Home › Forums › Ganymede & Titan Forum › Torchwood Search for: This topic has 160 replies, 25 voices, and was last updated 13 years, 1 month ago by cliff. Scroll to bottom Viewing 50 posts - 51 through 100 (of 161 total) 1 2 3 4 Author Posts November 7, 2009 at 10:47 am #105776 littlesmeggerParticipant Without killing the child Jack wouldn’t have felt the need to go away. Plus the story of Jack being darker and sending the children the first time around wouldn’t have been a needed plot point. It’s all to give Jack more depth, not really a plot solver. If they’d just gone in guns blazing and killed it, Jack would’ve felt good about himself, Torchwood wouldn’t have shut down for the time being, and there wouldn’t have been an end to the show [for if the ratings weren’t good]. At least this way everything was tied up, but in a way it can be restored if needs be. Which they clearly will do, seeing John has mentioned a filming block early next year being pre-booked in his schedule for if/when it’s comissioned. November 7, 2009 at 10:50 am #105777 Pete Part ThreeParticipant >It?s all to give Jack more depth, not really a plot solver. Infanticide = character depth. November 7, 2009 at 1:19 pm #105779 AndrewParticipant > Without killing the child Jack wouldn?t have felt the need to go away So it was done to make him want to go away? Um…was that something that had to happen, then? He was written as leaving – fully six months AFTER the events of CoE – as a way of putting the show on hold. Fair enough. But the kid wasn’t killed off in order to make that occur; the kid was killed to allow some moral questions on the subject of sacrifice and greater good. Jack was able to be written as leaving because the kid was killed, the kid wasn’t killed in order to make Jack go. It wasn’t a set-up to allow his departure – what would be the point of that? Why do we need him to leave at the end? (In fact his departure is strictly mechanical. It puts the show on hiatus, but more importantly it means we can skip over a large part of the Miserable Jack stuff we’d otherwise have to endure. Nobody enjoyed that last time it was done, and this way he an just arrive in the new series more or less back to his old self. It’s a way to begin undoing what the CoE’s ending does to him…only moments after it happened.) > Plus the story of Jack being darker and sending the children the first time around wouldn?t have been a needed plot point. The whole point of the earlier sequences was to show this as a story of sins being revisited, sure. The 456 come back because they got what they wanted last time- it establishes that even this visit won’t be the last, that they’re likely to come back yet again demanding even more – and that this all began with Jack’s original crime. So his role this time around is to atone, or at least to revisit on him the horrible consequences of his actions. What killing his grandson was meant to do was – in story terms – was punish Jack. It was intended to make him pay. But it was done in such a clumsy way, in the final 17 minutes of a five-hour story, “Hey, or we could just fry your grandson!”, that it felt way more arbitrary than in needed to. And it didn’t need to. Jack’s had decades to think about the 456, to muse on his guilt and think how it could have gone. To realise a solution too late, to become obsessed with what he COULD have done. There’s a really interesting story to be told in Jack knowing from the start how to solve the problem and struggling with it, since it means making the same choice the government is having to – select a child. But instead the dilemma is started and concluded in about the same time it takes to cook a frozen pizza. It didn’t help that the kid lacked a rounded character – his mum’s annoying, but the kid’s just a blank, which means it’s hard to care about him personally. To make that conclusion work, and conceptually it does, the kid needed to be far more important to us. After you lose Ianto – the funniest and most likeable to the Torchwood characters – the sacrifice of the brat feels pretty flat. > It?s all to give Jack more depth, not really a plot solver. What Pete said. But also: Never said frying the kid was a plot-solver – ‘Hey, we can just send the signal backwards’ is the plot-solver, and it’s the same half-arsed, un-seeded, quick-wrap-up