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Torchwood: Dr Who Spin-Off With Captain Jack

Sigh...some good moments, but wasn't worth watching till the last 5 secs.I really doubt this will get many people who never watched torchwood hooked,in fact i wouldn't be surprised if this is the last we ever see of torchwood. :(
 
Hmmmm. What with this, the godawful Outcasts and the current troubles with Dr.Who, it's almost like the Beeb is trying to kill off expensive Sci-fi series deliberately.
 
I'm getting seriously bored with it now. Doesn't help that the episodes themselves are so variable - some move the plot along sharply, the dialogue's crisp, etc, but others just kind of drone away, taking an hour to get ten minutes' worth of info over.

As Titch said earlier, there are little false dawns of old-style Torchwood, like Gwen on a motorbike blowing stuff up, and then it settles back into slumber mode.

There's twice as much air-time as there is plot. Simple as.

That and the fact that, to me at any rate, it's not really even Torchwood anymore. It's basically The Event but with people from Torchwood in it. And look what happened to The Event when the fanfare and hoopla all died down.
 
It's a five part story stretched over 10 episodes....
 
Timble2 said:
It's a five part story stretched over 10 episodes....
... and the frustrating thing is, last season showed just what you can do with a five part story stretched over five episodes. This could have been another Children of Earth, and instead, it's halfway to being another Lost.

And yet, I'll still keep on watching until the end!
 
You were lucky, saw way too much of John Barrowman this week...
 
Goes round in cycles, this series, you'll have a slow episode where you wonder if you're wasting your time (last week's) and then it speeds up and more actually happens like last night's. Two to go, which means a slow ep next week and a ripsnorting finale for the week after. But don't quote me on that.
 
Episode 9 is Zzzzzzzzz.

Really we are no wiser at the end of it than what we could have guessed way back, and the one new idea that get's introduced is bonkers.

This really is just bad television.
 
I enjoyed this weeks, but as people have said before though, it is so patchy in quality that a 5 part series would have been a much better idea.
 
Quite enjoyed it tonight, against my expectations. No episode with Lauren Ambrose is a complete waste of time, although my main problem with the series now isn't the pacing, but with Gwen who has spent this year barely holding herself back from being an utter psychopath.

Apparently this has been doing pretty well in the ratings both here and in the US, so there may be more to come.
 
I've liked it more than i thought as well, even though i do think its a couple of episodes too long. Its interesting to see Q in there as well. He must be the go-to guy whenever a Sci-Fi series needs someone. How many Sci-Fi Series has he appeared in now?

There is one thing that bothers me though, i can't help thinking that the Doctor would have sorted this out ages ago. Isn't he supposed to be a protector of Earth, surely every alarm in the Tardis went off when people stopped dying on Earth.
 
These evil corporations just can't help themselves can they?

Just like we have our plan for World Domination laid out for all to see in the Olympic 2012/ZION logo, this company can't resist putting a major clue to their nefarious plot on the letterhead.

I'll stick with it, as the actors have done a pretty good job in holding an overstretched narrative together - although I think the end may bring up more questions than answers.

It has one thing in its favour, with Outcasts setting the pace, it will never be regarded as the worst sci-fi of the year.
 
feen5 said:
I've liked it more than i thought as well, even though i do think its a couple of episodes too long. Its interesting to see Q in there as well. He must be the go-to guy whenever a Sci-Fi series needs someone. How many Sci-Fi Series has he appeared in now?
I remember when he was just that loser from DOOL.

There is one thing that bothers me though, i can't help thinking that the Doctor would have sorted this out ages ago. Isn't he supposed to be a protector of Earth, surely every alarm in the Tardis went off when people stopped dying on Earth.
This is kind of a problem for the last two "event" series. When it was just episodic television, you could get past some mighty demonic death thing laying waste to Cardiff, but CoE and MD are global events that can't really co-exist with Doctor Who without being noticed. I suppose they just don't exist in the same universe anymore. Despite the references to the contrary.

Which is probably for the best. If Jack and River ever meet, the sexual tension could destroy the entire universe.
 
