Torchwood Children of Earth (Spoilers for the whole series)

[amanuensis1]

Some discussion regarding Torchwood C of E and some cold facts regarding narrative structure/resolution:



1. If you're going to end Torchwood (the organization as well as the series), killing three-fifths of the team and making the leader leave Earth works.

2. Jack reneging on "An injury to one is an injury to all" is bitterly, bitterly unpopular. Unfortunately, Jack has had moments when he didn't exactly stick to this credo, so it's not completely out of character. It's damned unfair, and it really couldn't be crueler to have put him in the situation to make that particular sacrifice, but at least the writers recognized that that's really it for Jack. He can't stay here any longer after a decision like that. He's no longer our hero. He can't die, so at the least he has to leave Earth.

(Mind, I don't like that choice. It was a very mean thing to do, to take away the Jack-as-hero perception. I can't argue the structure of it, but I will argue that it sours the audience. An audience might grieve and that is the way of sad events in a story, but souring the audience is a risky choice.)

3. Watching the politicians of Earth turn into genocidal maniacs was brilliant, but I'm sorry, that demands an ending far more devastating for the majority of them. Not all of them could/would/should get Frobisher's ending, but we really needed to see more death/imprisonment/suicide/abject public stoning of these characters.

4. Similarly, when the world has gone stark staring genocidal you can't gloss over that with a "Six months later." I think the descent into hell that this miniseries depicted was fabulous but the world would be irreparably scarred if it could come back at all from a devastation like that. Children ripped from their parents' arms by their own government. Chaos and anarchy, guys. Riots in the streets. Not "Six months later."

You can hate the deaths, you can hate what they did to our Captain Jack Harkness, but as for me I'm vilifying them for dropping the ball on the resolution. Which is a serious pity, since most of it was tight and horrifying and brilliant. Bad writers, no denouement biscuit.

Comments

[quill-lumos.livejournal.com]

Completely agree with you on the ending, I thought the rest of the story was horrifying but brilliant too. The politicians deserved far more than they got, there needed to be some closure for the audience, but the interesting thing for me was how well the programme held up as a scathing attack on the UK's current government. There have been lots of revelations in the UK recently about cover-ups and dirty dealings etc. The programme works best if it's viewed against that backdrop

In this story, the 456 could have been dealt with differently if the government had not tried to hide what had happened back in 1965, that would have bought them more time. Jack solved the 'problem' of how to deal with the 456 fairly easily, how much easier would it have been for the world's techies to work on this. The clues were there, the whole thing about wavelengths, the children being used for amplification etc. with more time, things might have been very different. The Prime Minister is even called 'Green', surely a nod to our deeply, deeply unpopular Prime Minister.

Good Sci-Fi works best when it is used as a lens to view our own society, this is what I think they were doing with Torchwood. It was flawed, it was deeply distressing and I can't see how the show could continue, it shouldn't continue after that, at least not in this form.

Lucie

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I so hope the writers are on the same page as we are, that they meant this to be an ending for Torchwood completely.

And as an attack on government, I thought how well it could extend to any government. Obviously I'm not as close to this portrayal as someone from the UK is, but it felt like it could have been a conference table in the White House as well.