Comments on ScyFi Love: Torchwood: Children of Earth review - a terrible p...

It was definitely good, but I'm not glad I wat...

2009-07-18T05:28:20.542+01:00

It was definitely good, but I'm not glad I watched it. It was difficult and ultimately unsatisfying watching.

Whilst I was watching it, it kept flashing through...

2009-07-16T13:07:40.260+01:00

Whilst I was watching it, it kept flashing through my mind that this is what it must have been like to be a viewer in the 1950s when The Quatermass Experiment was a piece of home-grown appointment sci-fi.

As RTD could never contemplate killing off a much-loved regular character in DW, the bleaker scenes felt like a catharsis of unpleasantness for a writer who certainly comes across as having regular dark moments in The Writer's Tale.

I still think the only weak link in Torchwood is John Barrowman, whose relentless appearances on light entertainment shows make you think him as more of a presenter/pundit having a bit of a play, than a serious actor. It was rather cringey when he had his new coat on and announced: "I'm back."

It did feel like the end of a series, but presumably, Mickey Smith was deposited in present day Earth at the close of Journey's End to become part of Torchwood 2.0, with the odd guest spot from Martha Jones?

It was very good, and about time too. Ever since R...

2009-07-12T21:03:49.918+01:00

It was very good, and about time too. Ever since RTD's first episode, which was a cracking opener, TW has been rather frantically thrashing around in search of an identity, with some of the worst excesses ever seen on television in some of the more notorious episodes, usually by Chris Chibnall, who seemed to churn out a succession of RTD parodies.

I feared the worst in the first episode of CoE, which looked like some more silly adolescent fluff, but viewed as a whole it was certainly one of the more successful TV serials of recent years.

Barrowman turned in some good stuff too, which has not been a dead cert over the two full series.

Where TW can possibly go now is rather up in the air. Jack can surely never be the same jack-the-lad character again, and pretty much everyone else is dead, though I did wonder whether the shot of Jack, Evil Woman and Evil Man standing together was a foretaste of things to come.