Torchwood


I don't know where to start because of course you don't expect a Torchwood story to make sense or have the remotest grip on logic or reason or SCIENCE even... (but honestly, killing a few mice in a sealed bell jar has not ever meant being able to exterminate all the mice in a house, let alone all the mice in the world... really)

So apparantly the mission for this five-parter was to MAKE US HATE JACK HARKNESS!

I mean, back in 1965 he agrees to shepherd 12 cute little orphans to their doom for the very good reason that he won't be risking his life doing that. Umm wait, so we're totally sure the aliens aren't going to accidentally take everyone in range? But besides alien trust issues... he agrees to do it because he can't be killed. Nice guy, I suspect I'd have said 'stuff it, you want to deliver 12 cute little orphans to aliens you take them yourself, because if this is worth the lives of 12 cute little orphans then prove it's about the greater good by taking the risk yourself'... He just does the deal and tells the cute orphans to 'walk into the light'. And forgets all about it for 44 years.

In 2009 he briefly struts his moral high-ground of 'an injury to one is an injury to all' and for a couple of minutes you feel he may have learnt something, but within hours he first agrees that 10% of the children of the world is a good deal (after 'just say no' doesn't work) and then, when inspired to do something a bit more positive than saying 'no', sacrifices his own grandson for the greater good. (And this is done as if there was a ticking bomb with seconds to go, although there's precious little sign that the children of the world are all gathered up ready, indeed we're told that the UK has only grabbed 80%... and instead of going and rounding up a couple more school's worth they send soldiers into people's homes to snatch individual kids... oh yup that's going to work with the sekrit plan to pretend the aliens tricked us...) (no just don't even try to work out why anyone is doing any of this... everyone is stupidly selfishly other-sacrificing, and the army will grab kids from their screaming mothers arms because otherwise their kids will be taken... Oh, wait, if they don't grab the screaming kids who would there be to grab their -- the soldier's -- screaming kids? Really, soldiers are not that stupid, including that their kids are just as or more likely to be going to failing schools and so being gathered up anyway... no wait THE GREATER GOOD (aka EVIL demands this))

But wait... while the aliens have got by for more than forty years on just 11 children (one escaped) they are DRUG ADDICTS. If they kill the entire human race, or even a decent proportion of said human race, how is that going to get them more chemicals that make them feel good? (And of course the druggie aliens are disgusting vomit spewing aliens with violent tempers... DRUGS - JUST SAY NO) No, don't ask yourself why the human race doesn't immediately offer to farm kids for the chemicals while working on how to synthesise more (cloned tissue implants perhaps) -- because clearly while the aliens can transport themselves in pillars of fire they can't synthesise whatever they've found in prepubescent children that gives them a buzz. (And so have to wear the child as a hood ornament... and does that mean there are only 11 aliens with plug-in kids? How do they know they can peddle hundreds of thousands more?) This could be a really massive market opportunity for the human race... really, addicts are not generally the top of the drug trade food chain. The British government could have stepped in to become drug lords!

Anyhow, instead Jack sacrifices his grandson... because one child for millions is a good swap. Thank God he suddenly had a daughter and grandchild (Oh and of course just flung that information at Ianto when it'd most hurt) andthat he didn't actually believe that injury to one crap... not when it comes down to killing AN UGLY DRUGGIE ALIEN!

And sorry but the initial plan was to walk into the sekrit government building, and tell the aliens 'No' in a loud firm voice? (and crumble the minute they kill your boyfriend) Because that makes total and perfect sense. Really, best plan of all... it works with stroppy foreigners after all, raise your voice commandingly and announce that you'll fight them! Best. Plan. Ever. And then fire your guns at the bullet proof glass and entirely forget that you've seen that there's an airlock round the side... Plan falls apart and people in Thames House die horribly in screaming panic (except for the guy who gets in a hazmat suit... and demonstrates that the virus is kind of easily contained)

Next comes the BSG style laying out of bodies/bodybags -- though who they got to go into the building to clear out corpses which might still be infectious... and if they're not still infectious then the alien's germ warfare agent will fail, because when people die within minutes of becoming infected and there's no post-mortem contagion then you haven't got a viable weapon of mass destruction. However that's logic and logic has no place in Torchwood.

Ianto's dead, so there's clearly no point Jack doing anything more -- fifty people were killed and that makes fighting the aliens on the beaches a worse plan than giving up 10% of the world's children. Cue depressed Jack.

And yes, Ianto dies... Ianto comes out and declares himself gay for Jack Harkness to his sister, and then dies. The hero's gay lover dies, and fairly pointlesly... no brave guns blazing death but a 'gosh, went to deliver the threat to the aliens who previously threatened germ warfare without taking so much as a gas mask' death.

(You know, all this continued as if other countries would just line up their kids like sheep, even though they hadn't even the minimal information the Brits did. Or that those other countries had any means of rounding up kids to send them off. Or that we wouldn't all end up in one massive row about which kids were more expendable -- hey the Chinese only have one each but there are multiple countries teeming with street kids. But the UK is going to keep everyone in the country knowing they're big lying liars??? What happened to the internet? Satellite TV. Telephones.)

