End of Days

January 1, 2007

You know, this could have gone worse.

I’ve tempered the complaints about explicit sex and violence that informed my opinion of Torchwood for almost ten years by realizing that not only is there not so much sex and violence as I’d first imagined, but that it acts as the shock tactic in some pretty good stories. But the one complaint that remains, that I still haven’t seen settled to my satisfaction, is why in the FUCK anyone would ever want to draw a paycheck from a lunatic asylum like Torchwood.

Seriously, what is the appeal? The sole purpose of Torchwood seems to be to make anyone who works there miserable. It tears down their lives and doesn’t replace it with anything. The show lacks the sense of wonder that makes climbing into the TARDIS so appealing. You want to travel with the Doctor. You want to run away from Captain Jack Harkness as fast as you possibly can.

There’s even the question of whether Torchwood is actually doing any good. Was the world any better off at the end of “Small Worlds” or “Ghost Machine?” Were stories like “Captain Jack Harkness” or “Cyberwoman” about anything but Torchwood saving themselves? Hell, in episodes like “They Keep Killing Suzie” and “Greeks Bearing Gifts,” they’re the cause of the problem. And no episode exemplifies this more than “End of Days.”

The Rift has destabilized thanks to Owen’s meddling, and now time is falling apart. And it’s only the bad bits we get – plague victims and murderous Roman centurions. To save her fiance, Gwen locks Rhys up in the basement, where he’s promptly murdered. Every horrible thing the Fuck-up Four have done comes back to haunt them, in arguably the most transparent ploy to get someone to open a prison cell that has ever been committed to video, and yet they fall right into it, gunning down Jack and ripping open the Rift in the hopes that somehow making the cause of the problem a zillion times worse will make it all go away. Naturally, ain’t no such, and suddenly Abbadon, a 500 foot tall Kaiju who looks like a Playstation 2 cutscene, is stalking Cardiff.

The episode almost seems to be trying to make the show’s weaknesses have a point – the fatal flaws in the characters, the lack of chemistry and commitment they have to each other, the small dramas that have informed their reactions, all combine to free the Devil himself. Unfortunately, rather than have our characters learn from their combined, monumental fuck-up, all it does is add detail to those flaws, until we wonder why these five are even in the same room, much less part of an organization that requires a certain degree of discipline and an exploration of the uncanny. It’s so much about their tiny petty personal proclivities that there isn’t an instant of the episode that the viewer is surprised by anyone in it. Kabuki is more unpredictable.

Now, it’s fun to watch, of course; it’s tightly written, Bilis Manger is a creepshow, the dialogue is fair, and at least it’s more brightly lit than some earlier episodes. But the only thing that resolved a plot built entirely upon the fatal weaknesses of the protagonists was Captain Jack’s magic trick. Not a sudden realization of those weaknesses, not an attempt to overcome them, not the five of them banging their heads together and finding a solution. At the end of the episode, those flaws are still there, and no discussion is given to them. The one thing in the series that needs fixing above all other shortcomings, and Russell T. Davies didn’t touch it.

Anyone for Season 2?

Captain Jack Harkness

TARDIS Coordinates: January 1, 2007

This was a pretty optimistic day for Doctor Who. A week after the premiere of “The Runaway Bride,” the network broadcasts this episode and its followup, “End of Days,” as well as the Sarah Jane Adventures pilot “Invasion of the Bane.” So, at the dawn of 2007, the score is: one 43-year-old revived TV series, with its own unique and spectacular identity, one post-watershed spinoff, with a whole new cast and crew, and focusing on the second most intriguing character from the first season, and one children’s spinoff, based on a classic series character with her own agenda.

I’d call that a pretty good score, if I’d liked Torchwood on first viewing and felt optimistic that the Sarah Jane Adventures would make a good series. While I hadn’t disowned Torchwood as the bastard redheaded stepchild of Doctor Who…well, even Russell T. Davies criticized the first season a few years on, stating that he thought it was “trying too hard.” And certainly, with its explicit sex and violence, it seemed more about proving what Torchwood was allowed to do in Daddy’s absence than a spinoff. It made me think of a teenager that found the keys to the liquor cabinet.

It’s been something of a relief that its flaws were writ large by comparison and that the show actually turned out to be pretty good, though some of the old critiques remain, and they don’t all have to do with puerile fascination with the explicit. I don’t think the show has always been very good about finding solutions. While the rewatch has shrunk the size of the metastasizing tumors infecting my memory of the show, it hasn’t eliminated them completely. I do look forward to Season 2, which I remember much more fondly, and which seemed considerably more mature.

Tosh and Jack investigate the sound of music coming from a long-closed dance hall, because, this being Torchwood, nobody can just assume that it’s a few kids fucking around in the abandoned building. They fall through a time warp and wind up in January of 1941, as the dance hall is seeing off a contingent of soldiers, including one Captain Jack Harkness – the man Jack stole his identity from, a tall, lean American who looks like he fell out of a recruiting poster.

Needless to say, it’s no coincidence that Jack would meet his namesake; the events of the episode are driven by a sinister old man named Bilis Manger, who has an agenda of his own. Tosh manages to send a message to the future to restore both her and Jack to their own time, but Bilis intercepts and tampers with the message, so that when Owen uses it, it goes a bit wrong.

The real Jack Harkness has only a few hours left to live; his team will be ambushed the next day, which breaks Captain Jack’s heart. The two of them slow-dance before 1941 dissolves, which probably looked a bit odd to the onlookers, but with the rift hanging open like a wound right next to them, they probably just shrugged it off afterwards.

The big reveal, that Captain Jack Harkness isn’t Jack’s real name, doesn’t come as nearly as big a shock as the writers clearly hoped it would. The guy walks around with a sign reading “man of mystery and intrigue” hanging over his head, and the show has been really, really terrible about treating its viewers like idiots with regard to Jack’s past. It’s probably safe to say that most of the people watching knew that he was a 51st century time traveler and former con-man, and that something happened to him after he traveled with the Doctor, something that kept him from dying at the will of the Daleks. Yet when we meet him in Torchwood, it’s clear that the rest of the crew have been kept in the dark about his origins. Sarah Jane isn’t this much of a dick about her past; she opens right up to Maria when her secrets are discovered. Sarah Jane Smith treats a thirteen  year old girl as more grown up than a forty-year-old man treats a team of professionals with profound qualifications in disparate disciplines.

Look, I liked this episode a lot, and it again proved that Torchwood can be very sweet without losing its edge and very suspenseful without spraying the screen with blood. (Though Tosh carving open her hand on a tin lid just to leave a message seemed a bit gratuitous. Handwriting can linger, as anyone who’s read, say, the Voynish Manuscript, or the Dead Sea Scrolls, can attest.) But at this point, it’s appropriate to start seeing the series as a coherent whole, and the shape of its identity. We’re almost done here. One more episode to go.