The Aerie
We were down for about 12 hours due to a mixup with Qwest. Interestingly, i'd switch to a different LATA to handle my Internet connection... except there AREN'T any! Ain't regulated monopolies grand?
To add to this, I left my cell phone at Professor Barker's last night, requiring a return visit today. When I did so he asked me to pick up a telephone for him - his home phone wasn't working. It turned out to be a mechanical problem with his cable service.
When I arrived at his house it seemed everything was broken: my phone was somewhere in his house. His phone service was not working. My home Internet wasn't working. Thankfully we got it all sorted out, and by noon I was back at work, cell phone hanging uselessly on my hip, everyone's phone and Internet working. Thus you can read the messages here.
Now about Torchwood...
Torchwood is an anagram of "Doctor Who," which shows just how clever the folks were who put the show together. How many cool titles can YOU make from the letters in existing cool titles? Okay, you can turn "Tron" into "Torn," but what else?
As a Doctor Who spinoff, Torchwood can best be described as "X Files meets CSI Cardiff," and in fact the joke "CSI Cardiff" is made within five minutes of the pilot's opening. Accelerated helicopter pans and snappy dialogue combine with acceptable special effects and sometimes tortured writing to make for a charming, quirky show.
I won't go into it too much - if "Doctor Who/X Files/CSI Cardiff" doesn't get you there, nothing I can say will change that much. But it is a very fun show, and it bravely takes from Jasper Fforde the hand-off baton of Welsh Science Fiction and runs with it.
The first episode steals its opening scene directly from a cyberpunk novel that I will edit in here when I remember it. A murder victim is temporarily revivified in order to learn the identity of his killer, and has two minutes of reanimated existence in which to deal with his recent and impending death. The second episode features an alien that comes to Earth to consume the erotic energies of people engaging in sex... which is the plot of the movie "Liquid Sky."
While this displays a tendency for inadvertent if not deliberate plagiarism, it also shows that the writers are well-versed in the science fiction genre. You'd think that would be a requirement for science fiction programs, but any review of mainstream SF shows that a lot of it is written by people who don't understand why a starship can't decelerate at a greater rate than it can accelerate (see Stephen Donald's "Gap" series...), or why alien species ought not be having sex with each other (see Star Trek, any variety, any season, but most egregiously this episode).
Taking writing lessons from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the show spends a lot of time exploring the relationships of the ensemble cast, rather than fixating on science fiction gimmickry. This will be a good idea, assuming the continuity editors keep their wits about them: one character is an unkillable person who is at least a hundred years old, and keeping straight what such a character did when can be difficult. Unfortunately, fans are unforgiving: if a 100-year-old person says "I've never seen a rugby match," any subsequent rugby-match flashbacks will result in a flood of angry e-mails.
Since it's British it's a little more sexually edgy than American audiences are accustomed to. One character is revealed to be casually bisexual in the first episode, defusing a jealous lover with a spritz of extraterrestrial 'Axe' that yields a same-sex kiss. In fact, the first two episodes have rather a lot of same-sex kissing, now that I think about it. The explicit sex means I'll either figure out a way to edit the second episode's bathroom sex scene, or just leave the second episode out entirely if I make the series available to the kids. After the first two shows, calculated to jumpstart an audience, the sex seems to throttle back to reasonable levels.
I'm only a few episodes into it, but it looks like a lot of fun. It's not 'Battlestar Galactica,' but it it clever and sometimes poignant, and it goes the extra mile to pursue character-driven stories rather than settling for ray guns and rubber suits to entertain. Well worth watching when it finally gets to America...
Posted by Albatross at February 23, 2007 2:50 PM | TrackBack