Then big bad civil servant (who being one of the grey invisible people wouldn't have made much of a 'demonstration of loss' to the public but is supposed to obey orders to sacrifice his children when he knows the Cabinet have exempted their kids) is threatened with his girls knowing he's not a nice person before they get on the bus to be alien plug-ins. He being, we are assured, a good man, he goes home and kills his daughters and their mother. No 'let's have a go at running away' first... He shoots the kids (apparantly civil servants are allowed to sign out pistols for this purpose... my tax money at work) and he shoots his wife... who isn't under any kind of threat of death. And I felt slightly sick because I'm under the impression that I'm supposed to think of this honour killing as A GOOD THING. (It did not involve him having a heart to heart with his wife -- the sequence of events shows him arriving home, getting out the gun, hiding it from his family, and then shooting all three -- because he's a gooood man and doesn't want them to suffer knowing that he isn't) WTF??? I guess the goings on in Hitler's bunker did demonstrate the Nazi love of children/family.

But Jack's daughter (Alice) persuades the evil bitch who had him entombed in concrete that the Government isn't the State -- which she's sworn to protect -- and to go get Jack. Big mistake. Jack gets a spring back in his step and twiddles some knobs he didn't consider twiddling before and rush. hurry. clock is ticking. he needs a kid to be the transmitter for the signal (which I suspect blew up the alien's drug plug-in since though there was much red blood something also transported away... so I'm a bit at a loss as to how this helps with the viral doom thing). Anyhow, all the kids scream -- this is like the Gentleman episode of Buffy! -- alien explodes (all the kids in the world/UK have to scream to get one alien in London?) -- and grandson gets fried (possibly they could have made the signal a bit more directed at the one alien plug-in kid and not needed quite that much power?). End of threat. o.o

Jack is sad. Jack's daughter is sad. Everyone immediately realises that the threat is over and stops gathering up kids and beating up their parents. Joy. Happiness. Government looks embarassedly around for a scapegoat.

(So do I... and I choose THE WRITER)

Thankfully the American Ranger General had taken charge of getting the British kids together, so we can blame the Americans... (which is becoming quite popular in UK series only RTD treads the fine line between actual blame and 'no it was the Brits!' that should keep both sides of the Atlantic happy) but no, wait, civil service bitch -- who obeyed all the orders about killing people and rounding up kids -- got unhappy about her boss being forced to top himself and has recorded the PM deciding to use that excuse, and so power is passed into the hands of NaziBitchOne -- the woman who proposed that a lottery was a bad idea when they could use this emergency to get rid of the failing schools and their pupils... must be the education secretary, I guess. Really, I think I'd rather have the lying bastard who didn't think up that gem of social engineering in power still. (And boys and girls, funny that they didn't mention offering the kids who're in care or on the at-risk register... that'd give you a hundred thousand right off, then those in young offenders institutions and on asbos, you could get the police to round them up far more easily than knocking on doors looking for kids kept home from school. You'd also have made the alien's internet-style argument -- that we let a child die every four seconds so handing them over to aliens would be fine -- because you'd have been highighting that the majority of people do think that there are a bunch of kids who're substandard and are happy to have them treated as expendable. But then Gwen couldn't have made a really poor effort at saving Ianto's nephew and niece.)

Six months on, Jack runs away to space. We're not actually told about any other fallout from the whole affair... The world goes back to chewing the cud.

There was clearly meant to be a message, what actually came across was... that we pretend to like children but actually can't stand the little buggers. Social engineering is BAD. School league tables are a plot! Population control is EVIL, as is anything done for the greater good (so definitely no walking the kids to school so as to reduce your carbon footprint). Drugs make you EVIL (and unpretty). Oh, and being gay = dying young of a disease (and finding out your lover has been keeping a whole sekrit family sekrit from you so you also die a little bit unhappy with the gay choice). And a man should know when the best thing he can do for family happiness is murder his wife and kids (which as it happens didn't save them from anything except knowing daddy's job was a lot more ethically challenging than he'd ever told them). And The Doctor (or possibly that's God) doesn't always come and save the human race because humans are stupid and cruel to each other so he ignores them. And being pregnant makes you stupid... no, wait, Gwen's always been stupid. No, being Welsh makes you stupid, which is why a Welsh policeman takes off his stab jacket and forsakes his asp to attack the nasty soldiers (although since he hasn't been given any orders about them grabbing children off the streets he's merely keeping the peace by stopping them). Also Welsh men are all unemployed layabouts, thus while they'd put their kids into the care of Ianto's sister, so their wives could go to work, they were all hanging round the estate avaiable for an impromptu riot. And...

And as NaziBitchOne said... an injury to one is not an injury to all. Proof positive being that Steven dies and only two people are seriously injured by it (everyone else is made happier).

So many lessons.

The major one being that Russell can't write... and should Cpt Jack ever transport his face of Bo back onto my TV screen I really have to not watch, even if he's on BBC1.