Appraisal day by: GF Willmetts. Forgive the multiple misspellings of Torchwood. Seems because of my weekly coverage of season four of Tombwood on the SFCrowsnest Forum, activated a certain removal virus rewrites whenever I put Touchewood. No matter, you know what I’m referring to. A cure for the removal of the T*****wood virus please by the end of this appraisal!

Let’s have a miracle day or a Blessing if you prefer in the meantime. Near immortality all round. That and the actions of the removal virus to a certain group’s name and info off the Net originally created by Queen Victoria, the whole of mankind suddenly discovers that they cannot die. The exception is Captain Jack Harkness, who discovers now he’s back on Earth is now mortal and various people, mostly the CIA for the main part, want him to find out why he should he be the exception while other bodies want him dead. He meets up with Gwen Cooper and her family, before they are both captured by the CIA and whisked across to the USA and various shenanigans there.

Things aren’t helped that the CIA has also been infiltrated by people determined to grab or kill Harkness and Cooper. Any more info and they’d probably kill you and in some cases, do, just for knowing. That doesn’t mean no one can be feisty. Gwen Cooper, especially when she becomes assertive and reminds you of her specific Welsh nationality before clobbering you. Has anyone wondered why the CIA have used a commercial flight home and not used a faster military flight by the way? Well, other than the fact that it would be quieter and allow the opposition to poison Harkness that is. Not sure if I would recommend the cure for anyone with a weak composition, though.

Much of the story has the Teachwood duo wrong-footed and even with two renegade CIA officers in tow, it takes a long time to unravel what is going on. What tends to run interference is that the governments of the world concerned that population growth would quickly exceed food resources. The solution was that although everyone had unlimited life, if you were damaged, you stayed that way. If you were near death, you didn’t get better. In fact, you could get a lot worse. You just didn’t die but perpetual lingering. The most you would be doing is taking up hospital bed room. You would have thought there would be warnings to people to take care and not be too reckless. Instead the solution was to incinerate any critical level ones and amongst these is Gwen’s own father and her family are determined to keep him away from such a fate.

It’s made more heinous by keeping quiet about this particular resolution although how that can be done across the world is a bit grey. I mean, many families are likely to have this situation and working in this area, I would have thought the Official Secrets Act and its other forms in other countries wouldn’t have been able to have kept word from getting out.

There is also some glimpse of one of Harkness’ own affairs on a trip to the USA pre-Depression period, although little is said as to why he was in New York at the time. In many respects, this tends to be a bit of an indirect red herring padding where people take information from the situation and many demonstrations that he can’t be killed. Having seen the final episode, I can’t see the connection to how they used Harkness’ secret and the creature they fed his blood to. I mean, if you found something that looks like two pieces of raw hamburger wedged into a tangent running through the Earth, I doubt if the first thing you would do is chuck some blood at it to see what it does, would you? Hopefully, this will be explained in the next season.

The real problem is how long it took for this single story to reach an ending. From the looks of things, I’m not the only one to express concerns with this. It’s one thing to have a five part story shown over a week, quite another to have a ten part story ten weeks long and dragging so it doesn’t feel there’s an emergency situation going on. This is made worse when a good chunk of it lacks that SF flavour. It isn’t as though we’re shown explicit detail of how it affects the world. I’m not even sure if things would change that drastically but you’re given too much time to ponder on things where a faster-paced story wouldn’t allow. You don’t want to be told that there was a couple months gap between events and everyone sitting on their hands doing nothing, not even character bonding. That’s just poor storytelling.

Also, let’s look at it this way. The story is set over roughly a three month period. You would still have the same number of children born. Probably the same number of stillborn and those with defects. Would these actually be alive? At the other end of the age scale, as pointed out, the aged who would still reach the point of death they would have had before the Blessing and short of brain damage, would just as likely stay comatose. If you weren’t that way, then you’d go on as before. Hardly any effect on the amount of food consumed. Prolonged immortality might not depend on eating regularly. The number of suicides would probably remain the same. In fact, I would wager that it might actually go up as more people join the dangerous sports leagues scattered across the world to test the limits of indeterminate life. Well, it might stop if you found that injuries wouldn’t heal fast and brain injuries would be permanent and I suspect things would ease off a lot. Most people would walk around as if they were on eggshells. I do agree with them that the amount of painkiller dependency would go up and that Phicorps would make a killing there but then, so would any pharmaceutical company because painkiller drugs is one of their bigger sales items, although the dosage strength might need to be a lot stronger. I’m not sure if I would call it a Blessing. Immortality is only of good if you stay in good health. Things like this should have been explored more.

For three months of the story, I don’t think things would get beyond a state where things couldn’t be coped with. Saying that, the fact that so many countries would willingly incinerate the potentially dead so quickly has a disturbing thought too as if you can’t vote, you’re expendable in a democratic society. Shows how tenuous democracy is, doesn’t it? Makes you wonder why the world populace didn’t go into riots, even where marshal law is enforced. I doubt if the military would enforce this if they knew they were killing their own families. Surely Gwen Cooper’s family isn’t the only family in secret rebellion against this government extermination plan? Can you see such things being kept secret for long?

Without knowing how much lead time Russell T. Davies’ writing team had in creating this story, I can’t help but speculate that more could have been done with the sub-plots. A lot of the time it was used simply to remove Gwen from the main story to allow the American actors some room to breathe simply because she was the only one available to pull from the action. You could hardly send any of the American cast abroad for long and Esther Drummond’s family problem was dismissed in a few minutes. If anything, it’s a tribute to Eve Myles acting skill giving Gwen an attitude that tended to sublimate the American cast, who are largely pussycats compared to her and I hate saying this, don’t really stand out significantly. Actor John DeLancie was a scene-stealer, mostly because people know him from other SF roles but gets killed. Although whether that was anticipated before filming is hard to say.




Saying that, Barrowman’s Harkness gloss seemed to be missing a lot, even with the back story of his past when he was immortal. I could speculate that maybe he brought his game down for American consumption. Having not seen the other two key actors Alexa Havens and Mekhi Phifer in other roles, it’s hard to comment as to whether this is their normal performance level. However, there is certainly something odd about the blend of British and American cast that seems awfully unbalanced in finding a middle ground. Using so many of the Welsh contingent might be seen as keeping our side’s fans on-line as much as using US locations to attract US viewers for the first time. Hopefully, this can be remedied in a further season and is only teething problems of an international co-operative production. ‘Doctor Who’ has had less of a problem with this as most of its production has stayed with finance and minimal filming Stateside at the time of writing this appraisal. ‘Titchwood’ is still, after all, more of an unknown commodity over there.

Speaking purely as an editor/writer myself, I think the next season needs to be more of a mixture of standalone stories with an under-thread than one large story. Whether that is allowed to happen depends entirely on the viewing figures for the present series. Going epic all the time can also mean that you can’t be forever trying to out-do previous seasons and season three was exceptionally good drama after all.

From the idea stage, it certainly looked like a good idea but the execution (sic) could have been raised a lot more. Some of it could be because of blending British dramatics to American action and there aren’t that many Angelo-American blends around. Only viewing figures will determine what happens next.

© GF Willmetts 2011

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