This review is of Children of Earth as a whole than Day Five in particular, because the mini-season was basically one continuous story, so it's hard to judge the individual episodes separately.
Having just finished watching it, I'm feeling really shell-shocked - it's easily on a par with some of the most harrowing and emotionally intense episodes Torchwood's ever had, and probably some of the most intense and gripping television ever made. Many of the performances, both from Torchwood regulars and from newcomers, were brilliant, and it never shied away from dealing with disturbing issues and impossible moral quandaries.
If this ends up being the final season of Torchwood, it will certainly have gone out with a bang. Though the latest news pieces I've seen have said that a season four is in the works, so who knows...
And yet, while in many respects it epitomized some of the best things about Torchwood, it also really showcased some of the series's flaws. As much as I dearly love Torchwood, it's not perfect, and Children of Earth is, in many ways, like Torchwood squared: both the good and bad aspects of the series are magnified.
The biggest weakness, on the whole, is that logic too often takes a back seat to emotion. Maybe this is to be expected in a science fiction series that's fundamentally more character-driven than science-driven, but it would be really nice if things made a LITTLE bit more sense sometimes... SF always requires some suspension of disbelief, but in Torchwood's case the plot holes and fractured logic require more of it than the alien technology.
Listing everything that made me think "Wait... WHAT?" would be too long, and would also detract from the fact that otherwise I thought it was extremely well done (which is why I can put up with Torchwood's flaws in general). But a few of the standouts: Jack's actions in episode 4 - saying no to aliens who have already shown that they can concoct viruses deadly to humans, without no backup plan and apparently no expectation of consequences - was completely insane. What exactly did he think was going to happen? And the government's means of implementing their plan was equally nonsensical: convince people it's a perfectly safe inoculation program, and then send truckloads of heavily armed soldiers into the schools? Yeah, that's going to go over well...
Another problem is that, while I understand that Torchwood's been positioned as darker than Doctor Who, it seems like they've painted themselves into a corner by setting such a high level of intensity that they have to constantly find new horrible things to do to central characters just to keep up the standard. Killing two main characters at the end of season two was a hard act to follow, and killing yet another in the SECOND-last episode of this season made me wonder just how they were going to manage to top that in the finale, short of actually wiping out earth or something. Well, they managed it - but it came across as almost gratuitous. You could almost hear the writers in the background going "Oh god, now what? We can't kill ALL the main characters... Oh, I know! How about a kid? THAT'll do it!" I've got nothing against emotional intensity or disturbing subject matter - far from it! I thought Frobisher's final actions were perfect. Horrifically disturbing and tragic, yes, but completely real and believable for that character. Jack's "sacrifice", not so much. Yes, it was framed as the only way of saving millions of children, and maybe if it had been handled differently it would have worked better. If he'd had to talk to Steven and tell him what was going to have to happen, and Steven actually said yes, it would have if anything been MORE emotional, and it would have fit the characters better. As it was, he didn't even seem to think about it very hard, and the whole thing just felt contrived.
Maybe that's also partly John Barrowman's limitations as an actor. He's very good at playing a particular sort of role - the original Doctor Who Jack epitomized that. But the character has grown beyond Barrowman's strengths, because he really doesn't do intense emotion very well. In some ways that almost works, because Torchwood's Jack is 250 years older than Doctor Who's Jack was, and has seen enough loved ones die that it's understandable he'd be a bit emotionally hardened, but it really lessens the impact of scenes like that one, and even Ianto's death, although that was handled better than Steven's.
However, overall I'd still give the season a 9 out of 10, and there were many elements to it that I absolutely loved. Eve Myles and Gareth David-Lloyd were both phenomenal, as were many of the actors who only came in for this season, such as Peter Capaldi, Lucy Cohu, and, in the final episode, Liz May Brice and Susan Brown, who both showed their characters to be much more complex and interesting than they first appeared. And one of the things I most loved was that it showed ordinary people as capable of doing heroic things: Lois, Rhys, Alice, Ianto's family, PC Andy and others showed themselves capable of unexpected courage and conscience. That's one of the things that most distinguishes Torchwood from Doctor Who - that it's mostly about relatively ordinary people. Not a 900-year-old alien swooping in to save humanity, but about ordinary people coping with the extraordinary. That's part of what makes it so inspiring.
In closing, I do hope Torchwood continues for another season (though if so I really hope they can break the "OK, what can we do that's even more horrifying than everything we did last time?" pattern), but if it doesn't, this season will have been a very fitting end to it, epitomizing all that's both good and bad about Torchwood.
9 out of 17 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink