It took me a while … Cyberwoman has a strange reputation as its most embarrassing episode although it didn’t seem silly to me. That said I stopped for about 4 months between watching that episode and the next so maybe there was something wrong with it.
I have to say I always struggled a bit with Eve Myles’s Gwen Cooper character as the audience surrogate. I think perhaps because she’s police officer. I don’t know why anyone grows up and thinks they want to join the police. Perhaps because they want to issue speeding tickets. Who knows? Gwen takes on the investigation and interview / interrogation role of the group and therefore gets to ask all the necessary questions for the viewer.
The series is full of references to questions of mortality and atheistic propaganda – even going so far as to have characters come back from the dead and tell us that after death there is literally nothing. Meanwhile John Barrowman’s immortal Captain Jack Harkness spends a lot of time standing on the edge of tall buildings and sometimes even falling off them and lives his life in a state of permanent annoyance at the fact he can’t die.
The episodic nature of the first series allows for individual stories to be written about different protagonists in the group. It’s interesting here that we have 5 central characters but none of them feel that they are neglected in the overall narrative. Naoko Mori’s Toshiko Sato is a plausible geek and Burn Gorman’s Owen Harper is interesting – James Bond if he’d been physically unfit, rather plain, not very witty and had had a doctorate. It isn’t till the penultimate episode of series two “Exit Wounds” that we discover via flashback how the disparate group came together.
Toshiko seems to have been blackmailed into giving away government secrets and ended up in a UNIT facility with strong overtones of Guantanamo bay that’s so grim that she has to sleep on the concrete floor of a cell without any central heating until she was rescued by Jack who offered her a job in return for her freedom. It puts a different angle on previous episodes to consider that all the time she’s actually been effectively a prisoner of Jack. Owen Harper turns out to have been widowed which has left him a cynical misogynist unable to form relationships. Ianto Jones played with deadpan humour by Gareth David-Lloyd turns out to be an escapee from Torchwood 1 who Jack has been forced to take on out of a sense of responsibility which explains his role of being allowed to make the tea and have sex with Jack and, erm. very little else...
One of the best episodes is where Gwen Cooper admits her affair with Owen Harper (don’t ask what she sees in him) to her husband the long suffering truck driver Rhys Williams (Kai Owen) and then when he doesn’t forgive her for her infidelity wipes his memory with the drug retcon. I bet there’s lots of guilty people in the audience who wish they could sort out their relationship as easily. It also explores the social issues around people who work in secrecy.
Kai Owen’s part grows as the series goes on until eventually Jack ends up “retconning” their entire family. Tom Price also puts in a nice performance as Andy Davidson – the other person who knows Gwen’s secret. Although the existence of Torchwood seems to be something of an open secret – they have their name embossed on the group SUV, local pensioners are seen remarking “blood Torchwood” and local detectives find it very amusing when Jack rings up the local police to complain that “we’re trapped in our base”.
Martha Jones turns up but doesn’t seem to have much to do
except make everyone jealous – particularly Owen Harper as she takes on his
role after he is inconveniently shot and then spends the rest of the series as
a living corpse. He and his unrequited
love interest Toshiko Sato are disposed of at the end of series 2 in a rather
perfunctory way … as no one seems quite to know what to do with the series by
this point. Jack has an evil brother who
turns up and a nemesis called Captain Hart who seems to have a similar military
clothing fetish. Anyway it's dated quite well ...apart from the mobile phones and the clothes it doesn't look a decade old and the Torchwood hub set is very well realised. Still don't understand what the weebles Weevils were about.
I was going to try and review all four series on one page but that might be too much so for now…
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