Loaded Couch Potatoes

Torchwood, from the moment it debuted, was heralded — or derided, depending on whose voice you were hearing — as a darker, edgier spinoff of Doctor Who.  In this way, it was similar to previous genre shows like Angel (a darker, edgier spinoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Millennium (a darker, edgier show that wasn’t a direct spinoff of The X-Files but might as well have been).

Thing is, all of the original shows in those equations were plenty dark in their own right.  If you know the names Donnie Pfaster or Jenny Calendar, then you know this is true … and the scariness of the monsters on Doctor Who has long been one of its major selling points.

With that in mind, I would say that not only is “Children of Earth,” the new micro-season of Torchwood, perfectly in keeping with Torchwood, it’s also perfectly in keeping with its grandpappy Doctor Who.

I mean that in both a good and a bad way.

Let’s face it, Doctor Who can be a bit cheesy from time to time.  It’s part of the appeal.  I mean, war machines with plungers and various toilet parts glued to them … robots whose shiny metal bodies are clearly people wrapped in aluminum foil … this is not a show for you if you don’t have a fairly high tolerance for goofiness.

And if you take a look at the poster I posted (ever so kindly and with great forethought) above, you might get a little whiff of cheese rolling off of it, too.  Everyone looks so serious, and there’s Gwen, holding two guns criss-crossed over his chest like she’s some sort of deceased postal worker buried in hororarium by her own homicidal kind.  Nobody holds guns like that; there’s no reason too.

Except that it does, admittedly, look kinda cool.

I’m making it sound like I hate Torchwood and Doctor Who, and nothing could be further from the truth.  Well, I’m sure something could be — if I said, “I’m a chocolate-covered Australian wearing gas cans for shoes and hosting a Patrick Swayze benefit concert,” or “I prefer Pepsi,” or “Damn you and your buffalo wings,” that’d be further from the truth — but there is a good distance between the truth and the implication that I hate those shows.  I don’t.  Kinda love ‘em, actually.

But, yes, there is more than a bit of cheese, even in the ultra-serious “Children of Earth.”

The story, for those of you who aren’t familiar, involves an alien threat to Earth in the form of the 4-5-6 (they’re named after the radio frequency they were first detected on), who have threatened to release a devastating plague into the atmosphere and destroy the entire species if the government(s) don’t give them what they want: 10% of the children on the planet.  If this reminds you a bit of Stephen King’s Storm of the Century, well, it does me too, a bit.

As with Storm of the Century (which I highly recommend), much of the best drama in the story is to be had in the conversations held between the people in charge, whose unfortunate task it is to now figure out how to cope with an unthinkable situation.  The British government has to figure out whether it is better to sacrifice the entire planet or a mere portion of its population, and once they’ve decided that there’s no decision at all, they have to decide who the children they take are going be.

That’s where it gets tricky, of course.  Do you make the decision to be impartial and “fair” and conduct some sort of random drawing, or do you try and separate the chaff from the wheat in the hopes of rendering the social impact as negligible as possible?

I’ve got my own philosophical thoughts on all that, but they’re tiresome and you don’t care, so let’s move on.

One of the ways in which “Children of Earth” truly shines is that the themes of family in general and children specifically is woven throughout the entire five-episode arc.  Let’s start at the top: for one thing, Torchwood itself is a sort of family, comprised of people who work in very close proximity and form exceptionally tight (if not always pleasant) bonds.  As you might recall, Torchwood suffered some terrible losses at the end of season two, so it’s already a wounded and scarred family.

Within that group, though, “Children of Earth” finds each of the remaining three members dealing with separate issues.  Jack, we learn, has a daughter and a grandson, both of whom age like normal humans.  Jack has been playing the role of uncle for the boy; neither Jack nor his daughter know how to explain the truth to Stephen.

Ianto, we discover, also has a family we didn’t know about: a sister, a brother-in-law, a niece, and a nephew.  Ianto is obviously a good uncle, and this is a nice little bit of characterization for him.

