Kopic's Doctor Who & Torchwood News |
| Posted: 30 Mar 2008 03:00 PM CDT DoctorWhonews.com has been sent the cover for the forthcoming release of Series Four Volume One. The DVD contains the first three episodes of Series 4 and will be released in the UK on June 2nd 2008.  | ||
| Torchwood Episode 210 Recap: “From Out of the Rain” - AfterElton.com Posted: 30 Mar 2008 11:35 AM CDT
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| Shag, Marry, Kill, Resurrect (Revised) Posted: 30 Mar 2008 09:49 AM CDT If I've learned one thing from the angst-festival of Torchwood Season Two, then it's that gay men are happy to use the word "shagging" to describe fleshy man-love. Logically, this shouldn't be a surprise, and I've spent so much time amongst gay men over the last ten years that I'm sure one of them must have used the word at some point. But to me, "shagging" indicates a kind of sex that doesn't work without a uterus. It suggests a male woodland creature pinning down a female, and moving his pelvis backwards and forwards very, very fast; it suggests "rutting" rather than "making love", with all the associated mess and fuss of childbirth; it suggests a little internal alarm that says BABY-MAKING BABY-MAKING BABY-MAKING and won't stop until eggs have been fertilised. The idea that "shagging" might describe butch anal antics - or, in the case of Captain Jack and Jones the Hardware, probably a lot of tender licking and sucking with perhaps just the occasional bout of Resurrection Glove abuse - seems aesthetically wrong, to me. Rabbits shag, but it's not a term I'd apply to "out" animals like bonobos, antelope, or giant squid (the great gay leviathans of the deep). That aside, the only remotely surprising thing about the second series of Torchwood is its pig-headed refusal to do anything remotely surprising. Everybody had problems with the first series, and even those sci-fi geek-scum who'll watch anything with killer robots in it were left feeling vaguely dissatisfied, Mark sodding Braxton included. Which begs the question… why has nothing changed? Did the overall sense of gloom and disappointment really not make an impression on BBC Wales? A standard-issue TV critic would probably describe the programme as "slicker" these days, and it's certainly more confident in its ability to make the same mistakes over and over again, but none of its problems have actually been fixed. Even the worst episode of Doctor Who is worthy of in-depth analysis and point-by-point dissection (indeed, bad episodes are often more deserving of inspection than good ones, given that "Time and the Rani" tells you more about what happened to television in the 1980s than "Doomsday" tells you about life in 2006), yet Torchwood remains resolutely… filler. Full-scale reviews of Torchwood episodes are therefore unnecessary, since most of them can be boiled down to a single sentence, quite often "what's the point of this?". But in the interests of rational debate, here's a round-up of the season so far, with a whole honest-to-goodness paragraph per story… 1. "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang". Of the many, many design flaws in Torchwood, the greatest is this: whereas it's now de rigeuer for any modern SF series to be under the control of a single godlike chief-writer-cum-producer, whose own hand-written episodes are either measurably better than everyone else's or at least define the direction of the programme, Torchwood has a chief-writer-cum-producer who has no clear vision of where the series is meant to be going; who has no ideas other than things he's seen in other SF shows; and, worst of all, who has little or no understanding of how stories work (at least two of Chris Chibnall's scripts have no visible plot, while the rest have all the structural integrity of Muller Rice). In itself, it's telling that a Doctor Who spin-off should be under the creative influence of the man who wrote the least creative Doctor Who episode ever broadcast. However much the recent work of Steven Moffat may have been overrated ("Blink"… I could piss that in my sleep), surely a gadget-heavy sci-fi show about spunk-filled twentysomethings should rightfully be his gig? "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" is the inevitable "lead character meets his evil equivalent" story, and the inclusion of James Marsters just makes it look as if Chibnall's having a competition with himself to see how far he can get Torchwood to look exactly like every other "cult" programme on television. 2. "Sleeper". Of course, if we're making lazy Doctor Who comparisons, then the most obvious problem with the set-up of Torchwood is that it's stuck in modern-day Cardiff every week… or at least, it seems obvious, but look closer. The real trouble isn't that it's tied to Britain circa 2008, but that its attempts to integrate SF ideas into a contemporary setting can alienate us far more than any number of gonzo adventures in time and space. Here, we're supposed to get terribly emotional about a woman who discovers that she's going to cease to exist because she's an alien sleeper agent with an auto-destructing false personality. It's fair to say that very few people in the audience will be able to empathise with this situation, let alone cry in the right places. 