Torchwood
After the disappointment that was Robin Hood, I wasn’t expecting much of the BBC’s other new show, Torchwood. Not only is it a spin-off of the new Doctor Who, but it’s a series about alien hunters in contemporary Britain. Scary.
It wasn’t bad. The pilot was a pretty standard story of “confused woman (Police officer Gwen Cooper) runs after a mysterious group only to be turned away once she catches up with them, but not deterred, she finds them again and is invited to join” but the general atmosphere seemed different enough. It’s filmed and set in contemporary Cardiff, which means that it’s refreshingly different from stuff filmed in Hollywood. Aside from the unnecessarily American Captain Jack Hartnett, all the main characters speak with a cute Welsh accent, accentuating the realism underpinning a fantastically-themed story.
I admit that at the time I’m writing this, I still haven’t seen the new Doctor Who series, which apparently is very similar in visual style. Based on that, I feel I can evaluate Torchwood for its merits alone. It feels like it could be the kind of series I would have hoped for as a teenager, when I felt the indecision and running around in circles of the X-Files was frustrating and too dark. It aims to be a little more gritty than “teenage” series (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or similar), with copious swearing and violence, but clearly the producers have understood that swearing, blood and sex is exactly what attracts a teenage audience.
Torchwood clearly doesn’t have a massive budget, but it gets its dynamic down by using everyday settings influenced by fantasy/sci-fi elements. For example, the second episode features an alien taking over the body of a teenage girl, and feeding off of sexual energy of males, killing them in the process. Not only does the show feature an intimate sex scene in a club toilet, but also shows the club owner later masturbating to CCTV camera footage from said toilet (and witnessing the death of the boy). Oh, and the line, “I guess he came and went,” which had me in stitches.
I don’t get why they had to film so many shots on the rooftops of buildings. I guess they had plenty of money for the pilot and chose to use it to rent a helicopter. Hopefully they’ll get down to the serious meat in subsequent episodes.
It’s light, sci-fi fare for a distinctively young audience, with some believable - if fantastic - characters, and humour interspersed with violence and sex. Nothing amazing, but definitely not dreadful either. Sort of like a European Buffy the Vampire slayer, with grownup characters. I don’t know.