Anome_ said:
CoE and MD are global events that can't really co-exist with Doctor Who without being noticed. I suppose they just don't exist in the same universe anymore. Despite the references to the contrary.

Which is probably for the best. If Jack and River ever meet, the sexual tension could destroy the entire universe.
Maybe that's what blew the hole through the Earth in the first place.

I'm enjoying this series (I think!), even though I just know it could have been oh-so-much better, but the more serious it tries to be, the less it shares with the Whoniverse. In the first couple of seasons of Torchwood, it wasn't any kind of problem to have a Cyberwoman or a giant demonic devil-thing, but just think how jarring it would be now if the Blessing turned out to be a creation of - just for example - Davros or the Sontarans. In the old Torchwood, that would have been part of the fun, but now, maybe, it's lost its way a bit.
 
"Which is probably for the best. If Jack and River ever meet, the sexual tension could destroy the entire universe." But what a way to go! :D
 
Hang on - have we had 9 out of 10 episodes already? It's dragged and dragged, but now they've only got one hour to save the planet! What's going to happen to all the guest stars? Ernie Hudson, the backwards-headed girl (who was surely spotted in a "coming soon" segment with a neck-brace, but darned if I've seen her since), the others that I've forgotten. Still, at least we've now got Kate Winslet's mum* as a Blessing tour-guide...

Seriously, what are they going to have to achieve in the next hour? So many loose ends to tie up (so I suspect they won't bother with most of them) - if only this series was 12 episodes long! It's like one of those exams where you suddenly realise, with 10 minutes left, that there's a whole page full of questions you haven't noticed. See Mr Bean for details (5:00 minutes onwards)...




*No, only in Titianic, silly. She and Clint Eastwood were a couple, though, back in the 90s, it seems...
 
Just watched the last episode. It didn't really explain anything. In fact, I think it made a few things worse.
 
That really was absolute drivel, wasn't it?

And Oswald Danes really was just there to make things a bit edgier in a nasty kind of way, it wasn't really relevant to the plot who he was or what he was about.
 
It will be interesting to see how Captain Jack deals with an adversary that appears to be a giant vagina.
 
.....meh.....


When the highlight of your show is to name check a character from a more successful show you're in trouble

And it ain't over yet
 
That and bringing in actors from two other successful and related shows from a few years back.
 
I really enjoyed it! Liked the implementation of what has come to be known as The Keith Richards Swiss Clinic Gambit, thought that against the odds they tied up just enough of the threads (even the Danes plotline wasn't too bad, although it was the weakest he was there for a reason by the end), and the level of derring-do was a lot of fun.

I liked it better than the last series, which went too far in the tearjerking, that was here too, but it didn't drag it all down. It may have gone on too long, but I don't resent it for ambition. The cast was amusing, too - who would have thought Sarah Jessica Parker was a spy?

Now I'm looking forward to a fifth series, what with the cliffhanger and all. Yay Captain Jack!
 
I actually ended up liking it at the end although I still think it was too stretched out. Good stuff!!
 
Ho hum. If this was supoposed to introduce a new set of intriguing characters and expand the Torchwood franchise to a U.S. audience, why did they kill most of the cast off?

And how can Torchwood continue to operate secretly in future if the one question everyone on the planet wants to know is... who brought death back and how?
 
just me or was the death-rate amongst female characters much higher than among male?
 
jimv1 said:
Ho hum. If this was supoposed to introduce a new set of intriguing characters and expand the Torchwood franchise to a U.S. audience, why did they kill most of the cast off?

RTD's human sacrifice has always been part of Torchwood, they have a high turnover of characters.
 
Mal_Content said:
just me or was the death-rate amongst female characters much higher than among male?

About the same as far as I can remember, although two of the dead males came back to life.
 
I enjoyed the last episode, i enjoyed the 1st episode, but the stuff in-between was sometimes good sometimes rubbish.The fact that main characters die quite a lot is a plus in my book,the same team always victorious, none of them ever kicking the bucket, is just silly and never gets my attention,but that means Gwen is living on borrowed time. :(

*spoiler* would two immortals work? maybe if there is another serious jack will not be in it? Rex is taking over his role? :(
 
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