3. "To the Last Man". An episode which breaks all the rules of British sci-fi drama by involving a paradoxical timewarp that leads back to World War One instead of World War Two. Although I find it hard to be too critical of Helen Raynor, because frankly, I so would. 4. "Meat". When Buffy the Vampire Slayer pioneered the fantasy / soap-opera hybrid, it was wise enough to understand that all the fantasy elements have to resonate with the "real" elements: the monsters are hormone-driven manifestations of the characters' own teenage angst, so the fantasy and the soap-opera are ultimately the same thing. Every fantasy-soap since Buffy has completely missed this (fairly essential) point, and given us stories about giant scorpions with "relationship" scenes thrown randomly into the mix, as if giant scorpions aren't interesting enough without the occasional detour into Sex and the City. Here we have a story about an enormously bloated whale-beast that sits around having chunks of fat cut off its body, but which is also about… Gwen having issues with her boyfriend. If I were the actor playing Rhys, then I'd feel offended by the subtext. Naturally, we care more about a six-hundred-ton slab of manatee than about any of the characters' whining, tedious love-lives. 5. "Adam". SF screenwriting is a specific skill, which is why it's not necessarily a good idea to hire a writer who cut her teeth on EastEnders and let her talk about aliens. If you don't know precisely how to pitch a slightly-off-the-wall story involving an interdimensional memory-parasite, then you end up with hideously overwrought dialogue like 'you crave flesh!' or 'it was so beautiful, after the darkness and the stench of fear!', and that's before we even start to process the unintentionally hilarious "Flashback Jack" segments (which are, let's face it, like clips from the worst war movie ever made). But the fundamental problem with "Adam" is that there's no point doing a story about the characters' personal demons when the characters aren't complex enough to have demons, or when the Male Lead is so far-removed from us that it's impossible to take any of his problems seriously, let alone his unresolved issues with his dad. Imagine an episode of Primeval in which the girl from S Club 7 suddenly has memories of childhood sexual abuse while running away from sabre-tooth tigers… that's what Torchwood is like. 6. "Reset". Leaving aside the fact that it begins the most counter-productive story-arc in television history (Owen dies, thus allowing him to mope more), "Reset" actually verges on competence at times, yet it's still hampered by the question of what this episode is actually about. The Mad Doctors aren't making a point about the state of medical research in a twenty-first-century world, they're just… Mad Doctors. So mad, in fact, that they're prepared to go berserk and shoot people dead even though it makes no rational sense for them to do so. In much the same way that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies, you can judge an episode of TV sci-fi fodder by the quality of the villains, and here they're just evil for the sake of convenience. 7. "Dead Man Walking". Oh, Christ, it's a resurrection: that's almost as bad as reversing time. Worse, it leads to a script full of portentous, overbaked conversations about the nature of mortality and the trauma of human existence (you'd be forgiven for thinking that 'we fight monsters, but what do we do when we turn out to be the monsters?' is as bad as dialogue can possibly get, yet it's very nearly topped by Martha's histrionic 'it must be death… because it's stolen my life!'), padded out with every terminal cliché of modern fantasy. A black-eyed demonic possession (again?); one of the regulars turning into a geriatric for absolutely no good dramatic reason (again?); a desperate attempt to give some depth to a bog-standard Malevolent Alien Power by wrapping it up in a Medieval legend; an even more desperate attempt to introduce some sort of tension by putting a sick child in jeopardy… all this, plus a conclusion that makes the ending of "The Daemons" look convincing, and might as well have Owen defeating the monster with the Power of Love. Ultimately, though, the real problem with "Dead Man Walking" is that it's got even less to say about death than "The Satan Pit" had to say about religion. Only the vomit remains memorable. 8. "A Day in the Death". What baffles me is that anyone might consider "forty-five minutes of a corpse complaining about being dead" to be a workable basis for a drama programme. Although the fact that the script editor here is Gary Russell - a man who has no background in television scriptwork, whose own attempts at writing have been unfailingly risible, and whose sole qualification for the job is that he's spent the last two decades making everyone else in Doctor Who fandom as miserable as possible - says a lot about this programme's general level of care, attention and competency. 