Torchwood - Miracle Day - End of the Road

So, two good things happened in this episode of Torchwood. Firstly, someone died, and thus the overall story was advanced. As such, this episode created for the first time in weeks the feeling that there actually is going to be some sort of resolution to this story, and that the whole thing won't just stop suddenly when the series runs out of episodes. Of course, prior to that death we had a long scene of poorly written, directed and performed exposition, and afterwards we had a lot of pure padding that reached its nadir when three of the lead characters had to touch the magic floor in order not to be heard by the nasty CIA agents. But whatever. I'll happily cling on to the minor move forward in the overall story arc as a positive sign that things might get better.

The second good thing that happened in this episode is the arrival of Allen Shapiro, a sweary, intolerant type who rightly had little patience of Gwen and therefore came across as the most effective character in this otherwise rather sorry farrago. No doubt he'll vanish from the face of Miracle Day moving forward because he is just too interesting.

Two good things. In an episode that lasted for about 50 minutes, but felt far longer. Two good things - and then that's it. For the rest of the episode we had to watch Rex do very little other than remain close-minded and generally quite ignorant, Gwen doing little else that raging like an irate teenager (and just as effectively) and Esther deciding that the best thing to do with a mortally wounded Captain Jack was to drive him round the arse end of nowhere while sobbing. These people are meant to be the people saving the world yet they act like inept children. Christ.

Okay, let me break cover and say what has been on my mind for weeks but has reached bursting point after the eighth episode of this tedious series - this isn't working. It isn't working at all. It is at best lacklustre, and at worst seriously shit. It has been a massive disappointment. It has become an effort to watch it each and every week, let alone review it. The only thing keeping me going is the fact that I've already invested so much time in it that I may as well watch the final couple of episodes to find out where it is all going (if anywhere). I still hope (against hope) to be proven wrong in my assumption that this is just going to all be a massive disappointment by the final two episodes. But with each episode that goes by with no signs of real improvement that hope dies a little bit more. Prove me wrong, RTD. Prove me wrong, Torchwood. Although I suspect that this is beyond all of your abilities now.

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.

Torchwood: Miracle Day: The New World

Looking forward to an episode of Torchwood is to take something of a gamble. It can either be very good - awesome, gripping fantasy entertainment - or half-baked sci-fi that mistakes humping for making a show truly adult. So the start of Miracle Day provoked some rather ambivalent feelings in me - especially since it is a co-production with a US company. After all, the last time a Doctor Who (and Torchwood remains part of that world) was produced in part by a company from the US it didn't go tremendously well.

So what to make of The New World? Well, it works. It is much more in the vein of the great Children of Earth than the reprehensibly poor Meat. Part of this is the pace - because we have a story spread over numerous episodes rather than just 45 minutes installments, the characters and the plot lines have time to breathe and it doesn't all feel desperately rushed. It also allows a sense of anticipation to build up as you start to wonder where different plot strands are going. In particular, the Oswald Danes (a strikingly repellent character if ever there was one) storyline seems intriguing, and I wonder where that plot strand will go and how far they will be willing to push the envelope with it. Of course, the slower pace means Gwen gets nothing to really do for the first half hour, but that's not a major problem - the American characters have the potential to be far more interesting than the UK ones.

Furthermore, the central conceit of the show - that everyone has stopped dying - initially appears to be less threatening than the coming of the 456. But the episode works hard to show why it is not as positive as it might first appear, and why the absence of death will actually create a dystopia rather than an utopia. The episode subtly suggests that things are radically changing - possibly forever. Whatever problems there may be in RTD's writing, you have to hand it to him - he certainly thinks on a grand scale.

And then we have Captain Jack. Ah, the Captain - a mixed blessing it ever there was one. He has the potential to be a great character, but prior to this episode he has always been something of a superman, and just as bland. Here, as a man who shouldn't exist anymore, he is forced to rely on his wits and cunning, rather than his reputation and that of Torchwood. I particularly like Jack pretending to be a FBI agent to investigate - not least because he uses a pseudonym that is a subtle, yet great, nod to the fans. And I can't help but love the moment when Jack turns up in Wales to rescue Gwen et al. It's more than a bit cheesy but fuck it. It's cheese that works.

