Ardath Rekha

Okay, a lot of thoughts about it. When do I ever manage not to be long-winded?

I just finished watching the Torchwood miniseries this afternoon, and... well. It did leave me more than a little baffled as to where things are going to go and how the show is going to survive.

Now of course, I think some of the reasons I'm baffled is that there's a cultural difference between the way American producers and consumers view TV, and the way the British do. Some of the best British series I've ever seen were only a handful of episodes long, and were utterly complete and stand-alone at that level. (I'm thinking, in particular, of the six-episode masterpiece that is Ultraviolet.) This is in strong contrast with the American series habit of trying to make any show run for at least 100 episodes so that it can go into syndication, something that means shows' producers are usually thinking in terms of 20+ episode seasons, several of them... and American viewers know it. To an American viewer, a show that only has twelve (or five!) episodes = "canceled by the network mid-season."

I just bring this up because I think a lot of us American viewers are going to be having a difficult time processing the idea that this five-episode miniseries might be as stand-alone as it seems to be. And because it is a bit "...wtf?" to a lot of us that a show's producer would, essentially, dismantle a successful series' canon in such a drastic and possibly irreparable way... and ever be hired again. A lot of us are probably thinking "how can they get away with that?" about now... whether or not our expectations really apply.

So anyway, that's just the contextual framework I'm tossing out as possibly a part of why something so baffling made it to the (now, at least in America, strictly-digital) airwaves. I'd be curious to know what the Brits on my flist think about that assessment...

...because it really does feel like the entirety of the Torchwood premise and canon just got dismantled. Stop here if you don't want spoilers... well, and recaps.

So it's season 3 of Torchwood. We've had two great seasons, each of them thirteen episodes long, UK-style. The premise of the series has been very thoroughly set up. Captain Jack Harkness, a hyperevolved human Time Agent from the 51st century, who briefly traveled with the Doctor, now runs the Cardiff office of Torchwood, a clandestine quasi-government entity that monitors extraterrestrial incursions on Earth, deals with potential alien threats, etc. Men In Black with British accents and flashier wardrobes, really... and technically an alien heading them up. It's geared towards grown-up Whovians, with a lot more sex to it than can ever show up on Doctor Who. Cardiff is, in a way, a character of the series in its own right, with an interdimensional rift situated there, a scar of the Last Great Time War, and thus a tendency to pull in extraterrestrial oddities.

The audience is given entree into the team from the perspective of Gwen Cooper, a police officer who runs afoul of the team when her murder investigation crosses paths with one of their investigations, and ends up leaving the police force to work for them. It's an excellent way in, allowing the audience to be introduced to the show's premise and world as she is, and grow accustomed to it. Towards the end of the second season, Gwen's gone from stumbling neophyte to the world of extraterrestrials, to self-assured badass able to handle strange and dangerous situations without having too hard a time. She's more or less Captain Jack's second-in-command. And then things start going insane.

First, there's the issue of the Season 2 finale... in which two of the team's core members, Tosh and Owen, end up getting killed. It's a heartbreaking sequence, especially with the two of them conversing with each other over a radio link as they're dying. Tosh knows Owen's about to die, trapped inside a reactor that he's prevented from going critical, at the expense of having all of the deadly radiation flood the room he's in and incinerate him. Owen, however, doesn't know that Tosh is fatally injured and probably won't outlive him by more than a few minutes. (At least, this is the way I recall it; it's been a while since I watched the episodes.) Heartbreaking, painful painful stuff.

So we end the season with only three of the Torchwood staff still alive. Jack, Ianto, and Gwen, along with Gwen's husband, Rhys, who shows signs at that point of becoming more active in Torchwood cases. The trio then appears in the Season 4 finale of Doctor Who, helping the Doctor save the world -- and the universe, really -- from the Daleks. At the end of that, it actually looks like some other recurring Doctor Who characters are likely migrating over to the show: Martha, and Mickey. Martha certainly has the credentials to take over for Owen in the medical area, and Mickey's turned into a badass in his own right in the fight against extraterrestrial invaders.

Martha and Mickey are conspicuously absent from Children of Earth, a surprising thing indeed after the way it looked like they would be right in the middle of everything. I'm rather curious as to whether Martha's apparent honeymoon -- the reason given for her absence -- was with Mickey, but not hugely curious. It seemed a pretty offhand explanation for why she wasn't there.