gibberish that threatens to overturn so much of the greatness of RTDs writing. (He has a real ending problem.) The sacrifice is conceptually fine, but to place it at the centre of the quick plot fix was a huge fault in the execution. The best endings are seeded good and early, they should slot in like the final jigsaw piece, there on the table from the start you just didn’t know it. November 7, 2009 at 4:03 pm #105781 John HoareParticipant I really enjoyed the finale, and felt it was very powerful – but it’s difficult to disagree with most of your problems with it, and even I felt it was *slightly* too out-of-the-blue. It didn?t help that the kid lacked a rounded character – his mum?s annoying, but the kid?s just a blank, which means it?s hard to care about him personally. To make that conclusion work, and conceptually it does, the kid needed to be far more important to us. I found it upsetting enough – I think if they kid had mattered to us even more, it might have been *too* upsetting to watch. I certainly think it would have led to far more outcry about the show – as unfair as that might be… November 7, 2009 at 4:34 pm #105785 AndrewParticipant > I found it upsetting enough – I think if they kid had mattered to us even more, it might have been *too* upsetting to watch. Maybe it’s just me, but I so completely didn’t care. When the kid’s so generic, and our relationship with him is so young (he matters to Jack so much that we’ve not seen him in two years of Torchwood), Jack’s choice seems totally justified. It becomes the basic math problem – one child or millions – that it should never have been. The aim was to put a human face on the dilemma, and for for me it failed utterly at that. Plus, yeah, I was just reeling from the ‘Hey, here’s a dilemma for ya!’ arrival of the story’s climax… Still, I wish the outcry HAD been about the sacrificing of a child. That’s something to have an outcry about – hero makes hard, brutal choice. Instead it’s easily smothered by the tedious sound of shippers doing the Ianto whine. November 7, 2009 at 11:54 pm #105796 The PerformingMonkeyParticipant > Maybe it?s just me, but I so completely didn?t care. RED DWARF ASSISTANT SCRIPT PRODUCER EDITOR WHATEVER ‘I’M OK WITH CHILD KILLING’ JIBE November 8, 2009 at 10:38 am #105802 PetetranterssisterParticipant >It?s all to give Jack more depth, not really a plot solver. Infanticide = character depth. lol I liked the way the show went, All the way through i expected there to be a “happy” ending but it has become very well separated from dr who now, whereas the dr always saves the day and everyones a happy chappy jack isnt the dr hes just a normal guy and doesnt have that magic make everything better ability. As great as the show was we found it left us on a bit of a downer and made us feel completely different about captain jack a charachter we loved and to do that meant it was a pretty powerful story. November 8, 2009 at 12:36 pm #105804 JamesTCParticipant >whereas the dr always saves the day and everyones a happy chappy Unless you are in the Peter Davison era. November 8, 2009 at 3:03 pm #105809 Seb PatrickKeymaster >the dr always saves the day and everyones a happy chappy “Everybody lives, Rose! Just like always, everybody lives!” November 8, 2009 at 8:18 pm #105818 GwynnieParticipant The sacrificing his own grandson really upset me. Not because of the actual child, but the way that he coldly ignored his daughter’s cries and screams as he allowed her son to be killed in front of her. But he’d just lost Ianto, so we can feel sorry for him or hate him. Either way, if the government hadn’t acted like a bunch of retards and just asked him to help in the first place instead of trying to seal him into concrete cells and the like… well, you know. November 8, 2009 at 11:28 pm #105830 The PerformingMonkeyParticipant Hmmm. Happy or sad endings in the new series, let’s see… Rose – happy TEOTW – melancholic, bittersweet maybe Unquiet Dead – bittersweet again (Gwyneth dead, Dickens happy) AoE/WW3 – not really that happy all round Dalek – fairly happy, strangely enough Long Game – funny, throwaway ending Father’s Day – sad end, not dark though TEC/TDD – happy, the most uplifting ending so far Boomtown – unsure (can’t fucking remember the ending tbh!) BW/TPOTW – emotional, all over the