Since I seem to have obliged myself to continue watching Torchwood to the bitter end (see previous item), I don’t feel that I can really let episode three (BBC3, Sunday Nov 5) pass without comment.
Who would have guessed that the bloke in the suit (who hadn’t previously had a proper speaking part let alone a piece of the action) would turn out to be hiding his pretty girlfriend-cum-Cyberman in the bowels of Torchwood’s underground HQ, eh?
Sporting a very non-standard Cyberman outfit — a fetishy, flesh-flashing cross between Metropolis’s female automaton and a SintheteX latex ‘web’ suit — our Cyberchick spent most of the episode switching between her former human self and her altered ego — a deadly android intent on destroying everything in its path. This caused suit-bloke much weeping and gnashing of teeth; he just couldn’t accept that there was a conflict of interest between Torchwood work and harbouring what was, even by the most liberal standards, an illegal (not to say homicidal) alien.
As a plot, it was barely up to old Doctor Who standards, and the inevitable bit of ‘adult’ homo-erotica (Cap’n Hardness giving mouth-to-mouth) again just looked bolted on for shock value.
But the thing that’s irritating me most about this series is that beneath all the flash and bravado, it shows a sloppy disregard for the quality of internal logic necessary for sci-fi to suspend disbelief. There is just not enough effort to provide a credible framework for the show’s back-of-a-fag-packet story ideas.
Credibility was in similarly short supply in an earlier documentary on Five (Wednesday Nov 1) entitled The British UFO Mystery: Stranger Than Fiction, which surely deserves an award for the lamest UFO documentary ever made. Either that or it was a brilliant spoof by the people behind Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and Man To Man With Dean Learner.
Purporting to examine the case of a UFO widely reported flying through British airspace in March 1993, it based an hour of speculation on the views of a chap whose job at the Ministry of Defence had been to evaluate reports of this very kind. He had investigated the numerous sightings of an apparently huge, triangular craft passing slowly and/or at great speed through the night sky, and had been unable to satisfy himself that there was an innocent explanation for it all.
However, bad science just swamped this hour-long effort, rendering any conclusions the programme attempted to draw nigh on worthless as far as I was concerned. It didn’t help that the show’s makers seemed to have about ten minutes of legitimate material which they were determined to stretch to an hour by any means necessary — the means including an artificially slow and solemn voice-over and repeated use of bizarre stock aircraft footage that had no relevance to the events under discussion.
Other features of this strange programme included an audio recording supposedly of nervous American service personnel investigating the weird phenomenon, which was unaccountably illustrated by some Blair Witch Project-style torch-swinging in the woods. And there was a ufologist who, though wheeled out (you would think) to give some credibility to the theory of an extra-terrestrial intruder, said no, it wasn’t that at all, it was some bits of a Russian spacecraft burning up as it re-entered the atmosphere. I don’t know about you, but I always reckon if the ufologist doesn’t think it’s extra-terrestrial, it probably isn’t, and you might as well go home.
But this programme didn’t. It stayed out well past its bedtime, got all tired and confused, and left me with no better idea of what had been in Britain’s skies that night in 1993 than I’d started out with. An Unedifyingly Feeble Offering.
www.bbc.co.uk/torchwood
www.five.tv/aboutfive/press/pressreleases/200602309_strangerthanfiction
www.garthmarenghi.com
I agree entirely with your comments. There was no real plot and the standard of acting was pretty appalling to boot. I find Captain Jack's character intensely annoying - surely someone who's supposed to have been a Group Captain in the RAF ought to provide some leadership and charisma? I really don't understand how the team which made such an excellent job of Doctor Who can produce this dross!
Posted by: Gothic Image | 10 November 2006 at 08:03 PM