I just got back from watching the first episode of Torchwood (a local British-pub style bar and restaurant hosts a monthly Doctor Who showing, and this month was ‘A Good Man Goes to War’ and ‘Miracle Day’), and I have to admit, as someone who was never really grabbed by Torchwood the way I was by Doctor Who, this one was pretty good. Russell T Davies really seems to have hit on something with the idea of making the entire season one long multi-part story, centered on a single big worldwide phenomenon that the Torchwood team investigates. (Of course, by this time it’s the Torchwood duo…one of the other things I admire about the series is that they don’t pretend Torchwood is actually all that special at their job. They are not the best of the best of the best, they are bloody-minded and too curious for their own good.)
This time, for those who haven’t heard, the big phenomenon is that people have stopped dying. All over the world, the morgues are emptying out as they stop getting new customers. It’s not that people are magically healing or anything; one of the new characters, a CIA agent played by Mekhi Phifer, has a hole in his chest that was briefly filled by a piece of rebar. But they’re staying alive, a fact which is taken as evidence of a miracle…until people start realizing that we don’t have the resources to take care of a population that gets old and sick and wounded and hungry but never ever dies.
At which point, Jack and Gwen, formerly of the Torchwood Institute, begin to get involved. It’s an interesting hook, and while we’ll have to see where it goes, the first episode is sharp and clever and has lots of interesting bits. (It also has one transcendently silly bit where a child murderer is set free because he claims that he was executed and hence has served his sentence, which I will chalk up to RTD being a British TV writer and not an American lawyer.)
On the whole, I’m interested enough to keep an eye out for Part Two; for one thing, I’m curious to see whether my crazy theory about why everyone’s immortal is correct. (Crazy theory: Jack’s immortality has been siphoned out, as part of a murder plot against him, and has wound up being distributed among the rest of the world’s population.) For those of you who liked previous seasons of Torchwood, this one’s good too. For those of you who, like me, tuned out after the first three episodes and never went back, this is better than those were. For those of you who’ve never seen Torchwood, this is a pretty cool mini-series so far.
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If you haven’t seen anything past the first three episodes, you should check out Children of Earth. It’s where RTD finally got his feet under him.
I strongly urge you to check out the previous season, Torchwood: Children of Earth. (I’d suggest you get the DVDs, but this is the BBC we’re talking about; they bear a grudge over that whole War of Independence thing so you probably won’t be able to find any; just bittorrent it like everyone else). TV Tropes talks about the moment a TV series “grows a beard”, like ST:TNG season two or three or whenever it was that Riker grew a beard and the stories started getting much better. Well, T:COE is when Torchwood grew a beard to make Brian Blessed on a Harley look like Julian Clarey on a Segway. It was a killer, in every possible sense of the word.
Only… don’t watch it if you have a tendency toward slashing your own wrists. It’s not what you’d call up-beat viewing. Imagine Ann Frank Meets Old Yeller, with a cameo by Bambi’s mother… in space. That’s what we’re talking about here (except it’s not in space, but you get the idea).
Miracle Day had, in regards to the serial killer being paroled, the worst goddamn legal bullshit I think I’ve ever seen. It was just complete ass-backwards moronic, and really diminished my enjoyment of the episode.
Well, that and it was full of Americans. And one of the most ham-handed dialogue expositions scenes I’ve ever watched. Sigh. Suppose I’ll watch the next episode. I guess.
http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2011/07/11/torchwood-miracle-day-episode-1/
I have unsubscribed from MGK’s RSS feed.
@bbot Well, um, okay. Do you want to elaborate or just pronounce semi-troll-like statements?
How dare John Seavey watch the the first episode of the new Torchwood series, there is my reason to unsubscribe from updates to a blog primarily written by Christopher Bird!
I mean, that’s it, as far as I can tell. You turned off the RSS feed. Alright then.
My theory: Jack’s immortality mutated into an STD. The laws of Torchwood sexuality took over from there.
The execution thing sounds like something I vaguely recall about hangings, where if the rope broke the person was allowed to go free.
Don’t know if that was real or just a trope from fiction.
Add my recomendation of COE to the ones above. RTD “finding his legs” means Gwen Cooper does, too, and it’s wonderful to see.
