Torchwood MD full
Sep. 12th, 2013 05:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urthWell now I’ve actually finished Miracle Day and the rest of it was pretty uneven so in that it was sort of consistent.
I can’t help but feel the plot got really out of control in this thing; the first half shows it by being off the rails but the latter half kind of loses track of the rails entirely. After the first half being about the changes to the world, the second half kind of just uses them as a backdrop without actually exploring it very well. The back half did feel like more of a *Torchwood* story, but the larger implications kind of fade into the background.
And yeah, there’s no way this works in DW canon. Except one very remotely possible way. That this is Rusty saying that his characters exist in a universe separate to the main DW verse; that when Amy remembered the universe back into existence she created a separate universe from the one that had existed before. Except that doesn’t work with the SJA since Eleven popped up there after the memory-rewrite and that was also written by RTD so...yeah this doesn’t really work.
Another way this doesn’t work with DW is having the threat be so...Lovecraftian. The only way it might have connected is if the emptiness in the Blessing was supposed be connected to the Void. The Void was sort of Lovecraftian in its unknowableness, but in a bit more sci-fi format of being the unknowable nowhere space between dimensions. And maybe that was what they were going for, but connecting it back to something in DW would have taken more time than MD allowed for the big thingy of the story.
The evil of the humans kind of works, but it’s a stretch especially from Rusty. The thing about CoE was, yeah it had some seriously dark decisions being made but they still came from mostly human places of rationalization in the face of fear. This is just evil, and the fact that we don’t really learn the extent of their plans makes it even more so. Are they rationalizing it to themselves? Most of the family members we meet don’t seem to really care, just convinced of their own right to make these decisions.
And in CoE, for every person we saw abandon the noble aspects of humanity, we saw somebody else rise to embrace them – Ianto’s sister taking in the neighborhood kids, Andy throwing off his police garb as it became clear that what he was being asked to do was not for the good side – here...that’s been lost too; we only see humans being selfish, at best herdlike to the forces in power, at worst hideous specimens like the camp director (and when one of your “heroes” is an unrepentant murderer and pedophile...yeah that’s part of the problem) with only very very small moments where there’s hope for humanity. Kitzinger was kind of the worst of that; at first she comes across as a direct connection to forces at work in this, she’s even dressed as your typical she-devil fem fatal; but then as it was revealed she was just a person and this was just her job I kept hoping she would prove to be an unlikely hero in the end, but no, only room for one unlikely hero this season and we went with the pedophile.
I feel like the open-ended ending really hurts this too. Sequel baiting isn’t entirely bad (though considering I’ve never heard anything about this being continued it’s pretty annoying here) but they basically made the threat undefeatable, both in the sense of not being able to do anything about the Blessing itself and the families being like weeds. And if this were a series unto itself okay, so you have a big bad to deal with; but in the context of DW it’s a serious problem. Something like say ‘The 4400’ had big world changing things happen and ended on a really big one but was cancelled without being followed up on but there isn’t a larger universe out there that should be effected by the issues it raised and threats left unresolved. And in the case of the DW verse it’s literally the entirety of the future of the universe in play. In WoM Ten nearly changed a fixed point in time by going all Time Lord Victorious; does that future, or the future that depended on it, work if there’s supposed to be these other players in the game (to say nothing of how the events themselves call that future into question, but I’m less annoyed y that because that question already existed)? And that’s just one pretty small example.
Also, Rusty, way to mess up your own mythology. It always seemed to me that Jack’s immortality was because Bad Wolf Rose had reached through time and space and brought him back every time he died. And if it *was* something in his blood then the reprogramming should have made people like Jack; ageless, healing, coming back to life intact. Not this sort of suspended, just not able to fully die state they got. Although I guess maybe those two points sort of cancel each other out; people weren’t getting Jack’s level of immortality because his blood isn’t what really causes it, but it does raise questions as to how Jack’s blood being able to heal others has never come up before. You mean to tell me that Torchwood, the amoral organization dedicated to protecting the British Empire, never considered testing to see if their immortal employee’s blood could be useful in that goal?
But for all this time I’ve spent on the issue of this series really not working in the DW verse and that Rusty kind of broke it himself in this case...I kind of feel like that’s not the point. Like this isn’t exactly supposed to be in the same world as it has been before; like there’s probably a version of this script where reality rewrites itself at the end and only a few people (Jack, Gwen, maybe a few others) actually remember this dystopian world of Miracle Day (which considering that this series takes place over months Miracle DAY seems like the wrong title), possibly by falling through the Void back into a world closer to where they’re supposed to be Or maybe revealing that Jack and Gwen are in some kind of nightmare world under study of some actual alien threat or something. Actually that last one probably makes the most sense, aliens are trying to put people into some kind of Matrix reality, where there’s this shadowy unknowable evil at work, where Jack can’t call Martha or anyone for help, where the fact that Jack has kids (even addressed in this story; which, point of order, if his blood is special then his kids and grandkids should be sort of special too) doesn’t matter to the evil family or to him, where the passage of time doesn’t seem all that steady; and where the Doctor has truly abandoned them this time.
