miracle day
Torchwood: Miracle Day E10 “The Blood Line”
I thought I owed my very recent review of the penultimate episode of Torchwood a quick PS to wrap up the series.
Maybe it was the result of diminished expectations, but I thought this was a decent, strong finish to the season. It had more payoff to it than I’d expected, and while I wouldn’t say it “caught fire” exactly, and it still had a lot of the flaws that I’d written about previously, it was on the whole a more satisfying end to the story than anticipated.
“The Blessing” for example turned out to be a more interesting, thought-provoking and developed concept than I’d actually expected. It raised some intriguing possibilities, which is a shame that the TV series was in no mind to properly explore. And there was good resolution for several storylines that have meandered through the series looking rather lost at times, such as the whole character of Oswald Danes – so original and central in the early episodes but then apparently rather forgotten about as the writers found other shiny diversions to play with for an episode at a time, but who finally had some reason to exist in this last hour. And once again, Eve Myles stole the show as Eve Myles with most of the best lines and a way of acting that meant you watched her in a scene no matter what anyone else was doing.
On the downside, the finale was still too long and drawn out, determined to go for the over-the-top and rather pretentious epic finish where short and snappy would have meant more genuine excitement. While some scenes came over as top-flight, well-written drama (the exchange between Jack and Oswald in particular) other parts looked like they just hadn’t had time to work out the kinks of what they were trying to do.
For example: that left a protracted stand-off on the gantry overlooking two ends of The Blessing, with a couple of dozen weapons-wielding extras who arrived en masse … only to be left standing around, looking awkward with nothing to do until suddenly they all scarper at the vital moment. Honestly, it was a relief when the head honcho in Buenes Aires finally shot someone rather than everyone just standing there twiddling their thumbs.
And the final big confrontation – which could be described as a blood-brothers ritual writ large – ended up being overblown, and verging on being a subliminal camp horror sex porno parody. Characters’ bodily fluids erupted in slow-mo across the screen, with cries and yells that were uncomfortably orgasmic in tone, which led to smirks and giggles where the focus should have been the apex of self-sacrificing drama.
After that climax (pun intended) there were the codas which set up the next season of Torchwood, if there should be one, which included one moment that I saw deliciously dubbed on Twitter as ‘Deus Rex Machismo’ involving Mekhi Pfifer, which I have to say I rather saw coming (or half expected) and which could be by far the most interesting development the series tries if it does get another outing.
Personally I was happier to see Lauren Ambrose’s character Jilly survive, and link up with the shadowy Families contact again on a park bench where she was invited to participate in ‘Plan B’. I’ve really liked her character and the actress’s portrayal, and overall – as I said a few days ago – I’ve enjoyed the series as a whole more than many people clearly have. For all its faults, I genuinely hope that it does get a chance to show us what Plan B actually is.
And, as I also said before: let’s hope that they learn from their shortcomings making this series if they do indeed get that opportunity, while at the same time building on their successes.
Torchwood: Miracle Day E9 “The Gathering”
Here’s another review I’ve been holding off writing for a while. In the case of Torchwood: Miracle Day, after seeing the first episode I thought I should give it a chance to settle down, find its feet and then write about it again when it found its stride. Unfortunately, having now reached the penultimate episode in the run, I’ve been forced to concede: that was no “settling in”. That really was/is the show’s stride.
It was always clear that this was going to be a bit of a slow burner, but what I hadn’t appreciated was that it had been placed on a flame-retardant surface as well. Throughout the last two months, save for the helicopter chase in episode 1, the damn thing has consistently refused to do anything but smoulder and there’s been no chance of fire let alone fireworks from it.
Now this is not actually necessarily a bad thing. The show is clearly trying to do something rather different from the usual TV science fiction fare and is seeking to produce something that has intelligent, quality writing centred about some high concept abstract ideas, and just because it’s not delivering thrills and spills is by no means necessarily a failure on its part. I respect its ambition and what it has achieved, and I’ve certainly found the series watchable and intriguing unlike many viewers and fans who have increasingly become frustrated and come to loath it. But that the same time, I can’t say I get hugely excited about it, either.