Although having seen ep 2 tonight, it’s not spoiling anything to notice at least one or two similarities creeping in.
That was the same theory I had, actually – I’m too lazy to do the math, and not sure it would matter in any case, but if you believe (and semi-spoiler alert for Doctor Who Series 1, 3, and Torchwood from here on out) that Jack = Face of Boe, then he lived for billions of years. Even with millions of dead-yet-not-dead people milling about, I could see it happening.
That said, it would require something with enough power to circumvent the whammy Rose slapped on Jack to make him immortal, which entails power heretofore unseen in the Doctor Who universe.
I think I pulled a nerd-muscle there.
I don’t think parole of the murderer is that far fetched. He was sentenced to death. It is not his fault death becomes a slap in the wrist. Look at it this way, if human life expectancy suddenly goes to 2000 you can’t add years to an already convicted fellow’s sentence.
having watched episode 2 it seems like a reasonable supposition.
My idea was typical alien invasion stuff. Turn off mortality for a week, let humanity destroy the earth for you using up all resources that you don’t need for your race, then turn mortality back on, let humans all starve to death.
so who would want to kill Jack that bad. His daughter hardly seemed like the sort with the know how to set this up.
@ Zob
Yes. You can. It’s called “commuting your sentence to life imprisonment”. We give people multiple life sentences to to be served from time to time – just because we don’t expect them to live through it doesn’t mean that if they kept living we would stop accepting the validity of it.
@zob: Took me five minutes of Googling to determine that there is Supreme Court precedent for this; if you perform an execution, and at the end the guy is still walking and talking, it’s not considered cruel and unusual punishment to try again. It’s also not considered wrongful imprisonment to hold them until that sentence can be carried out.
Ultimately, Oswald’s argument rests on the legal definition of “dead”, and while the series presents this as a situation where the mere threat of a massive lawsuit is enough to cow the state, in practical terms, there’s a jailhouse lawyer born every minute who threatens to sue for “millions of dollars” for the way they’re treated in prison. Most of them get dismissed with prejudice within a day, and this one’s got Supreme Court decisions backing up the state’s actions.
And the idea that he could personally sue the governor should have been treated with laughter, not fear. The governor is not personally locking Oswald up; the state of (whatever…Kansas? Oklahoma?) is doing that. Oswald has no case, and it’s a little embarrassing that everyone reacts as if he does.
So far, I’d say it’s nowhere near as engaging as Children of Earth was. That said, it’s still some damn good television.
Although, is it just me or are Jack and company kind of secondary? It feels like the new characters are taking more centre stage than they are.
SPOILERS: Having “legally obtained” a copy of the second episode, I can say that MGK’s theory is acknowledged. How far that goes or what that means is entirely up for debate.
it’s true the Oswald’s case is laughable, but it has been my experience that legal issues in American television – especially if the show is not a legal show – are presented laughably.
I saw the opener last week . . . Doctor Who New York is going to show all the episodes of “Miracle Day.” Though the sound was crap, I understood most of the episode. I think it’s a great premise, though the whole “Murderer goes free” thing is bullcrap. I vaguely remember one of the fogies in Oz surviving the electric chair in the old days, and he wound up getting life without parole.
Two Theories:
1. Somehow, everybody on Earth has been stuck in a fixed point in time. Doesn’t explain why they heal like Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her, though.
2. Off-Topic: Jack does not become the Face of Boe. However, one of his testicles does evolve/mutate and become that.
The sentence is death, not execution. If it’s temporarily inconvenient or impossible to kill you, they just keep you in prison until they get around to doing you in.
The broken rope thing is fictional, although there is a story somewhere in the Newgate Calendar of a man who was hanged, presumed dead, and nearly dissected before he was revived: his sentence was commuted to transportation not because the law required it, but out of what passed for mercy at the time.
In general, Torchwood remains fun in spite of its rough edges, and appears to have had a fair bit of thought put into it. And, Canadians: you can watch it on Space’s Web site even if you don’t pay for the cable channel.
I may have only been half paying attention, but I understood the commuting of his sentence was in part describing it as divine intervention, because of the timing. (Then again, that may have been mentioned during the ‘this Season’ parts, where it seems the character is going to be made into a celebrity/religious figure of some sort). I just chalk it up as a combination of required by the plot (they need to turn a death row inmate into a prophet) and perhaps a bit of church/state satire (I’m sure there are some Govenors that would parole someone because of an ‘act of God’).