So, did I like MD as its own story, outside of what the show and verse have been? I’m really not sure. It’s not bad exactly, but I’m not sure how good it is. I feel like the end would have been a LOT stronger if they’d basically admitted this wasn’t really in DW canon and was kind of Starz’ apocalypse fanfic and just killed Jack flat out. Let Jack be Jesus and die to save the world from this perversion of nature, sealing the Blessing so it couldn’t happen again. Let Gwen be all that remains of Torchwood, claim this was always *her* story, from the time she joined Torchwood to being the last one standing. Have her – like the world – walk away from this broken and reeling, but ready to rebuild. Even killing Rex and having Jack come back by Bad Wolf Rose intervention stepping in again (or implying that Jack may still be alive inside the sealed Blessing or through that shot somewhere else in space/time/dimensions) would have worked better for the story. Esther being the one sacrificed to save the world doesn’t work, she’s just a victim, and her tragic end actually pales next to the sacrifice of Gwen’s father, because we got plenty of Gwen knowing what she was doing with the choice she was making.
There are some things about this season that really worked, and things that even apart from not fitting in the larger verse it’s supposed to be in, don’t. It definitely doesn’t stand on its own very well either, I stand by my statements on the first half that the characters as we get them just here aren’t all that engaging, and the lack of resolution to the ending is pretty unsatisfying. If it was a thing on its own, the mediocre-ness would have been like plenty of other shows that didn’t really find their footing and were cancelled without a proper ending. Its own history (including said history’s connection to the larger DW-verse) is both what props it up to something a bit more, but drags it down because you can’t help thinking about how it doesn’t work in all that. It’s really hard to discuss this as if it isn’t part of those larger universes, because this is season 4 of Torchwood, which was in the past much more connected to the parent show than it is here (CoE was defined by the Doctor’s absence, of him turning away in shame (or at least emo) and all that, but the absence mattered, where it isn’t really remarked on here).
So, that was a lot of babble to talk around in circles right? Basically, it was okay. Episode 7 in particular was really good, and while I didn’t watch the credits closely enough, if RTD didn’t have the writing credit on that one I’d be shocked as it had his fingerprints all over it. Sure the whole season couldn’t have been that since it didn’t do much to further the plot but it had great characterization and was *about* the characterization. But now I can get on with other, better things to watch.
I can’t help but feel the plot got really out of control in this thing; the first half shows it by being off the rails but the latter half kind of loses track of the rails entirely. After the first half being about the changes to the world, the second half kind of just uses them as a backdrop without actually exploring it very well. The back half did feel like more of a *Torchwood* story, but the larger implications kind of fade into the background.
And yeah, there’s no way this works in DW canon. Except one very remotely possible way. That this is Rusty saying that his characters exist in a universe separate to the main DW verse; that when Amy remembered the universe back into existence she created a separate universe from the one that had existed before. Except that doesn’t work with the SJA since Eleven popped up there after the memory-rewrite and that was also written by RTD so...yeah this doesn’t really work.
Another way this doesn’t work with DW is having the threat be so...Lovecraftian. The only way it might have connected is if the emptiness in the Blessing was supposed be connected to the Void. The Void was sort of Lovecraftian in its unknowableness, but in a bit more sci-fi format of being the unknowable nowhere space between dimensions. And maybe that was what they were going for, but connecting it back to something in DW would have taken more time than MD allowed for the big thingy of the story.
The evil of the humans kind of works, but it’s a stretch especially from Rusty. The thing about CoE was, yeah it had some seriously dark decisions being made but they still came from mostly human places of rationalization in the face of fear. This is just evil, and the fact that we don’t really learn the extent of their plans makes it even more so. Are they rationalizing it to themselves? Most of the family members we meet don’t seem to really care, just convinced of their own right to make these decisions.
And in CoE, for every person we saw abandon the noble aspects of humanity, we saw somebody else rise to embrace them – Ianto’s sister taking in the neighborhood kids, Andy throwing off his police garb as it became clear that what he was being asked to do was not for the good side – here...that’s been lost too; we only see humans being selfish, at best herdlike to the forces in power, at worst hideous specimens like the camp director (and when one of your “heroes” is an unrepentant murderer and pedophile...yeah that’s part of the problem) with only very very small moments where there’s hope for humanity. Kitzinger was kind of the worst of that; at first she comes across as a direct connection to forces at work in this, she’s even dressed as your typical she-devil fem fatal; but then as it was revealed she was just a person and this was just her job I kept hoping she would prove to be an unlikely hero in the end, but no, only room for one unlikely hero this season and we went with the pedophile.
