Monthly Archives: November 2006

Countrycide: First Glance

Damn that lead writer, Chris Chibnall… We’ve suffered his sex-crazed alien and his deranged Cyberwoman… do we really need to go through anymore? Maybe I’m tarring Chris for something the director insist on doing wrong. Maybe Chris weaves delicate and exciting stories of extra terrestrials, cyber-violation and the supernatural – and then the directors make an unqualified pigs arse out of shooting ’em. On the other hand, perhaps Russell T has far too much faith in this man and Chris, as a result, is driving Torchwood into an early grave, utterly unsupervised.

Countrycide starts off on solid ground, building tension and a sense of the creepy unknown in all the right sorts of ways. It has all the tension that the trying-too-hard-to-be-Alien sequences from Cyberwoman never had. However, the episode rapidly slides into an odd combination of Bones and The Hills Have Eyes – set in south Wales. Oh… with a splash of The League of Gentlemen for good measure (who, after all, can resist a small portion of the Special Stuff). The team find bodies stripped to the bone in the woods, lose their cars, find an abandoned village… then Tosh and Ianto get ambushed and captured by the weirdo locals. That’s where it just loses it…

The episode provides a plotline that shifts away from the extraterrestrial and the supernatural into something downright unsavoury… and serves up not only the other kind of meat, but also a supremely unsatisfying ending. I don’t care what kind of action hero Jack might be… you’re not telling me he can wade into a room and single-handedly take everyone down without so much as a scratch.

After the exhilerating high of Small Worlds, this provided a dollop of mixed feelings, but mainly disappointment…

Null and Void

Watched Small Worlds again yesterday and noticed a new connection between Torchwood and Doctor Who continuity.

At the beginning of the episode, we get a shot of Jack standing in the foreground of his office, with his desk sitting behind him. He’s talking to Ianto, I think. Anyway, on Jack’s right (the viewing left) sits a table lamp – and hung over the rim of the lamp’s shade… a pair of 3D glasses, presumably the ones the Doctor used to view the void stuff while at Torchwood One (in Army of Ghosts and Doomsday). Doubt Ianto had the time or inclination to pick them up while rescuing his girlfriend, so seems more likely they were salvaged from Torchwood after the Doctor sealed the rift into the Void.

Neat.

Death Imminent… Oh, sorry… Never mind!

It struck me that Gwen and Peri experienced similarly dubious life-threatening assaults, in Cyberwoman and Vengeance on Varos, respectively.

In the latter, while the Varosians struggle to deal with the Doctor, they send Peri and a rebel off to undergo weird DNA regression therapy that brings out the inner animal in those treated. Peri promptly starts a steady, uncomfortable transformation into a bird – feathers and all. However, the Doctor manages to stop the process at the last moment and the significant changes simply fade away, leaving Peri weakened, confused, but ultimately unharmed. Odd, considering the maniacal scientist responsible for the experiment seemed so darn certain the procedure had gone too far to stop.

For Gwen, the impending danger came in the form of enforced cyber-conversion. The cyberwoman dispatches Owen with a slap and then forces Gwen into the cyber-convertor. Gwen screams as electricity courses through the frame and then the automated cyber-conversion module above her opens up to reveal various whirling blades and slashing scalpels. Whirl, slash, whirl, slash… the machine hangs there for an age, apparently getting no closer to Gwen from the looks of the long shots, until finally Jack manages to get Toshiko to shut down the main power. Whirl, slash, whirl, slash… whirl, stop. Considering the speed of cyber-conversion seen during the attack on Torchwood in London, this machine must have been in need of a service or something. Gwen would have been screaming for hours before the darn blades even got close to cutting her up…

Really, if you’re going to expose people to impending peril or permanent transformation into a budgie, at least make the danger seem real.