place TCI – very happy indeed, self-congratulatory bollocks New Earth – sad with Cassandra, happy Doc and Rose smug Tooth & Claw – ominous Queen Vic warning but mostly smugness School Reunion – very happy, self-congratulatory smugness(…) TGITFP – sad, moving, masterpiece-like Cybes – who actually cares?? TVs and shit – smug as fuck TIP/TSP – mostly happy L&M – hey I’m shagging a paving slab, how happy can you get?? Fear Her – a storm’s coming, Tennant with Olympic flame!! AoG/Doomsday – sad, emotional departure That’s only a handful of happy endings in 27 episodes (series 2 smugness and all that). Expect plenty of happy endings in series 5 (of course, I mean the new series 1…) because Moffat seems to like them. All except TGITFP. Speaking of TGITFP, if he’s ever capable of that form again WE will be the happy ones. November 8, 2009 at 11:35 pm #105833 JamesTCParticipant >Boomtown – unsure (can?t fucking remember the ending tbh!) The TARDIS opened and it turned the Slitheen into an egg that didn’t fart. November 8, 2009 at 11:51 pm #105834 The PerformingMonkeyParticipant Oh yeah, don’t know how I could forget that. Sort of a happy ending then, what with Jack in his non-brooding days. November 9, 2009 at 12:29 am #105838 John HoareParticipant In conclusion then, shippers are idiots. Excellent. November 9, 2009 at 2:11 am #105840 Plastic PercyParticipant Boom Town does end though with Mickey and Rose’s relationship problems still hanging in the air. Rose runs off to the Doctor instead of Mickey and when she comes back looking for him he mearly watches her from afar then leaves silently, presumably back to London. But all this is ignored to an extent when he comes running back to her in ‘The Parting of the Ways’. November 9, 2009 at 5:26 am #105842 Ben PaddonParticipant That’s because, as Mickey pointed out himself in Boom Town, he cares for Rose even after she abandoned him. “I can’t even go out with a stupid girl from a shop because you pick up the phone and I come running.” No matter what happens Mickey still feels for Rose. That doesn’t change, right through to the end of series two – he loves her. Logic and reason be damn’d. By series four he seems to have come to the realization that he can never be with Rose, which is why he doesn’t go back to Pete’s World. Does he still love her? Probably. That’s how love works, y’see. The Lister of Series I and II held above all things an irrational infatuation with Kochanski even though she’d barely ever spoken to him. The Lister of Series III onwards still held a ruddy great big torch for Kochanski even after she dumped him. Love, as well as being a device invented by bank managers to make us overdrawn, is a powerful emotion. November 9, 2009 at 11:18 am #105845 GwynnieParticipant And Rhys still loves Gwen even though she mostly treats him like shit (see how I veered it back to Torchwood). What is it with RTD and women treating their puppydog men badly? Hmm. November 9, 2009 at 11:35 am #105848 JamesTCParticipant >What is it with RTD and women treating their puppydog men badly? It isn’t limited to women, look at Jack going off with John while he was with Ianto. It just seems like all the likable characters (Mickey, Rhys, Ianto) just get treated like shit by the people who are meant to be the main good guys, I don’t like that. November 9, 2009 at 2:15 pm #105849 Plastic PercyParticipant Being Mickey Smith – CONS: Are treated like shit by stupid, selfish girlfriend. Picked on by wheelie bins. PROS: Will end up as a cool Kyle Reese style resistance fighter, only with a bigger gun. November 9, 2009 at 2:49 pm #105850 Pete Part ThreeParticipant CONS: Gets buggered up the arse by the kid from Byker Grove. November 9, 2009 at 3:10 pm #105852 JamesTCParticipant That was Rickey November 9, 2009 at 3:52 pm #105853 Pete Part ThreeParticipant I always get those two guys mixed up. They have similar features. Were the actors related? November 9, 2009 at 5:36 pm #105857 GwynnieParticipant Racist! November 9, 2009 at 8:30 pm #105862 Ben PaddonParticipant > It just seems like all the likable characters (Mickey, Rhys, Ianto) just get treated like shit by the people who are meant to be the main good guys, I don?t like that. You’d hate Battlestar Galactica then, what with the supposedly good characters doing quite blatantly nefarious