I’m finally caught up with the telly I missed from the weeks I was away so while it’s all still in my head let’s talk Torchwood!
The episodes that aired while I was away were episodes 5, 6 and 7 which are ‘The Categories of Life’, ‘The Middle Men’ and ‘Immortal Sins’ .
‘The Categories of Life’ is as simple as it sounds. It’s an episode that explains the different categories of life that are decided as a result of the Medical forums set up to discuss the ‘Miracle’. Category 3s are able bodied people with no minor injuries, category 2s are people who have persistent but stable injuries/diseases and category 1s are people who are brain-dead or should be dead.
The group decide to go to one of the new ‘Overflow Camps’ which they found out about from the hard drive they stole from Phicorp. Rex goes undercover in one of the camps because he actually is a category 2, Esther joins him at the L.A Overflow camp working in the office and Gwen goes undercover as a Nurse in the Cardiff Overflow Camp.
I’d been pondering the Overflow Camps since the end of episode 4 and I’ll be honest, I didn’t see the twist coming. I knew it would be sinister but not that sinister. This episode also marks a denouement for one of the characters, as unbelievable as that seems in a world where people can’t die.
I do like that about Torchwood, they kill people off. It sounds cruel but it just doesn’t happen in other TV shows. ‘Being Human’ and ‘Doctor Who’, two shows I’ve talked about here and I love them both very much, however they’re a bit reluctant to kill any one (Rory from the latter, as much as I don’t want him to die, appears to have the same amount of lives as a cat and being ripped apart by a Werewolf didn’t seem to stop Herrick from returning to series 3 of ‘Being Human’). As much as I mourned the loss of Owen, Tosh and Ianto (particularly Ianto, I cried more than one should at the death of a fictional character) I understand why they do it. Do you really think, doing all these dangerous things and secret missions, that no one would get hurt? No, of course not, that’s not how the world works and in a show that is all about the supernatural it’s nice to have a bit of realism. It’s also true that, as Captain T Davies has said before, having the unpredictable element of death lurking about in the series really does keep audiences on their toes.
I really enjoyed this one. Some people have taken issue with the switching of location but I’m quite enjoying it, it mixes it up a bit. With all the undercover-ness it’s a tension packed episode which works well alongside the more social aspects of the plot. It puts humanity under a microscope with not particularly nice results. I know it’s sci-fi but think, what would happen if no one died anymore? What would happen to the mounting casualties that should be dead?
Episode 6 (‘The Middle Men’) opens with Stuart Owens, the Chief Operating Officer of Phicorp, sending someone to Shanghai to find out about some construction that’s going on there. The man then calls Owens and rather than tell him what’s happening he jumps off a building to put an end to his own consciousness. Jack tracks down Owens and confronts him about Phicorp’s work and Owens confesses that he knows little more than Jack does and that there’s something bigger pulling the strings.
Meanwhile Gwen in
It’s a weird one this episode. Parts of it are awesome, parts are dull and some bits are quite hard to watch.
I know I’ve whinged about Esther and how she needs to man up but she does come into her own in this episode. She’s still being very sneaky in the offices of the L.A Overflow camp which I quite like and there are also some pretty graphic scenes of violence towards women later on in the episode where she is the unfortunate victim. I feel quite bad because I’ve been a bit hard on her. This episode reminds us that whereas Rex, Gwen and Jack are used to being attacked and shooting people Esther was working in a office before this, it’s a totally new world for her.
This episode is a bit uneven in its ideas. The writer introduces two concepts, ‘the blessing’ and ‘the 45 club’ both are interesting ideas. In the newly established ‘post Miracle’ world if you throw yourself off a building from 45 floors up it is enough to make you lose consciousness permanently so that’s what people start doing hence ‘the 45 club’. ‘The Blessing’ is spoken about but never explained. I figured that ‘the Blessing’ would become part of the bigger story arc but it just seemed so weird to mention ‘the 45 club’ and not take it anywhere because it’s an intriguing idea. This just seemed like a very un-Torchwood thing to do, they’re usually quite tight on their storylines and having something like that just seems a bit superfluous.
Jack seems a bit redundant this week, Rex gets tortured by a crazed Overflow Camp manager, Esther goes through the mill and poor Gwen, after blowing up the Cardiff Overflow camp (it was brilliant!) discovers via the magic contact lenses that her whole family has been kidnapped and is being held ransom. So all in all, bit of a mixed bag.
Episode 7 is ‘Immortal Sins’. This takes place mainly in flashback flitting between present day L.A and 1920’s
This episode is completely Jack centric. Most it is flash backs of 1920’s New York which is nice, it’s easy to over look the many lives that Jack has had and the possible repercussions of the things he’s done. Daniele Favilli is great; he plays Angelo, a mere mortal that falls for Jack. I question the fact that he seems pivotal in the whole ‘Miracle’ however there has been no mention of him till episode 7 of a 10 episode series, but that doesn’t detract from Favilli’s excellent performance.
However as you might expect in an episode where Jack is in nearly every scene, John Barrowman is the star. In ‘Immortal Sins’ Barrowman carries the episode shoulder high. The little snippets of dialogue in the present day between Jack and Gwen are wonderfully played. There’s this overwhelming love that the characters obviously share but coupled with the fact that they are divided, she has a family to whom she is devoted and he has seen so much but not really let anyone share it with him.
There are some pretty difficult scenes in this. In the middle of the episode Angelo discovers Jack’s immortality and thinks he’s the devil so stabs him to death. This leads to everyone in the neighborhood finding out and Jack being repeatedly murdered and coming back to life while chained up in a cellar. I found it particularly hard because it seemed to go on forever, it was really bloody and was just not nice to watch. Having said that I doubt it was ever meant to be an easy scene and it was massively effective in its attempts to convey that that was the worst thing that anyone has ever done to Jack.
I’m enjoying Jane Espenson’s scripts and in ‘Immortal Sins’ she’s written one of the best episodes of this series. It’s been apparent for some time that Jack has got something to do with ‘the Miracle’ and this episode goes more towards explaining where he fits into the scheme of things more so than any of the episodes before it. The cliffhanger is a stonker which is great because I don’t think we’ve had a particularly great one for this whole run.
Three episodes. One I liked one I really liked and one I can take or leave. I’m a bit concerned that I haven’t loved any episode so far this series but I’m eternally optimistic for the remainder of the series.
Now, I think it’s time for my…
Reasons to be cheerful!
1. Batman set photos! Yay! After the Avengers-fest that was my last post I feel like I’ve neglected the Caped Crusader. So here are some photos of Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne and Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle (baring more than a passing resemblance to Audrey Hepburn).
2. John Malkovich is going to fight zombies. Yes you read that right. John Malkovich has been cast in the film ‘Warm Bodies’ a ‘zombie romance film’ told from the point of view of a Zombie that falls in love with the Human girlfriend of his latest victim. I hadn’t heard about this till now and I’ll be honest it sounds fucking mental. I CAN’T WAIT! I’ve become a bit of a fan of Zombies over the past couple of years. ‘Shaun of the Dead’, ‘Zombieland’, ‘The Walking Dead’ are on heavy DVD rotation at my house and there’s a lot of new Zombie based celluloid offerings hitting the cinemas in the next year or so (World War Z, Zombieland 2, Pride, Prejudice and Zombies) which all look rather interesting. Watch this space for more news of the undead on the big screen.
That’s all for today.
Goodbye till next time :-)
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