One thing – and I noted this in my review of episode 1 in July – is a problem with the central premise: that no one dies. This doesn’t feel like a ‘threat’ (doesn’t everyone want to live for ever? Actually, I don’t, but maybe I’m just weird) and moreover isn’t a threat you can fight or do anything about in the physical sense. With little consistent momentum to finding out who or what is behind this (if anyone) we’ve been left to battle a succession of middle-ranking faceless bureaucrats that might neatly show the banality of evil in real life but which are curiously unsatisfying when they’re quickly disposed of and everyone moves on to the next layer of middle management. Even now, at the end of episode 9, when the big threat is presumably nominally revealed, it remains something so huge and abstract and unchallengable that we’re still lacking something satisfying from the show.
Instead, I think that the show is convinced that it is doing something Really Profound, Meaningful and Shocking the whole time. The trouble is that it isn’t. It’s actually being rather thuddingly obvious. When we got to the big reveal about what the camps, categorisations and the ovens were for at the end of episode 5 I doubt anyone was surprised. Most of us had got to that plot development about two episodes earlier, so it wasn’t shocking at all.
The show’s principle problem is that it actually ducks the difficult stuff and ironically takes a too-easy line of it. By irresistibly equating the camps, ovens and hiding of Cat 1 patients by the heroes with similar Nazi-era atrocities, the show shortcuts any discussion, any hint of grey in the moral context: you know immediately who is good and who is evil, full stop. It doesn’t help that until episode 9 there has been very little sense of social or economic collapse portrayed as a result of Miracle Day, which made all the outrageous over-the-top political/military response seem wildly disproportionate to an abstract threat. The summer riots in London looked more like a threat to world order than Miracle Day did for the first eight episodes, making the actions of governments, politicians and PhiCorp simply look like the moment had been well prepared for and everyone was rubbing their hands with glee that they now got to enact their long-standing nefarious plans. Honestly, dub in a bit of Ming the Merciless cackling, or a Bond villain stroking a white cat, and you couldn’t have made it any more black and white.
The more difficult path would have been to accurately chronicle the collapse in detail (as opposed to the evil plans enacted) and put the heroes into a position where they have to decide: if not the categorisation and the ovens, then what? Stand by and watch society completely disintegrate? Ban people having babies to control the population? (Ban sex, just to be safe?) What to do with those who are suffering? Should people be allowed to choose to volunteer for a good roasting? How much would people actually put up with and go along with? Just how do you tackle this problem without resorting to ‘evil’ one way or another and becoming tainted yourself?
Think I’m asking too much for a TV show to do in an hour’s entertainment? Maybe I am. I suspect so, actually. But you know what, I didn’t put the programme into this scenario and make it to try and be an intelligent, adult, high concept take on science fiction. It volunteered – no, it shoulder-charged its way through and forced itself into this position. Having done so it needed to then deliver, and for all its good intentions and ambitions and ideals, and quality writing, production and acting, it’s ultimately ended up ducking the task it set itself – and I think that’s the root of the frustration that has driven many viewers off.
At least there’s been much to enjoy among the casting, which has included genre favourites such as Nana Visitor, John de Lancie, C. Thomas Howell, Ernie Hudson and Wayne Knight. For my money though, the best guest performance was that of Mare Winningham, best known as the drippy stepmother of the drippy Meredith in the drippy Grey’s Anatomy – but here astoundingly, jaw-dropping horrific as the crazed right-wing bigot (think Sarah Palin raised to the power of a hundred steroids) in episode 4 who ends up somewhat crushed by the weight of her own political expectations. In the main cast, the big surprise is that Eve Myles has pretty much owned the series and blasted everyone else – even Hollywood stars – off the screen. Bill Pullman has had a delightful time going over the top as Oswald, and I’ve adored every too-scarce moment of Lauren Ambrose’s screen time vamping it up as Jilly. By contrast, Mekhi Phifer has been disappointingly generic and John Barrowman bizarrely subdued in what you would expect would be his element.
At the end of the (miracle) day, then, we have Torchwood: Curate’s Egg. There’s an awful lot of good stuff here, but there’s a flaw running right down its centre that’s proven a stubborn obstacle to the programme as a whole succeeding as it wanted and needed to. Personally I’m pleased they made the attempt and have appreciated the ride, while at the same time I hope that any future production teams going down this path learn from the problems and manage to sidestep them better next time by.
Torchwood: Miracle Day Ep1
Some spoilers.