So, over the course of the five --very powerful-- episodes, the Torchwood facility (and all of its amazing collected artifacts and technology!) is blown up, the new doctor, who seemed like he was going to turn out to be the team's next medical technician, turns out to be a spy and is then murdered, Ianto is murdered, Jack is forced to kill his own grandson in order to save millions of other people's children, and in the aftermath, Jack announces that he's leaving Earth, allegedly forever. OUCH. I MEAN, FUCKING OUCH. What's left?

No facility. No apparent continued charter; the government treated the Torchwood staff with not merely disregard but outright murderous intent. No leader. No more Torchwood?

Of course, if I were an alien invader, I'd consider that the most opportune time to attempt to invade the planet, ever, if it weren't for the fact that they'd only just expelled an invader with apparently-lethal force. So there's definitely a premise still left to continue the show...

But I have a feeling that they hurt a hell of a lot of viewers with just how much they took away. The base, Ianto, Jack's commitment to Earth and to being a stand-up guy... it's stunningly nihilistic stuff there.

Now, I like Lois. In fact, I adore her. And I can see her taking up Ianto's duties in a continuation of Torchwood and I wouldn't even hate her for doing so. She's smart, feisty, resourceful... and seemingly the ultimate Personal Assistant. And I can get that they might want to hold off on introducing her in that capacity until after people have gotten over Ianto's death, but at the same time, the end of "Day Five" left us with nothing, not even a hint of that. As far as we can tell, there's no more Torchwood, anyway. Johnson's another character I'd love to see more of, because it's awesome when the badass bad-guy who's trying to kill the team ends up switching sides and becoming their most powerful ally. I could see her potentially resurrecting Torchwood in Jack's absence, recruiting its one surviving member on Earth, and rebuilding it with Lois and a few other choice players in tow.

But I'm not sure fans are going to stand for that. A lot of fans are going to be too upset about everything that was lost, in the course of this miniseries, to want the show to continue at all, or to watch it if it does. And a lot of them are likely going to pretend that the miniseries' events didn't happen.

So again, I'm baffled by how and why the series producers would pull so many rugs out from under... pretty much everything... and think they can get away with that, or if they were really intending to have the show simply end at this juncture. Weirdly enough, the BBC's Torchwood page talks about a five-episode miniseries starting on July 20th... and I can't find anything about whether it's a rerun of Children of Earth or something else. But from reading my flist, it seems like a lot of people are talking about ditching the series if it does continue. As far as I know, it was doing extremely well, too, with a strong and growing fanbase in spite of (or even because of) handling and embracing issues that most shows shy away from.

Now, I'm no stranger to director-producers who are sadistic to their viewers; I'm a big Joss Whedon fan, and I've forgiven him repeatedly for that. He killed of Jenny Calendar and Kendra in the second season of Buffy. He killed off Buffy's mother and Buffy herself in season five, and made me love him for doing it. He killed off Doyle in the first season of Angel and made me adore him again for it... and then killed off CORDELIA in the fifth season, following it up by killing off Fred and making me end up finding her murderer, Illyria, pure awesomesauce later that season, before finishing us out by killing Wesley. Plus he got me to forgive him and still love him for killing Shepherd Book and Wash in Serenity. That's a lot of pain there that he put me, and other fans, through, and while there are probably a number of people who have never forgiven him for it, we overwhelmingly did.

Because he never took everything away.

There's a part of me that kind of wants to ignore the canon contributions of Children of Earth myself, and exist in a la-la land in which Ianto and Jack are still sneaking off to Jack's unexploded office for a little nookie, while Tosh works engineering magic and Owen snarks around his med lab. And there's a part of me that's genuinely -- perhaps morbidly -- fascinated to see how on (or off) Earth the producers are going to manage to salvage the show and sell us on what they've done. Can they pull a Joss and get us to not only forgive them for what they've done, but love them for it? Or is that it? Has Jack left Earth to go become the Face of Boe and put his humanity behind him? Will we find out? Will we care if we do?

I'm really not sure of the answer, and really not sure how much I want to know it, at this point. I guess we'll see.

I really hope Doctor Who is kinder and gentler when it returns.