9. "Something Borrowed". A story in which Rhys proves that he's a "hero" by disintegrating a baby, and Jack all but gives a knowing wink to the audience before announcing 'we're going to need a bigger gun!' and manfully blowing away the mother with a bazooka. The alien itself spends much of the episode in the form of a predatory female with no personality other than a tendency to hiss at the camera, in order to distract us from the thought that she just wants to have children and doesn't really have a choice about how she goes about it: the very fact of this species' biology means that it deserves to be wiped out, we're told. (The argument seems to be "well, the good guys would die if they didn't kill it, so what are they supposed to do?", but since the scriptwriter is solely responsible for putting the team in this cheerfully kill-or-be-killed situation, that isn't really a good excuse for the blazing amorality of it all.) Is this really supposed to take place in the same universe as Doctor Who? Because even Star Trek would balk at this kind of moronic, gun-toting slop. Kill the alien children! They're not like us! 10. "From Out of the Rain". In all honesty, if episode ten had been written by anyone other than P. J. Hammond, then I would have given up in disgust after "Something Borrowed". Not that I've got a great sentimental attachment to Sapphire and Steel - although, like many of my generation, I have fond childhood memories of The Story With That Bloke Who's Got No Face - but as a TV scriptwriter with more than thirty years on his clock, Hammond at least knows his craft. However, there's a fine line between knowing your craft and sheer bloody-minded complacency. "From Out of the Rain" gives you the sense that he hasn't felt the need to change his act in the last thirty years, as if we're getting a version of the Bloke Who's Got No Face story for an audience that can accept the oddness of it in double-quick time, except… having hurried the whole thing up, he runs out of plot halfway through, and the last twenty minutes are almost too rudimentary to bother watching. A bigger issue, though, is that the entire episode seems massively misplaced. Tales of creepy carnival-folk work beautifully in pre-television small-town America (c.f. Something Wicked This Way Comes), but in modern-day urban Cardiff, a villain in a top hat just looks like an art student pretending to be Papa Lazarou. 11. "Adrift". And in tonight's Torchwood, what we learn is this: people with a slight skin disorder should be locked up and treated as subhuman, because otherwise they might make a weird screaming noise that makes their mums cry. Captain Jack protects us from these xeno-lepers by arranging secret renditions to a lighthouse and making sure they get the full Bedlam treatment, not telling any of his closest friends and confidants about it because… well… because the victims are a bit ugly, even though it makes absolutely no rational sense for him to keep it secret from the rest of Torchwood. And that's just the ethical argument, so we don't even have to dwell on the thought that this is a drama script which spends half an hour letting Gwen wander around Cardiff doing nothing remotely dramatic. Look, just let the rift-mutants go, all right? Simon Weston had more epidermal problems than they do, and he got on the cover of the Radio Times. 12. "Fragments". Ah, I see. Chibnall's decided to write the two-part "season finale" himself, in the mistaken belief that he's Joss Whedon rather than Pip and Jane Baker. The Buffy comparison is obviously an apt one, since this is blatantly Torchwood's stillborn attempt to remake "Becoming", starting with the period-drama flashback of the hunky-yet-dissolute male lead being pulled out of the gutter by women in corsets. It's almost as if this is being deliberately contrived as Every Torchwood Fan's Favourite Episode, setting up a half-excuse for an "origins" story and then stocking it with as many Cult TV Standards as possible: when we find out that one of the regulars had a fiancé who died of an alien attack and a brain tumour, you get the feeling that Chibnall isn't just seeing how many clichés he can use, but how many he can use at the same time. Since this series seems to be doing its best to morally outrage me on top of everything else, I might also mention that the attempt to ironically "reference" the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay is the most insulting thing I've seen on television since I erased Sky Three from my digibox menu. Gee, next year let's have an alien who kills teenaged girls by smashing them over the head with a hammer like Levi Bellfield, that'll look "topical". I suppose everyone's already pointed out that it's a pteranodon, not a pterodactyl? Just time for one last round of righteous abuse, then. I've recently been informed that in 1986, Chris Chibnall appeared on TV's Open Air as a representative of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, to complain about the quality of the mid-'80s series and generally slag off the production team. Leaving aside the obvious irony that we're talking about someone whose production skills make late-era John Nathan-Turner look borderline-competent (and the fact that I now feel far more justified in saying all of this, since he's clearly inclined to be just as offensive