Torchwood: Because I had to.

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT

As a fan of all things Doctor Who, I felt it was time I turned my attention to the spinoff series Torchwood. Now I had actually seen an episode of TW before I saw a single Doctor Who episode, and I didn't like it. To be fair, it was the final part of a five-part mini-series and I didn't know who any of the characters were, save one, and I didn't fully understand the stakes. All this in mind, I still thought it was a bit melodramatic and ended on an extremely dark note. But, again, I'm a completist and I like the crap out of DW, so after a few months, I thought I'd give it another chance. Luckily, all of Torchwood is available for instant play on Netflix. God. Bless. Netflix.


First some context. In the first season of the revived Doctor Who, a character was introduced in the last five episodes. His name was Capt. Jack Harkness and he at first appears to be a normal WWII American Air Force pilot on loan to the British. He is quickly revealed to be a 51st Century Time Agent-cum-Con Artist. He's a roguish character, the Han Solo of the series. He's morally ambiguous and a bit of a loose cannon, but never the less a loyal companion to The Doctor. Capt. Jack is played by openly gay actor John Barrowman, which I'm sure aided in the decision to make the character Omnisexual (men, women, aliens, monsters, etc.) and added yet another layer to his already colorful personality. The showrunner of the updated series was Russell T. Davies, the creator of Queer as Folk, and I think in general it was a very brave awesome thing to do to introduce a main character on a "family" show who is GLBT. At the end of the season, Capt. Jack is killed by a Dalek only to be brought back to life by the energy of time. He is, however, stranded in the far future, seemingly forever. That isn't the case, however.

During Doctor Who's second season, there are multiple references to the Torchwood Institute, a secret organization started by Queen Victoria as a means of protecting the Crown against alien threats, the Doctor among them. In that season' finale, Torchwood reveals that it takes and adapts alien technology for service to the the United Kingdom, but they are all but destroyed. Or, the LONDON part of Torchwood was destroyed. Torchwood 3 is working just fine over in Cardiff, Wales.


And that's where Torchwood season 1 picks up. In Cardiff, as is explained in a Doctor Who episode, there is a temporal rift allowing time and space matter to travel between dimensions, making it a hotspot for alien phenomenon. This follows the Buffy model of having all the action take place around a single area that happens to attract the paranormal. Makes it easy to keep the location shots cheap. Since both Doctor Who and Torchwood are BBC Wales productions, all they have to do is go outside. When series one begins, Captain Jack is the leader of a small team consisting of medic Owen Harper (Burn Gorman), tech-savvy Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori), and stuffy paper-pusher Ianto Jones (Gareth David-Lloyd). In the very first episode, they are more or less discovered by Police Constable Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) who helps solve the case and is inducted into the world. Blah blah blah, heard it all before.

It took me about five months to get passed the first four episodes. Torchwood was a "post-watershed" series, which in Britain, given the limited number of television station, is the designation of a show that airs later at night and can have much more adult content, including graphic violence, sexual content, and bad language. I am always up for heaping helpings of all of these, except when they aren't handled well. It felt to me that the writers didn't know how to make a show of this nature and as such put in huge amounts of sex unnecessarily, or just because they could. In many cases, the sex didn't have anything to do with the story and was really more just titillation for the sake of it. Sci-fi writers generally don't know how to deal with sex. Gwen, who is dating blue collar Rhys (Kai Owen) has an affair with Owen which is neither interesting nor very important to their characters. There was also, amongst the sex, a fair amount of homosexual activity. One episode finds Toshiko (a female, the name's not a giveaway to anyone outside of Japan) in a relationship with a mysterious blonde woman who ends up being an alien, wouldn't ya know it? Another ends with a sweeping, 360-degree camera sweep around Capt. Jack passionately kissing goodbye to a young military man of the same name. I definitely applaud the show for going there and that much doesn't distract, it's just used in such a sensationalized way.


One bit I did enjoy about the season is just how deeply damaged all the characters are. Gwen struggles with her personal life and her work life, Owen hates himself and wants to die, Tosh is crippled with insecurity about everything, and Ianto, a straight man, grapples with his growing romantic feelings toward Jack. We also learn little bits about what happened to Jack after he was stranded in the 24th century. Turns out the time energy that brought him back to life left him immortal, or more accurately, left him with the ability to come back to life after getting killed. He is shot, stabbed, strangled, smothered, and other means of dispatch not beginning with S only to eventually gasp back to life. We also learn that he somehow got sent back to the late 1800s and has to live through the whole 20th century waiting for the off-chance the Doctor will come find him.