@Cespinarve
If I am convicted for 25 years and I suddenly become immortal you can’t add time to my sentence. Then again becoming immortal would suck if you are sentenced for live without parole.
@John
As it is stated in the episode, when a malfunction or blind streak of luck is the reason behind failed execution you are right. But what happened in the torchwood universe is more than that. It redefined the term death. Technically he died on that execution table. Problem is dying doesn’t mean anything anymore. You can try to poison him again but after a certain point it becomes pointless torture.
Personally I’d simply go for old school vampire execution way. Incinerate the guy till there’s nothing but ashes left and then spread those ashes using a river.
zob; dude, you’re overthinking it.
Bury him alive. If you’re really into overkill, do the cement thing they did to Jack in CoE.
Having seen all New Who up til Matt Smith, and never having watched a second of Torchwood (or SJA), what would I need to know going into Children of Earth?
If you have to release the guy, which I have no idea whether you do or don’t under American Law (being Australian), surely there would parole condition for a convicted sex offender, not going near schools etc. Then you just need to put surveilance on him and wait for him to slip up in the slightest, then get him back in court with a not so lenient judge and convict him with the maximum possible years because of the circumstances.
Liked ep.2 considerably more than ep.1.
One thing that bugs me, and perhaps unfairly. Part of the Dr. Who mythos has always been that when the Earth is in major crisis mode, the Doctor always shows up to save the day. They mention this often in Dr. Who.
And when Torchwood started out dealing with small-scale Rift shenanigans and pesky ghosts and stuff, that was fine. But with Children of Earth and now this, with the entire planet in jeopardy, I keep thinking “so where’s the Doctor?” It seems to diminish the character of the Doctor, to me, which is annoying.
Am I being unreasonable?
@Black Rabbit:
Opinions may differ on this point, but the great thing about Children of Men was that it was mostly self-contained. I think you could probably watch it by itself and not be confused by 99% of it, provided that in New Who it is revealed why Jack can’t die, which I’m pretty sure is well-explained by the end of the modern Series 3.
There is no way he would have been released. He simply would have been held until such time as his sentence could be correctly carried out. And even in alternate universe Earth if he was, against all odds, released, it would have taken a hell of a lot longer than a day or so.
As for my reaction to the episode, there were too many guns and explosions. I wasn’t pleased by the Americanization of Torchwood. I wasn’t thrilled by Agent Rex spending an unusually long time bitching about a toll bridge when the vast majority of US bridges are toll bridges. And I wasn’t happy with the unrealistic idea that a US agent could march into Wales and rendition British subjects with a wink and a nod toward the legalities.
The second episode was better, though.
Have some faith people. Good lord it’s only episode two. Suspend your disbelief. This is not real life, it’s a TV show, the laws can be anything in such a universe. ‘Children of the Earth’ was spectacular and ‘Miracle Day’ could be spectacular too once it plays itself out.
And here’s another recommendation for Children of Earth, which was the very first time that a season of Torchwood wasn’t…well, awful, if I’m going to be honest about it. (Seriously, those first two seasons were BAD.)
But CoE was solidly good throughout, and fucking awesome when Peter Capaldi was on screen.
I didn’t find the guns & explosions to be un-Torchwood. Torchwood has always been “shoot first, then ask the only important question, which is whether to keep shooting, oh and BTW the answer is HELL YES”… so as to contrast with Dr. Who’s “Ask questions first, then keep asking questions, and by no means ever shoot”.
I wouldn’t chalk the release-of-the-unsuccessfully-executed-killer to “RTD being a British TV writer and not an American lawyer.”
It’s less a British vs. American law thing than an invocation of TV Law; the “they totally have to let you go if your execution doesn’t work, man” thing is an old saw that I can’t be the only one to have encountered numerous times in fiction.
If you want to argue that it’s unrealistic to use, then fine (though I’d say it’s allowable as a nod to a goofy popular belief), but I have to utterly poo-poo the notion of blaming it on some national difference.
Spoiler:
Seriously, Starz, a Holocaust-type solution?
Also, was “COE” Jack’s final con-job & “Miracle Day” his punishment for it?