Torchwood Children of Earth, part 5: Sacrificial lambs

We've come to the end of "Torchwood: Children of Earth," which means we can all openly discuss the whole series. Unfortunately, my Comic-Con stint means my review won't be much longer than for any of the previous chapters. Spoilers coming up just as soon as I stand back...

"That's what Torchwood does, you see: it ruins your life." -Gwen

So who's feeling upbeat right about now? Anyone? Ready to party? No?

I have to applaud Russell T. Davies and company for having the courage of their convictions. While I took issue with a few things in the finale, overall it felt very much of a piece with the thrilling, squirm-inducing four hours that preceded it. There was no attempt at false uplift. Yes, The 4-5-6 are killed(*), and the British Prime Minister is basically stripped of his power, but his replacement is the equally odious Denise. John Frobisher kills his family and himself for what turns out to be a solveable problem. Many are still dead, many others are still traumatized, and in the end, our hero -- smiling Captain Jack, the man who's supposed to be perfect at everything, who can conjure a solution to any problem out of thin air, who lets the world wash off his back -- is left with the image not only of his dead lover, but of the grandson he chose to kill in order to save millions of other children. In that moment, he has to make a similar decision to the one Denise was proposing last night -- needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few (or the one) -- but he does it in a very different way. Where Denise and the rest of the British government were all about protecting their own kin at all costs, Jack has to sacrifice his grandson, because there isn't any time to find someone to take Steven's place.

(*) Or, at least, their Earth-bound representative is; I wasn't entirely clear on whether the rest were also slaughtered, or simply turned tail and ran once it became clear they weren't going to win.

And it's with the matter of timing that I take my biggest issue with the finale. I realize that Davies wanted to create a scenario where Jack had no choice but to use Steven to save the world, and it feels like much of the episode was structured to lead us to that point. Jack is kept on the sidelines, brooding over Ianto's death, for much of the hour, so that when he finally takes action and comes up with a solution, there just isn't time to look for another sacrificial lamb. And that doesn't track with the Jack we know, even after Jack tried to tell Ianto (and us) last night that we don't know him nearly as well as we think we do. Even in mourning, Jack would have taken action, would have fought to make sure Ianto's death wasn't completely in vain, rather than throwing in the towel until Agent Johnson goaded him into saving the day.

I know Jack being useless ties into the general apocalyptic feeling of the first two-thirds of the episode, with Frobisher's murder-suicide and Gwen and Rhys frantically trying to protect the "bad kids" from the neighborhood of Ianto's family from the army, but it was so out of character that it felt like a cheat to get the desired result. And what I think could have made Steven's death even more powerful -- and, admittedly, it was plenty powerful -- would be if he wasn't Jack's only choice. What if Jack is working on this plan all along, does have time to get access to some other random kid, but realizes in the end that he can't be a monster like the PM or Denise -- that if he's going to do this monstrous thing, then he has to suffer personally for it?

Or maybe I should stop trying to rewrite Davies, who, as I've written all week, really delivered the goods throughout "Children of Earth," with the help of a great cast (and I again want to praise the work of Peter Capaldi as the doomed Frobisher, who wasn't quite the unfeeling bastard the PM took him for), director Euros Lyn, and everyone else. Just a superb week of television, and a quantum leap forward for "Torchwood." Assuming the show's going to be back -- and based on the ratings in the UK, it almost has to -- I think the miniseries format is the way to go.

Now Davies just needs to find a way to bring Jack back to Earth, and maybe deputize Rhys and Lois Habiba (and, if he can be found, Mickey Smith) so that Gwen isn't a one-woman agency.

What did everybody else think?

Torchwood Children of Earth, part 4: Endless love

Once again, I don't have time to give each episode of "Torchwood: Children of Earth" the proper review it deserves, so I'm going to offer up a few quick thoughts after the jump and then open it up to you. Spoilers for episode four coming up just as soon as I bump up the numbers...

"A man who can't die has got nothing to fear. So you watch it. And you keep watching." -Alice

And now "Torchwood" is not playing around, at all. Rest in peace, Ianto Jones. The line to pillory Russell T. Davies forms after all the Donna Noble fans have had their say.