Because of the not-so-great writing and sometimes way dramatic acting, I'd say I actually liked 2 and a half episodes of the 13. But I kept watching because I heard it got better. At the end of Torchwood season 1, Jack goes off to find the Doctor leaving his team without a leader. That storyline picks up in the last three episodes of Doctor Who season 3 where Jack does indeed find The Doctor and travels with him and his new companion Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman). A whole mess of stuff happens that I won't get in to if you ever want to watch it, but at the end of it, Jack decides he misses his team and working for and with Torchwood and leaves The Doctor to return to them.

But when he does, at the beginning of Torchwood season 2, he finds a team that is at once happy to have him back and resentful that he left in the first place. During this season, the writer's calmed down a bit and found their own rhythm. They introduced a few character's from Jack's past (which is our future... wibbly wobbly timey wimey) and strengthened the character relationships. Gwen is engaged to her boyfriend Rhys and eventually tells him about her job. Toshiko tries to confess her feelings to Owen, who just doesn't get it. Ianto embarks on a romantic relationship with Jack that is allowed to develop naturally. My favorite arc occurs in the middle of the season where Martha, now an agent of UNIT (Unified Intelligence Taskforce) comes to Torchwood to help. During this time, Owen is killed and Jack tries to bring him back to life. It half works. Owen is animated again, but he's still technically dead. None of his bodily functions are operating, his heart isn't beating, he doesn't get tired, he can't drink or have sex. If he's injured, it won't heal. So he has to deal with being the living dead, which doesn't go too well.


Season two had uniformly better writing and acting, but it was still far too "monster-of-the-week" and often those monsters were uninteresting. The season ends with Owen being disintegrated and Tosh is killed by the bad guy, leaving Torchwood severely diminished. The next time we see Jack, Gwen, and Ianto is during the finale of Doctor Who season 4, where every character who ever existed reappears. It's a pretty ridiculous finale. But after THAT, is the five-part miniseries "Children of Earth" which is pretty damn amazing, I must admit. It's basically a sci-fi version of 24, which I also loved. The writing is top notch as are the guest stars. I could try to describe what it's about, but I wouldn't want to spoil any part of it. If you like sci-fi at all and think I have good taste in anything, give "Children of Earth" a watch. It's on instant play on Netflix and it's only five episodes. What's stopping you!?!?!


For a whole calendar year, there's been no new Torchwood, but in the recent weeks it has been announced that BBC, BBC Worldwide, and Starz Entertainment are teaming up to produce a fourth season of Torchwood, starring the remaining cast, and adding new people. This version will also travel beyond Cardiff for an "international flavor." I won't say I'm excited, but I have tempered optimism. The show improved every time it came back, and if it ups the ante of CoE, then we're in for some excellent crap.

Man, I do go on.

You're welcome.
-Kanderson

Top 6: Pathetic Alien Threats

Today I decided to look at that time-tested movie trope of the alien invasion. Almost from the time we realized there was an outer space we've been dreaming about the life that might exist somewhere among the stars. And almost as immediately, we decided they were probably hostile and would kill us, the paranoid meat sacks that we are. However, some of these "threats" posed in popular fiction have been slightly less frightening than, say, a blender turned to frape. Whether too ridiculous, convoluted, or just plain timid, these are the alien invaders we could easily give a swirly to.


VI - WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953, 1988, 2005)
This one goes at the bottom (top) of the list because these aliens and their tripod spacecrafts actually do kill a great deal of people. It's the perfect plan: "Martians" attack us in order to use our planet as their own. They begin growing their vegetation and pretty much decimate the planet. The only problem, of course, is they couldn't get passed our first, best, and only line of defense... which is a germ. These sophisticated alien invaders must not have any immune system to speak of because they wither and die in a matter of minutes after catching some unnamed bacterial infection, leaving nothing but empty husks. When the novel was written by H.G. Wells in 1898, this was probably a viable answer to the problem. Now, on the other hand, it's kind of a cop out. I hope if the aliens do invade, they're this lame. I have a cold right now, let me cough on the fuckers.


V - THE BLOB (1958)
Similar situation as War of the Worlds, this little nugget features Steve McQueen as a teenage drag racer facing off against, well, the Blob. It's basically just that. An alien that is nothing more than an amorphous mass of red gelatin that engulfs whatever's in its path. It seems pretty horrible, until you find out that it can be easily stopped by a fire extinguisher. Apparently, the pressurized CO2 can render the entire thing useless and indeed freezes it utterly. Once it can't blob after anyone anymore, the military drops it in the middle of the arctic circle, which is great until the polar ice caps melt. So soon we're going to have to deal with global warming AND huge gooey alien things. Thanks again, military! If you get passed the silly horror, The Blob is actually a very thinly veiled warning against the growing Communist threat. A huge, seemingly unstoppable RED thing is sucking everything into itself and making good, honest Americans a part of its evil marauding. Not bad for 1958. All credibility does go out the door with the easier than necessary solution, and of course this hysterically out of place theme song.