Then there’s Gwen, who during the course of the story discovers she’s pregnant; her husband, Rhys, is thrilled, but as the story progresses and things get darker and darker, Gwen seems to begin questioning whether or not she even wants to bring a child into such a world.

Gwen is wrestling with some mildly (if mostly academic) difficult decisions, but the entire story culminates in a scene in which Jack has to make a truly monstrous choice.  I’m not going to give it away here, in case someone is reading who hasn’t seen it yet; and if you have seen it, you surely know what I’m talking about.  This scene is a Battlestar Galactica-worthy moment of pitch black darkness, and it shares with that show a sense of there being no other way to resolve things.  It’s one of the most powerful moments in the history of the Whoniverse, that’s for damn sure.

There are numerous other such moments, many of them in the last episode, and it’s these scenes which makes me give a thumbs-up to these episodes.

They are, however, far from being free of problems.  Here are a few:

*     I hate the vocal effects they used for the sound of all the children simultaneously saying the same things.  It sounds nothing like hordes of children speaking simultaneously.  Now, granted, I don’t actually know what hordes of children simultaneously saying the same thing sounds like, but I bet this ain’t it, and if it doesn’t feel right, it feels wrong.  This feels wrong.  I’d have preferred to actually hear all of those kids speaking; that might’ve been creepy.  Although I’m sure the production logistics of accomplishing that sort of thing would be considerable, so maybe crappy vocal effects was the best they could do.

*     As a plot device, Clem — the old man who was almost a viction of the 4-5-6 — is a bit clunky.  He feels pretty significant during the first few episodes, but his story comes to a weak conclusion, in my opinion.

*    I’m not a big fan of the way the 4-5-6 are depicted.  Which is to say, how they aren’t depicted, because basically, they are never shown.  My first inclination was to think it was cool, because that way, they didn’t have to go through hours of buildup to show goofy rubber-masked aliens.  But then I began to feel like that was a bit of a cop-out, and also not in keeping with Doctor Who tradition.  It was an even worse decision to havee the aliens be some sort of weirdly vomitous creatures who were constantly spewing some sort of pea-soup-looking flith against the windows.  I suspect that this would have been okay if they’d shown it only once or twice, but it seems like it must’ve happened at least ninety-three times.  And did you notice that every time, those windows looked spotless, as if the 4-5-6 hadn’t just yarked on ‘em ten seconds earlier?  Methinks some shots were recycled.  Bad execution of a decent idea.

*     I’ve got a boner for Gwen, don’t get me wrong, but I think they tried to play her up as too big of a bad-ass at times.

*     Can America please hire a different newscaster?  Apparently, we’ve only got the one, and she looks a bit too much like Skeletor for my tastes.

*     I don’t believe for one second that if all the children of the world began chanting “We Are Coming,” and then stopped, society would continue to operate just like normal.  I get that this is a convention of storytelling, but I’m just saying, that’s silly.

*     The Prime Minister is obviously even a bigger douche than Saxon was, but it feels totally unbelievable that he would order Frobisher to sacrifice his own children to the 4-5-6.  This scene plays because the two actors are pretty great, but it seems patently false on a storytelling level, and custom designed only to give us the scene which follows.  Which, again, is a great scene; but it feels a bit like it came out of a factory that customizes in stock scenes of Darkness and Despair.

*     Ianto and Jack’s big scene was a failure on the part of the director.  Here is a very emotional scene, played in too close-up a shot from a too-awkward angle.  Back the hell up and give us a better look at these two good-looking gentlemen; otherwise, you ruin it.

Mostly, though, this was a gripping, excellent series of episodes.  I’ve seen some complaints that it’s too dark, and that that darkness makes it feel too separate from the Doctor Who canon of which it is technically a part.  I disagree.  At one point, Gwen basically asks where the Doctor is, and it’s a valid concern.  To me, though, this strengthens the Doctor as a character.  After all, he’s always finding himself stuck in nasty situations, trying to find the right metaphorical medicine to fix the problem at hand; his absence here just makes him seem like that much more of a savior all the other times.