things, and the supposedly bad characters making actually quite sensible points even if they go the wrong way about expressing it. You like your telly nice and clear-cut, don’cha? November 9, 2009 at 9:55 pm #105869 Tarka DalParticipant I feel I’ve missed a quality discussion, but I did spot this… > even if it finished the job of almost entirely removing its core cast All in all a 100% successful trip. > You like your telly nice and clear-cut, don?cha? He sort of has a point though. You can have ‘grey’ characters without making them such arseholes that there’s very little reason to route for them. November 9, 2009 at 10:09 pm #105874 The PerformingMonkeyParticipant Look at Kate on Lost (go on, I dare ya). Since they mostly took away that ‘grey’ side of her she has been an extremely boring char IMO. Not that she ever had the most thrilling story (or the best actress playing her, let’s be honest, though Evangeline is bea-ea-utiful to behold) but when there was at least some danger about her it felt refreshing. Now she’s goodie goodie blandness what’s the point?? Of course, Jack has also been a weak link. So much so that his ending better be bloody specacular to merit him being the ‘main’ char. I think he was improved in season 5 to an extent, though it felt like he had less screentime. Sawyer was definitely the main good guy in season 5. November 9, 2009 at 10:16 pm #105876 Jonathan CappsKeymaster Character. November 9, 2009 at 10:20 pm #105879 Tarka DalParticipant > Now she?s goodie goodie blandness what?s the point?? Well the point I was making is that grey characters are good. However if they get the balance wrong then they tip over into just being unlikeable people. I realise that’s not the same for everyone, but that was one of the main things that put me off Torchwood. Whereas in Buffy for example the lead character acted like a throughly unlikeable cow for a good couple of seasons, but great writing (for me) meant that she retained just enough sympathy to still be worth watching. November 9, 2009 at 11:14 pm #105890 GwynnieParticipant Well… I watched Buffy for the other characters. She was just annoying. November 10, 2009 at 2:07 am #105894 Ben PaddonParticipant Correction: Sarah Michelle Gellar is just annoying. She’s a bitch. Even Joss Whedon hated her – he couldn’t wait to kill her off in season five. November 10, 2009 at 2:16 am #105897 JoParticipant …and then bring her back to life in the first episode of season 6. That showed her! November 10, 2009 at 7:47 am #105899 Seb PatrickKeymaster She speaks very highly of you, too, Ben. November 10, 2009 at 9:29 am #105901 Ben PaddonParticipant > ?and then bring her back to life in the first episode of season 6. At the time season five was written it seemed likely that’d be the end of the show as The WB had said they had no plans to pick it up again. Keep in mind that it’s not the same thing as being cancelled, which is what happened to Firefly and Angel. Whedon wrote an ending that’d work as a series finale should it have to serve as one. Ultimately it didn’t, because UPN jumped in and said “Yeah, we’ll have two more seasons of that, please.” So they kind of had to bring her back. Otherwise you’re stuck in a Taggart scenario. Another TV show that experienced a similar “non-cancellation”, but that went the other way entirely, is The Dresden Files. The first season was a ratings smash for The SciFi Channel here in the US, but it wasn’t making SciFi much money. They didn’t order any more episodes but they wouldn’t say whether or not they were cancelling it. Eventually time passed, the actors found themselves having to move on to other projects to make sure that they could, y’know, afford to live and stuff like that, and once the actors had done so SciFi made an announcement saying how disappointed they were that the actors had moved on and tried to make it sound like it was the fault of the actors and the production company, Lions Gate. It occurs to me that in the last week I’ve publicly slagged off Focus Features and SyFy, both of whom are owned by NBC Universal. That might explain why I haven’t heard from them about that job yet. November 10, 2009 at 11:25 am #105903 GwynnieParticipant If we’re on the subject of Whedon… has anyone watched Dollhouse? And what did you think? I’ve just finished season 1… I