IV - SIGNS
Here's a message to all you would-be alien invaders out there: If you're going to invade a planet and do the whole "gas them with your weird arm toxin" thing, maybe don't invade a planet made predominantly of the ONE THING THAT HARMS YOU!!! I do not dislike this movie, in fact as far as house/family under siege movies go, it's probably one of the best. M. Night Shamalamadingdong does a good job of keeping the aliens more frightening by only giving us small glimpses of them, like a foot in a corn field, or a hand under a door, but then the end of the movie comes up and the whole thing is ruined. Apparently, these aliens and their infinitely advanced cloaked spaceships and coded crop circles are harmed by good ol' H2O. Goddamned WATER brings about the death of these things. You know what planet has no water? Statistically, every other planet in the whole frigging universe. Pick one of them instead. Did you not do your homework at all? Way to fail so horrendously, aliens. I'm glad Joaquin Phoenix beat the tar out of you. You're stupid.


III - CRITTERS
The poster for this movie is a complete misrepresentation. If a group of things that looked like that invaded Earth, I would legitimately be afraid, but the critters are actually little, carnivorous balls of fur. It's like some Trekkies got high one night and said, "Dude, what if Tribbles could, like, eat you?" And his friend, undoubtedly said, "Duuuuuuuuuuuuuude." That's the general conceit of this movie. But, we're lead to believe, these koosh balls with teeth are so dangerous that two shape-shifting alien bounty hunters need to be dispatched. Really, anyone with a nine iron should be able to take these things down. Or just, like, a ruler. I think it was really just an excuse to make a monster movie with hand puppets. I liked this movie the first time I saw it, when it was called "Gremlins."


II - INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL
This is the saddest I've ever been in a movie theater, and I saw Spider-Man 3. A little piece of my childhood died in the summer of 2008 and went to join the part of me that used to like Star Wars. Apart from being just an all-around stupid movie, it also has the distinction of being the only Indiana Jones movie that proves that science is actually less believable than magic. Nazis seeking enlightenment from The Ark: Good movie. Commies seeking enlightenment from Mayan space aliens: Awful movie. The actual alien portions of this movie play like any other Aliens-Were-Always-Here flicks, and, sort of like Mission to Mars, don't make any sense. If the aliens were willing to give the ultimate knowledge in the universe to someone, why didn't they just go find that person instead of waiting for someone to find them? And then they have the audacity, nay, the balls to pass judgement on those that arrive? If I were Indiana Jones, I would have punched all of them in their weird, oblong crystal skulls.


I - PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE
Let me see if I can understand this plan, known to the aliens as "Plan 9." Since the American government did not respond politely to your barrage of flying saucers, you will reanimate the corpses of the recently deceased to, what? Kill everyone? Terrible plan, right? Well, what you don't know is that the first eight plans from outer space were even worse. I happen to have access to the previous plans from these diabolical heathens and will share them with you now.

Plan 1 From Outer Space: Let loose a flock of angry sea turtles
Plan 2 From Outer Space: Throw lit matches at everyone
Plan 3 From Outer Space: Send a giant robot down to Earth and kick Brit Hume really hard in the shin
Plan 4 From Outer Space: Replace all the chocolate in the world with less-delicious chocolate substitute
Plan 5 From Outer Space: Miley Cyrus (this one actually worked)
Plan 6 From Outer Space: Act really aloof and sarcastic in hopes Earth won't know we secretly love it
Plan 7 From Outer Space: Tap everyone in the world on the shoulder and then run away
Plan 8 From Outer Space: Burrow deep into the Earth's crust and lie dormant for millions of years until such time as an expedition makes its way toward the core of the planet and then step out and tell them we're happy to take their literature but we're just not very religious

This is that movie Edward D. Wood, Jr is most known for, and with good reason. It makes no sense. Widely regarded as the worst movie ever made, though I would personally give that dubious honor to "Manos: The Hands of Fate," "Plan 9 From Outer Space," is that rare kind of bad movie that is so unbelievably atrocious that it has actually become entertaining. Made for about $.35, it shows that anyone can make a movie as long as they throw some zombies and flying saucers in there.

And there you have it. Aliens pose no threat.

You're welcome
-Kanderson