Torchwood: Miracle Day: Dead of Night

Another week, another episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day. And while Dead of Night is better than last week's effort, it is still far from superb. In fact, the episode struggles even to be good.

Part of the problem is that there is no real sense of menace in this show. Even when Gwen has to hide from Jilly Kitzinger there is no tension - in part because Killy is simply no threat to Gwen. By this stage in Children of Earth we had the 456 - barely seen triple-headed beasts with menacing voices and a penchant for projectile vomiting. In this story, all we have is a bunch of humans behaving in a slightly suspicious way. This isn't an episode of The Bill - it needs a little bit more dramatic.

And what has happened to Gwen? She seems to have evolved into a curious cross between Amy Pond, Sarah Jane Smith and James Bond. There is precious little left of the police constable who stumbled across Torchwood a few years back. Yeah, you could argue that this is part of her overall story arc, but there is precious little reference to that arc. Instead, it seems it is enough to have her occasionally mentioning her kid to reference her back story - and she has become little more than a bland cipher, a way of progressing the plot.

Not that the plot particularly progresses. We have now seen that there is a bad corporation, that there are drugs, and that Oswald Danes is falling in with what are heavily implied to be the bad guys (not that a murdering paedophile was ever really going to be a good guy, of course). And that's pretty much it. Basically, we've had 150 minutes of TV to get... well... not very far at all. Sometimes less is more and if you don't have the plot for 10 episodes, then don't try to tell your story across 10 episodes.

And there's still a lot of padding. Having the two male protagonists getting laid is a good example of this; it adds little to the plot, just titillation on the sidelines of the story. And we seem to be seeing a recurrence of what I'm going to call the Old Law of Torchwood - if the story is flagging, throw in a bit of shagging. As well as killing time, it also allows you to make your programme look adult. Not in the sense that it is challenging drama for adults, but instead because it has to be broadcast later in the day as the sex is not appropriate for the kids.

That's the Old Law of Torchwood; unfortunately, there seems to be a New Law of Torchwood. And it runs like this - the closer characters get to the Torchwood team, the less interesting they become. Rex was a great character in the first episode; now he is a second-rate Captain Jack - doing what Jack does with more petulance and with less of an ability to deliver a quip. Likewise, the odious Oswald Danes somehow loses some of his menace - despite describing the murder of a young girl - when describing it to a frantically emoting, gun-wielding Captain Jack. Once again, I'm left with the feeling that this show would be better without the Torchwood team in it. Hopefully that will change... hopefully.

And a word about the incidental music. Who in the name of Christ decided that the often hideously out of place music would be appropriate for what is supposed to be an edgy sci-fi thriller? A teenage boy who likes to ROCK? It sounds amateurish, like someone who has actually seen the show trying to create a score from it using the solely the tag lines for each episode.

Not everything is bad, of course. The soulless strike me as a great - and really rather spooky - idea. So can we see more of them? Can we get a feel from where we have come from? Would it be possible to see how, y'know, ordinary people are responding to the miracle rather than the increasingly cartoonish regulars? Wouldn't it be a good idea to see a normal person becoming one of the soulless? I mean, the whole thing feel very padded out, so perhaps a further storyline that normal people could relate to might have been a nice addition. But, no doubt, the soulless themselves will fall foul of the New Law of Torchwood. As soon as they get sustained contact with Torchwood, they will become much less interesting.

I think the most frustrating thing about the evolving Miracle Day series is its very mediocrity. It isn't good enough to look forward to each week, and it isn't bad enough not to watch. And, while I never really thought I would write this, what this needs is more RTD. He wrote the first episode which is, by a country mile, the best of the three we have seen so far. Torchwood is his baby, and frankly the baby needs its father because at the moment, it is floundering. It should be essential viewing; instead, it is watchable at best.