Since I’m just sitting here waiting to here how hellish the rest of my day may end up being, I might as well gripe about Torchwood. Since there will be spoilers, I’ll put it behind the cut to be nice.
I have been thoroughly enjoying the Torchwood miniseries. I love Torchwood. It’s even possible I love it more than Dr. Who, which means I love it a lot. So last night when Ianto died, I was, to say the least, less than pleased. They already killed off Tosh and Owen, a move which also made me grumpy, so killing off another character seemed entirely wrong. Surely he’ll be saved at the last minute, right? Well, at the end of last night’s episode, it didn’t seem like that was going to happen.
Aggravated by this turn of events, I turned to the internet for spoilers for tonight’s episode. Unlike some people, I don’t mind spoilers at all. Just because I know how the story is going to end doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy the telling of it. Reading forums and whatnot last night, I find out that Ianto won’t be brought back to life, Jack takes off to do some “traveling” with his time vortex wrist gadget, and that leaves pregnant Gwen as the sole remaining member of Torchwood. It makes me wonder if they are intentionally trying to kill the Torchwood series.
Tosh and Owen dying sucked, but they could have been replaced by characters equally endearing, and life at Torchwood could have continued. Killing off Ianto, after all the talk about how they were going to really explore the relationship between him and Jack, seemed stupid. Yeah, they explored that relationship. Explored it to death. Jack running off to who knows where, as far as I am concerned, kills the Torchwood series. Jack is Torchwood, and how the hell is Gwen supposed to go on alone? While pregnant, no less? How the hell is she going to rebuild the entire Torchwood team and create an entirely new base of operations all by her lonesome? I personally don’t think she’s that damn awesome.
I don’t know where they intend to take this should there be another season or miniseries, but if there’s no Jack, I won’t be watching. If there’s no Ianto, I’ll watch, but the show would have to seriously be fantastic to make me feel like watching it regularly. It would become one of those shows that sits on the DVR stacking up episodes until there’s nothing else on I would rather watch, rather than the show I start watching as soon as it’s recorded long enough for me to skip the commercials. Sort of like Moonlight. I like the show, but there’s almost an entire season sitting on the DVR, because there’s always been something else on I like more. I’ll get to it when I get to it, or I’ll lose interest and delete it at some point.
Fans aren’t at all happy with the way the miniseries has ended. I’m not happy about it either, and it makes me wonder what the hell they are thinking ending it this way. Lin fell asleep just before Ianto died, so I have informed him he needs to watch the last 15 minutes of last night’s show before we watch tonight’s, because some stuff happened that’s important. He’s not going to be happy about it either.
Anyway, I think the writers and directors screwed up more than they may think. Torchwood had a huge fanbase, and now that huge fanbase is really, really peeved. I’m not sure how they will fix this, but I’d suggest they find some way to get Jack and Ianto back on the show. No one is going to want to watch Gwen being Gwen every episode.
Not especially happy hearing about there being a new Dr. Who soon either. I liked the first guy pretty well, and I grew to really like the second guy. Do we really need a new Doctor already? They sure are burning through the regenerations. The Doctor can’t have too many of his 13 “lives” left, but I am sure the writers will find some stupid non-canon way to explain it away when they decide to kill the next new guy off … thereby destroying yet another decent show.
Now that no one is watching and maintaining some control over the rift, isn’t that going to cause some problems in Cardiff and beyond? I would think so.
I suspect that with RTD leaving Who he wants to close Torchwood while people still like the show. But I could be wrong because he demonstrably hates doing what people expect.
As for the new Doctor, they’re bringing in a new everything when they hand the show over to the man behind most of the best episodes since the relaunch. This will either go awesomely or terribly.
This will either go awesomely or terribly.
That about sums up my feelings on it. Guess we just have to wait and see!
Watched Planet of the Dead tonight. It was good. Not fantastic, but good.
Planet of the Dead is actually one episode which is really improved by watching the behind-the-scenes Dr Who Confidential, just for the bit where they hadn’t intended the bus to sustain damage, but you can’t send anything surface mail these days. Fortunately they hadn’t filmed the final london scenes at this point so they simply concluded “Oh, so that’s what happens when a bus goes through a wormhole”
The last bit of the film where the psychic woman walks up to the doctor and cryptically babbles the plot of the rest of the specials made me impatient for RTD to just go and hand over to someone who understands foreshadowing.
What scares me is that putting Moffat in charge might be at a cost of his episode writing.