So, the Americanised relaunch of Torchwood is underway. And we can breath a little sigh of relief, because the main headline is that the transatlantic co-production arrangement has not catastrophically tampered with the show’s basic DNA.
Yes, there are differences – of course there are. But then, each series of Torchwood has been different from the one before as it moved from BBC Three to BBC 2 to BBC 1 and now to international status, and given how woeful that first series was at times this growth and development series-on-series is to be warmly welcomed. Certain parts do feel very American, but that’s okay because the underlying basic structure of the show still feels remarkably faithful to its Welsh roots, and with Russell T Davies writing the first hour there were no cringe-worthy American gaffes about the British in evidence; instead there was a nice sequence where new character Rex Matheson struggles to comprehend the idea that Wales might not be connected to England and that he actually has to pay to get in.
The co-production status gives the show much grander scope than it had before – the helicopter chase filmed in Rhossili on the Gower was grand stuff, and seeing Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) in kick-ass mode with bazooka (after earlier carefully putting pink earmuffs on the baby, Anwen) was wonderful. Also wonderful was Captain Jack, who made a delightfully over-the-top hero’s entrance into proceedings (and several times, at that) completely befitting the character’s personality, but he also had time for more interesting subtle moments such as his use of the alias “Owen Harper” for long term fans, and especially when he found out the effect that Miracle Day was having on him – is he afraid, or happy? Scared of dying, or delighted at being freed from a curse? It’s a beautifully played moment by John Barrowman that allows him a real moment of skilful acting a world away from his usual “larger than life” persona.
It was interesting to see all of the old Welsh cast in a US production (also including Kai Owen as Rhys and Tom Price as Pc Andy) acquit themselves so well. But arguably the most scene-stealing performance of the show was from by far its biggest new name, movie star Bill Pullman in a very unusual (for him) role of a despicable convicted child killer: the “sneering bad guy” acting wasn’t exactly subtle, but it never quite went over the top either and hinted more than a little of a Hannibal Lector-like evil that makes it fascinating to see what they intend to do with the character over the coming weeks.
Weakest performance by far was Mekhi Phifer as Matheson, which is odd as he’s the second biggest name of the cast with an impressive TV (ER, Lie to Me) and movie (Dawn of the Dead) track record and yet who was embarrassingly poor even from his very first scene (as an absurdly hyperactive CIA agent taking delight in a colleague’s leukaemia before ending up in his own fatal car crash) and then lumbered with a misjudged scene that saw him lurching out of the hospital on wheelchair and crutches demanding international flights and sidearms with blood flowing from his chest. It takes acting of some skill to pull off such an inherently absurd scenario, and let’s just say that the actor didn’t nail it.
The basic scenario is an intriguing science fiction Big Concept (“what if no one could ever die again?”) but at this point, despite the script talking about the consequences of population overrun in mere weeks, it lacks the nail-biting instant tension of Torchwood’s finest hour, the “Children of Earth” miniseries, and the narrative pace seems a little slow for both Torchwood and for US TV standards. But that’s probably more down to the fact that the show has to introduce not only the Big Concept but the entire idea of Torchwood and its remaining members to an American audience. Perhaps the first episode only felt slow to long term Torchwood fans who know all that stuff backwards, while presumably to new viewers the whole “What is Torchwood?” B-plot would have been as confusing as all hell. Writing for a mass audience is such a difficult balance at the best of times.
Still, at this point I’d say that the first episode needed a little more Big Concept jeopardy: fighting a “concept”, especially one where people aren’t dying by definition, lacks a sense of real danger. I’m sure they’ll get there as the episodes progress but I wonder if the series wouldn’t have been better slightly nipped-and-tucked to around eight episodes rather than ten. We’ll see how it fares.
On the whole though a solid start, even genuinely impressive in places. Not perfect, but with room to grow, and certainly interesting and intriguing. Perhaps the biggest relief of all, though, is that despite all the changes, the move to America, the new cast and the primarily US-based setting, is: “they didn’t totally f*ck it up” in the way that, for example, a US co-production totally fouled up Doctor Who in the 1990s.
And that’s one huge sigh of relief you hear coming from me and a large section of fandom: now we can get on with watching and enjoying the series itself without that first fear and trepidation anymore.
Taking the Short View 