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

[garillama.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I was thinking about this all last night, and I think Jack leaving would have been even more poignant if they had skipped the "Six Months Later" and done it at the end of Day 5 or "A few days later". If he ditched out on Gwen and Rhys while the country was in the middle of riots and political upheaval, and Gwen was sobbing and begging him to stay and help them explain and help them fix things? Whew, now THAT would have been a betrayal.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

And I would have loved that version as well!

[garillama.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this more and more, and I think the thing that bothers me the most is, where was the Doctor? I know he's kind of a deus ex machina, but really? I can suspend my disbelief enough to say that Jack was too bullheaded to call for help, Gwen didn't have access to the cell number, and Ianto wasn't willing to go against Jack's wishes until it was too late, after the Hub was blown up and he didn't have access to the number. But this thing was world-wide. That means Martha Jones, down in Africa, and presumably with her cell phone (because she's way too smart to travel without one), would have been seeing all this happening, probably called UNIT and gotten blown off, and called the Doctor. And now that I think about that, I'm sure UNIT has some radio channel or something to contact him as well. This is all assuming that the TARDIS didn't just take some initiative and drag the Doctor to Earth all on her own.

And I simply cannot believe that Jack would have given up and used his grandson without calling the Doctor and asking for help. He's cold, but he's "last-resort" cold, and he would have been running through every option in his head before he volunteered Stephen. The Doctor isn't the kind of option one just forgets.

I know, I know. It's a different series, and if the Doctor's there to step in and fix every problem there wouldn't be any conflict, blah blah blah. But I really just can't believe that no one in the entire world would have thought to call the Doctor.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Yeah, one has to recognize that Torchwood doesn't have the Doctor and be willing to suspend one's disbelief that he won't be there to fix their messes. And it can be hard to do that when the shows feel so similar (and one's a spin-off of the other, yeah, that).