I feel like the open-ended ending really hurts this too. Sequel baiting isn’t entirely bad (though considering I’ve never heard anything about this being continued it’s pretty annoying here) but they basically made the threat undefeatable, both in the sense of not being able to do anything about the Blessing itself and the families being like weeds. And if this were a series unto itself okay, so you have a big bad to deal with; but in the context of DW it’s a serious problem. Something like say ‘The 4400’ had big world changing things happen and ended on a really big one but was cancelled without being followed up on but there isn’t a larger universe out there that should be effected by the issues it raised and threats left unresolved. And in the case of the DW verse it’s literally the entirety of the future of the universe in play. In WoM Ten nearly changed a fixed point in time by going all Time Lord Victorious; does that future, or the future that depended on it, work if there’s supposed to be these other players in the game (to say nothing of how the events themselves call that future into question, but I’m less annoyed y that because that question already existed)? And that’s just one pretty small example.
Also, Rusty, way to mess up your own mythology. It always seemed to me that Jack’s immortality was because Bad Wolf Rose had reached through time and space and brought him back every time he died. And if it *was* something in his blood then the reprogramming should have made people like Jack; ageless, healing, coming back to life intact. Not this sort of suspended, just not able to fully die state they got. Although I guess maybe those two points sort of cancel each other out; people weren’t getting Jack’s level of immortality because his blood isn’t what really causes it, but it does raise questions as to how Jack’s blood being able to heal others has never come up before. You mean to tell me that Torchwood, the amoral organization dedicated to protecting the British Empire, never considered testing to see if their immortal employee’s blood could be useful in that goal?
But for all this time I’ve spent on the issue of this series really not working in the DW verse and that Rusty kind of broke it himself in this case...I kind of feel like that’s not the point. Like this isn’t exactly supposed to be in the same world as it has been before; like there’s probably a version of this script where reality rewrites itself at the end and only a few people (Jack, Gwen, maybe a few others) actually remember this dystopian world of Miracle Day (which considering that this series takes place over months Miracle DAY seems like the wrong title), possibly by falling through the Void back into a world closer to where they’re supposed to be Or maybe revealing that Jack and Gwen are in some kind of nightmare world under study of some actual alien threat or something. Actually that last one probably makes the most sense, aliens are trying to put people into some kind of Matrix reality, where there’s this shadowy unknowable evil at work, where Jack can’t call Martha or anyone for help, where the fact that Jack has kids (even addressed in this story; which, point of order, if his blood is special then his kids and grandkids should be sort of special too) doesn’t matter to the evil family or to him, where the passage of time doesn’t seem all that steady; and where the Doctor has truly abandoned them this time.
So, did I like MD as its own story, outside of what the show and verse have been? I’m really not sure. It’s not bad exactly, but I’m not sure how good it is. I feel like the end would have been a LOT stronger if they’d basically admitted this wasn’t really in DW canon and was kind of Starz’ apocalypse fanfic and just killed Jack flat out. Let Jack be Jesus and die to save the world from this perversion of nature, sealing the Blessing so it couldn’t happen again. Let Gwen be all that remains of Torchwood, claim this was always *her* story, from the time she joined Torchwood to being the last one standing. Have her – like the world – walk away from this broken and reeling, but ready to rebuild. Even killing Rex and having Jack come back by Bad Wolf Rose intervention stepping in again (or implying that Jack may still be alive inside the sealed Blessing or through that shot somewhere else in space/time/dimensions) would have worked better for the story. Esther being the one sacrificed to save the world doesn’t work, she’s just a victim, and her tragic end actually pales next to the sacrifice of Gwen’s father, because we got plenty of Gwen knowing what she was doing with the choice she was making.
There are some things about this season that really worked, and things that even apart from not fitting in the larger verse it’s supposed to be in, don’t. It definitely doesn’t stand on its own very well either, I stand by my statements on the first half that the characters as we get them just here aren’t all that engaging, and the lack of resolution to the ending is pretty unsatisfying. If it was a thing on its own, the mediocre-ness would have been like plenty of other shows that didn’t really find their footing and were cancelled without a proper ending. Its own history (including said history’s connection to the larger DW-verse) is both what props it up to something a bit more, but drags it down because you can’t help thinking about how it doesn’t work in all that. It’s really hard to discuss this as if it isn’t part of those larger universes, because this is season 4 of Torchwood, which was in the past much more connected to the parent show than it is here (CoE was defined by the Doctor’s absence, of him turning away in shame (or at least emo) and all that, but the absence mattered, where it isn’t really remarked on here).
So, that was a lot of babble to talk around in circles right? Basically, it was okay. Episode 7 in particular was really good, and while I didn’t watch the credits closely enough, if RTD didn’t have the writing credit on that one I’d be shocked as it had his fingerprints all over it. Sure the whole season couldn’t have been that since it didn’t do much to further the plot but it had great characterization and was *about* the characterization. But now I can get on with other, better things to watch.