to other inept programme-makers), this raises a serious question. Until now, I'd naturally assumed that Chibnall was an all-purpose TV hack who ended up on Doctor Who by mistake and didn't actually know anything about it, hence his belief that the best way to run a spin-off series is to copy as much as possible from straight-to-video sci-fi movies. But how can anyone be a Doctor Who fan for more than two decades, and then - when finally given a chance to write for the series, with a whacking great twenty-first-century budget, to boot - deliver a big pile of slasher-flick poo like "42"? How is it even physically possible to be that rubbish? He's had twenty years to think about this, for God's sake! Surely he's had at least one original idea in that time…? Actually, now I think about it... 'the darkness and the stench of fear' is how the memory-parasite describes the experience of travelling through an interdimensional void. Can you have a stench, in a void? If there's no air, then how do you smell? (Like a dog with no nose, possibly.)  | ||
| Reviews: A Day in the Death Reviewed Posted: 30 Mar 2008 09:26 AM CDT The tale of Owen Harper continues in A Day in the Death, as he and the team come to terms with his new found deathness. It is an interesting direction the show has taken with this storyline, one that hopefully will not have a reset button. Owen being dead and Jack being unable to die (at least for a few billion years) counterpoint each other nicely, and raise questions about the nature of life and death. It also calls into question the actual fate of the previous opponent of Death. A Day...  | ||
| Posted: 30 Mar 2008 06:47 AM CDT
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| News: Partners in Crime FX Preview Posted: 30 Mar 2008 04:02 AM CDT The website of the popular scifi magazine SFX has an interesting news feature on the visual FX used in next weeks series opener Partners in Crime. The Adipose - the new alien race that we will see in Partners in Crime - will be computer generated beings, and will be realised using the crowd-generating Massive FX technology that was created for the Lord of the Rings movies. Usual CGI specialists The Mill contacted Stephen Regelous to assist in creating an "army of diminutive critters"...  | ||
| News: Attack of the Ming Mongs Posted: 30 Mar 2008 01:49 AM CDT Unhappy with BBC scheduling? Time on your hands/no life? Well, why not write to the BBC, and express your disgust with Doctor Who being on at 6.20pm. A few months ago, we found out that Doctor Who wouldn't be on much in 2009. I for one was astonished, and find it doubtful that a rest was "always the plan" as RTD has put it, given that Series 4 was only commissioned last year. That doesn't mean however that a rest is a bad idea. But I'm digressing here - the point is that I and...  | ||
| Posted: 30 Mar 2008 12:53 AM CDT Two of the Big Finish Eighth Doctor and Lucie titles have had their titles changed.
Finally, the trailer for Sisters of the Flame has been released and you can listen to it on the site. If you register on the Big Finish Website, you can downland the trailer and share it with your friends.  | ||
| Torchwood: From Out of the Rain - TV Squad Posted: 30 Mar 2008 12:50 AM CDT
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| This Week in TV Blogs - BuzzSugar.com Posted: 30 Mar 2008 12:40 AM CDT
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| Posted: 29 Mar 2008 11:26 PM CDT I spent last weekend at Orbital, the Eastercon held at the Radisson Edwardian hotel near Heathrow, and I already have nostalgia for such packed experience. Five days is long enough for an event to feel like a lifestyle, so now I feel like I've moved to a different country, where things are more dull, but marginally less drunken. It was the best of times… no, that's it. I arrived on the  | ||
| Man too good for Doctor Who sells Tardis - TV Squad Posted: 29 Mar 2008 11:08 PM CDT
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| Posted: 29 Mar 2008 10:59 PM CDT Visual effects company The Mill are up for a BAFTA Craft Award for their work on Doctor Who  | ||
| Welcome to the Tellybox! by Carole Gordon - Eclipse Magazine Posted: 29 Mar 2008 08:08 PM CDT
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| 'Doctor Who' Season Four Preview Posted: 29 Mar 2008 08:00 PM CDT Check out our guide to what lies in store for you-know-Who in the new series of the time-travelling drama.  | ||
| DVDS SEEN : Late, great HBO series on DVD - Arkansas Democrat Gazette Posted: 29 Mar 2008 06:51 PM CDT
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| Doctor Who: Return Of The Daleks by Nicholas Briggs - Crows Nest Posted: 29 Mar 2008 05:17 PM CDT
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| Dalek invasion - Bradford Telegraph Argus Posted: 29 Mar 2008 02:00 PM CDT
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| Six Degrees: Kate Moss to Britney Spears - Digital Spy Posted: 29 Mar 2008 01:10 PM CDT
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| Austen adaptation could use more of her lively Sensibility' - Long Beach Press-Telegram Posted: 29 Mar 2008 12:38 PM CDT
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