enjoyed it but I really want to discuss it. Where did this come from? Ah, Jack being bland? I don’t know… for someone who’d died that many times, spent 1000 years or something underground and seen so much of the universe, he still seems a bit too sane. But maybe the healing thing works on his mind, too (as it does in Heroes). November 10, 2009 at 12:59 pm #105906 DaveParticipant I loved Dollhouse season 1, I haven’t seen any of season 2. November 10, 2009 at 1:21 pm #105908 Jonathan CappsKeymaster From what I’ve seen of Dollhouse season 2, it’s very excellent indeed. Much, much better than most of the (still enjoyable) season 1. November 10, 2009 at 2:46 pm #105909 Pete Part ThreeParticipant Got 4 episodes of Dollhouse on my Sky box. Haven’t mustered up the enthusiasm to watch them yet after been underwhelmed by Series 1. November 10, 2009 at 4:07 pm #105911 Jonathan CappsKeymaster Watch them. November 10, 2009 at 4:11 pm #105912 Ian SymesKeymaster This. I was a teensy bit underwhelmed by Season 1 too, but Season 2 has kicked its ass. Conversely, I really enjoyed Season 1 of Fringe, but the first few episodes of Season Two were so poor that we’ve got a bit of a Sky+ backlog. November 10, 2009 at 4:14 pm #105913 AndrewParticipant No spoilers, but…series two has really picked up that much? It’ll be great if it has, I just had the feeling the format was always going to get in the way of real excellence. November 10, 2009 at 4:27 pm #105914 DaveParticipant >I just had the feeling the format was always going to get in the way of real excellence. I did worry that Whedon’s reaction to Firefly being broadcast in the wrong order and Fox TV’s resistance to the overarching storyline of Angel seasons two to four, went too far in the opposite direction: “You want reset button TV? I’ll write the reset button into the narrative itself.” My fears were mostly groundless, but obviously simultaneously utilising and kicking against the horror movie or western genre yields more material than how many characters can the admittedly brilliant Eliza Dushku play, either one after the other or all at once. How many new and interesting ways are there to use that chair? November 10, 2009 at 4:27 pm #105915 Seb PatrickKeymaster And by “the format” you mean “Eliza Dushku’s acting ability”, don’t you? November 10, 2009 at 4:36 pm #105916 AndrewParticipant > And by ?the format? you mean ?Eliza Dushku?s acting ability?, don?t you? Not especially – she does fine. Not exceptional, but fine. I think series one showed up a huge set of problems in the construction of the show. I need to get my NtS article on the subject finished; but if series two’s awesome it may not be worth it… November 10, 2009 at 4:41 pm #105917 DaveParticipant >she does fine. Not exceptional, but fine. I think she has pitched it just right, she’s different enough in each personality without it being: “And now I do my cowgirl accent.” November 10, 2009 at 4:49 pm #105918 Jonathan CappsKeymaster Dollhouse season 2’s strengths lie in the fact that it jumps right into the over-arcing story that was being built up over season 1, sans fucking about with self contained episodes. No spoilers, but there’s also a bit of a character reshuffle that makes the whole thing tighter and more focused meaning that there’s some cracking momentum building up. Ian’s wrong about season 2 of Fringe, by the way. It’s definitely better than season 1, for much of the same reasons that Fringe is now better. November 10, 2009 at 5:01 pm #105919 Jonathan CappsKeymaster (Although Dollhouse is of course several yards better than Fringe) November 11, 2009 at 9:27 pm #105941 AndrewParticipant And thus the writing of an article becomes even more pointless until I see season two… http://io9.com/5402497/the-apocalypse-comes-early-for-joss-whedons-dollhouse November 11, 2009 at 10:46 pm #105942 JoParticipant :o( November 11, 2009 at 10:51 pm #105944 Jonathan CappsKeymaster Shitbags. November 11, 2009 at 11:02 pm #105949 Tarka DalParticipant Oh ffs. I’ve not even started watching it yet! Fingers crossed his next project rhymes with kipper. Author Posts Viewing 50 posts - 51 through 100 (of 161 total) 1 2 3 4 Scroll to top • Scroll to Recent Forum Posts You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Log In Username: Password: Keep me signed in Log In