entertaining, compelling, disturbing, tense, distressing, depressing, bleak. Adult.
Who’d have thought it?
July 15th, 2009 at 9:17 am
I did think that the resolution was all a bit quick, but I do take your point. It was certainly bloody good, and I was another person who had quickly given up on Torchwood …