Pop Vultures

The second series of Torchwood finished last night in the US, so I’m going to pretend that I deliberately avoided writing about it after its UK airing in order to not spoil anyone (rather than admit that I forgot about it).

Of course, after nearly giving up on the show mid-season, the final episode was excellent. Enjoyable as it was, it was also frustrating as hell because it showed what Torchwood is capable of doing and so rarely does. How can a show with such potential to be good so often fall flat?

I think I have the answer.

Torchwood is a fantasy. Now, don’t start arguing that it’s sci-fi; I know that. But it’s also a ten-year-old boy’s fantasy. Seriously. It’s the story of a classified organization that works underground in a secret hideaway (complete with a concealed entrance, no less) and saves the world from alien attack. If one of my students wrote such a story, I’d hand it back and insist they avoid such obvious genre clichés.

Add in the fact that everyone on the show fancies and/or shags everyone else, and you’ve got the adult version of that fantasy. Now, that’s not necessarily a problem in and of itself. I mean, the basic Buffy story was that of a girl who slayed vampires. Veronica Mars had a teenage private eye, Nancy Drew with attitude. Both these shows were fabulous despite a seemingly ludicrous premise. However, they also embraced their somewhat unlikely plots and ran with them, playing with the genre, the characters, the storylines. In short, they had fun with the shows.

And that is where Torchwood lets its viewers down. It doesn’t play enough. It took one of the sauciest characters in Doctor Who history, Captain Jack, and turned him into a dark, brooding sort. It cast five attractive actors and allowed them to run around shagging anything that moved, regardless of species, and made it some sort of somber lesson about the danger of sex rather than a gleeful romp between the sheets. It got caught up in doomed love affairs and existential angst, ideas that should only be used to ground and temper the playfulness, not given center stage. This is why Doctor Who, despite its frequently cheesy production, remains the better show — it plays first and asks questions later.

The best Torchwood episodes this season have been the ones that messed about with the formula and shook up the predictable fantasy. “Adam,” for instance, was exceptional. That episode inserted a new character into the gang, one who could manipulate memories, and the tension was created not from some silly alien chase but from the audience’s desire for the impostor to be found out. That simple change from the typical “boy meets alien, boy loses alien, boy captures alien and everyone lives happily ever after” narrative made all the difference. Oddly enough, the more playful narrative made for a more powerful show, one whose emotional moments felt honest, rather than forced. The mid-season visit from Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones also livened up the show, providing some much-needed flirting and banter with the often deadly serious cast.

The other times this season when Torchwood embraced its playfulness were the best of the bunch, and we can thank James Marsters for that. As Captain John, he brought humor and style to the show. He refused to take the gang seriously, and, by so doing, it seemed as if the writers were admitting that the show was little more than a silly fantasy construct. Once that was out in the open, they were free to play a bit more. They threw everything into the final episode: explosions, time travel, long-lost brothers, aliens roaming the streets, unrequited love, self-sacrifice – it was all there. By overloading the show with these over-the-top elements, it freed it from the navel-gazing angst that held it back. Everyone was too busy running around to talk about their feelings, and the end result was that we liked them quite a bit more and actually started to care about them. When, at the very end, two of the main characters died (and it seems they’re actually going to stay dead this time), the deaths felt earned and genuinely moving. Just when I was starting to like Owen, they killed him off. Now THAT’s good television.

I’d like to believe that this strong conclusion sets the show up for a solid third season, but the show has been too inconsistent for me to trust that a few good episodes have righted the spaceship. So, in the interest of continuing along this much-improved path, I offer these suggestions to the writers:

1. Put Captain John in every episode. If he’s not available, use Martha Jones instead.
2. Have Jack kiss someone at least once a week. The man is an incorrigible flirt in Doctor Who – why take that away from him?
3. Each season, at least half the plots should revolve around something other than the gang saving Cardiff from some deadly alien. Mix it up, people!
4. Give us a proper Big Bad, a villain we love to hate and that connects the plots from one episode to the next. The show doesn’t need to be turned into a serial, but there should be a reason the audience doesn’t want to miss an episode – and John Barrowman’s perfect jaw line isn’t enough.
5. Stop taking yourself so damned seriously, okay?

If season 4 can manage all this, I’d be far less likely to forget to write about it.

Now that it’s over, what did you think of the season as a whole? Was the final episode good enough to make you forgive the show’s faults?