But this is more than just Jack's show - the character of Rex, for example, is a great addition to the Torchwood universe. He's determined, ruthless, intelligent and questioning - at the same time as being obsessive to the point of being very funny. His departure from hospital, and his complete ignorance of the UK, is nicely handled in a way that is humourous but not too obtrusive ("you mean I've got to pay for this bridge? Goddamned Wales"/"Wales is insane!"). If this is Jack's last stand, then Rex deserves to become the new star of the show.

And the episode also has some striking images - the nightmare that is the man who was blown to a pulp but still lives (and then was decapitated at Captain Jack's request) is a great example of this. Not all of it works of course - the missile sequences are just poor CGI. But the whole thing has the feel of quite a big budget production, and Torchwood deserves a big budget.

Is it truly great? Well no - not yet. But it feels like it has thought out, properly plotted and is genuinely intriguing. I want to know why Jack is vulnerable again, why Torchwood as a concept was sent to the CIA at the same time that death stopped, and just what has caused the immortality gripping, and threatening to destroy the world. So congratulations to RTD and the Torchwood crew - you've avoided the potential curse of Torchwood, and it looks like you've got a hit on your hands.

Doctor Who - The Doctor's Wife

The reason why Steven Moffat and RTD have been so successful at producing (generally speaking) great Doctor Who is because they can both write. Sure, you might not always like the end result, but they can - when pushed - produce great story arcs and (arguably more importantly) great individual episodes. Which is why it was a stroke of absolute genius for Moffat to get other establised writers - who have had serieses of their own as well as particular, idiosyncratic writing styles - to get involved with Doctor Who. And tonight's episode attests to that genius.

Throughout the entire episode, there was always a feeling that this was an assured, competent and - crucially - imaginative writer leading us by the hand through a desperately exciting race of an episode. Sure, I guessed that Idris had become the TARDIS. But that didn't stop there being numerous other twists that I didn't see. Partly because this was a consummate story teller who knew exactly where he wanted to take us and - crucially - also knew the pace at which his story had to go at in order to work. Compare this episode to the previous one - the latter felt like an exercise in padding, the former felt like a great author determined to say everything he wanted to say about Doctor Who in 45 (utterly outstanding) minutes.

Part of the success of this episode was that it never left with time to breathe, and to think about what was going on. But it was also about how the story changed (in a very natural way) during its runtime. It went from sci-fi to fantasy to body horror to traumatic mind-fuck to iconoclastic yet very reverential Doctor Who. The story had no problems with adding to the overall mythology of the show, but did so in a way that is intuitively plausible - why shouldn't the TARDIS have chosen the Doctor rather than the other way around, and why shouldn't she have chosen where he needed to go rather than following his commands about where he wanted to go? After all, that could explain why the Doctor almost always ends up in the thick of an adventure...

At the same time, though, this was written by someone with enormous respect both for the fan and for the casual viewer. There were details - from the big (like the use of the previous TARDIS control room) to the small (like the use of the little communication boxes from The War Games). Yet the whole thing was carefully, yet not patronisingly, explained - we were never left if any doubt about what was going on without having to have lots of idiotic exposition scenes. In a sense, this made tonight's episode the most successful of the season so far, in that it genuinely seemed to have been written with everyone in mind. Plus, it was full of laugh-out-loud moments - a particular favourite of mine being the TARDIS's decision about who was the pretty one.

Yet it wasn't just about the writing. This was also extremely well directed. The shots seemed to have been properly thought through, and were consequently very well composed. Two standout moments for me: the moment when the Doctor and Idris were in the same frame, with the latter present through the use of a reflection in a shaving mirror, and the moment when Amy walked into the corridor dedicated to maligning her. Plus the acting was uniformly good. Matt Smith in particular got to run the full gauntlet of emotions, while Suranne Jones gave an utterly convincing performance as an old, sentient time machine not used to talking contained in the body of a woman.

Was it perfect? Well, no, but as near as to make no difference. My biggest gripe was the Ood - not that it did anything wrong, but just that it didn't need to be there. House itself was enough of menace; we didn't need another monster grafted on top. Plus, some of the CGI around the Doctor's mail didn't quite work (although the FX in this episode was otherwise pretty strong). But these are minor, almost pedantic points. This was the sort of Doctor Who that I just lap up, and an utterly convincing explanation for why I like the show so much. Inventive, funny, scary, clever and sad - the Doctor himself in a nutshell.

In short, an absolute success of an episode. And when Steven Moffat leaves, the show could do much, much worse than giving Neil Gaiman a call about its vacancy.