Series 2 of Torchwood is about to start, and I’m going to give it a go to see if I like it better than the first series. Here’s a few thoughts on why it didn’t do it for me last time round…
I went in to Torchwood series 1 expecting (or at least hoping for) something “adult” in the sense of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica: something intelligent, mature and hard-hitting. Instead, it was “adult” in the sense that The Sun is “adult”, which makes sense when it’s being broadcast by BBC3, which has brought us such shows as Grown Ups and Titty Titty Bang Bang.
It was all terribly reminiscent of the early 90s Doctor Who novels, which freed from the constraints of a family audience were at times “adult” in a terribly adolescent way of putting in lots of sex and swear words and feeling very grown up about it. One of the most damning reviews of Torchwood from my perspective was a letter to Doctor Who Magazine from a young teenager to the effect of “Torchwood is cool cos it has sex in it!!!”
This is in part a matter of personal taste. Bawdy entertainment such as Torchwood and much of BBC3’s entertainment appeals to many people, some of whom would be left cold by the sometimes rather grim and po-faced Battlestar Galactica, for example. Some people came to it with the wrong expectations and were disappointed, and it isn’t that Torchwood failed, just that it was trying to do something different.
However, there seem to me to be certain problems with series one of the show that are a matter of craft, not just personal preference. One of the other issues was the lack of dramatic consequences. Consequences to the characters’ actions are vital to creating drama, but it sometimes seemed that the writers of different episodes had barely talked to each other.
In Cyberwoman, for example, Captain Jack shoots Ianto’s girlfriend and Ianto vows that Jack will pay. But a couple of weeks later, all this is seemingly forgotten and the two of them are in some kind of weird undefined relationship! Russell T Davies protests that it’s not as simple as “Jack shoots Ianto’s girlfriend”, because technically he shot a pizza delivery girl with the brain of Ianto’s semi-cyberconverted girlfriend transplanted into her body, but does that honestly improve anything?
The series commits various other crimes against drama: Owen’s morally dubious use of an alien spray that really does have the “Lynx effect” never got a payoff, Gwen confessed her affair to her boyfriend only to wipe his memory with “retcon”, and when the rift is opened at the end of the series, it conveniently resets everything. And just what do you need to do to be dismissed from Torchwood?
The case for the defence is that the writers didn’t want to bog the series down in overly complicated storylines that might alienate the casual audience. But that’s no excuse for neglecting proper character development, or resetting to the same default status quo for most of the series. Russell T Davies has said that one of the things they do in the second series is develop the characters’ relationships more, so they seem to have this in their sights.
Torchwood was at its best when it was delivering pure, unadulterated entertainment, and worst when being self-consciously “dark” and “adult”. At times, it crackled into glorious life, with unique and quirky moments, like the invisible lift and having a Cyberwoman battle a pterodactyl, and some genuinely well handled drama, such as characters from World War Two struggling to adjust to 21st century life.
We’re promised a second series that’s more consistent, more confident, and more fun. It probably won’t ever appeal to me in the same way as Doctor Who, just for reasons of personal taste, but if series 2 of Torchwood delivers, it could iron out its teething problems to succeed on its own terms.