Ianto's death in Thames House is the climactic, tragic scene of episode four, but the hour has several sequences that are more horrific, even if they don't bring about the end of a popular ongoing character (and Captain Jack's boyfriend).

The first is our glimpse of what The 4-5-6 actually look like -- and, more importantly, what was done with the kids Jack gave them in 1965. "Children of Earth" has gotten a lot of mileage out of using The 4-5-6 as an implied, unseen threat, and even here, the sequence is cleverly shot from the POV of the soldier's video camera, so the picture quality is poor and intermittent. We see everything we need to see to be disturbed, but not so much that we can start to spot the seams of the trick, you know?

Even more disturbing, though, is the scene where the Prime Minister and his people hash out how to select the 10 percent of their children who will be turned into immortal, catatonic fanny packs for The 4-5-6. Davies' work has never shown much fondness for politicians, but Denise's speech about the necessity of discrimination at a time like this -- "Should we treat them equally? God knows we've tried and we've failed." -- are among the most chilling words ever uttered by a "Doctor Who" villain -- if not moreso, because she's not an alien invader bent on global domination, but a scared human being trying to protect what's hers by passing the burden on to someone else.

(There aren't a lot of commonalities between "Doctor Who"/"Torchwood" and "The Wire," but I could sure imagine Tommy Carcetti participating in the American version of that meeting, couldn't you?)

But getting back to Ianto's death, what makes it especially crushing is that it comes almost immediately after it seems that Torchwood has successfully turned the tables on both the government and The 4-5-6. They can blackmail the PM into getting whatever they want, and they have knowledge and technology that the aliens might not be ready for -- but they, in turn, aren't prepared for how quickly and fatally this one representative could strike back. So Ianto (and a bunch of MI-5 employees without easy access to HazMat suits) is dead, Torchwood is now down to a team of two (three if you want to count Rhys), and it looks like the bad guys -- both the aliens and the humans -- are going to win. What now?

Keep in mind, as always, that we're following the American broadcasting schedule of this show, so talk about the first four episodes and only the first four, even if you've already seen the whole series because you live in England or are handy with illegal downloads. Any comment I consider the least bit over the line gets deleted, period.

Considering that, what did everybody else think?

Torchwood Children of Earth, part 3: They are here

Once again, I don't have time to give each episode of "Torchwood: Children of Earth" the proper review it deserves, so I'm going to offer up a few quick thoughts after the jump and then open it up to you. Spoilers for episode three coming up just as soon as I hit the Army surplus store...

"We want your children. We will take your children." -The 4-5-6-

When I interviewed Russell T. Davies last month, he said that the budget for the new season of "Torchwood" hadn't gone up at all, and that the improved production values for "Children of Earth" were the result of a lot of hard work by his crew. If so, then part 3 in London was simply gorgeous, arguably the single most impressive bit of VFX of the RTD era of both "Doctor Who" and "Torchwood."

With The 4-5-6 ensconsed at Thames House, the third episode's narrative shifted a bit away from our Torchwood heroes and towards John Frobisher and his colleagues in the British government, who seem as much the villains of "Children of Earth" as the aliens do. And Peter Capaldi is doing such a good job of playing Frobisher -- as a man who isn't so much bad as weak (and who, as we learn in his phone conversation with Jack, is fully aware of his own weakness) -- that I'm okay with him taking on more story burden in this chapter.

At the same time, we got some more Jack/Ianto romantic sweetness (including a reference to The Doctor), Jack dealing with the abduction of his daughter and grandson, and Gwen hooking up Lois with the super sci-fi contact lenses, so it's not as if the team vanished altogether from the narrative.

Keep in mind, as always, that we're following the American broadcasting schedule of this show, so talk about the first three episodes and only the first three, even if you've already seen the whole series because you live in England or are handy with illegal downloads. Any comment I consider the least bit over the line gets deleted, period.

Considering that, what did everybody else think?

Torchwood Children of Earth, part 2: Three fugitives

Once again, I don't have time to give each episode of "Torchwood: Children of Earth" the proper review it deserves, so I'm going to offer up a few quick thoughts after the jump and then open it up to you. Spoilers for episode two coming up just as soon as I hide in a potato truck...

"If I can't kill you, I can contain you." -Johnson

With Captain Jack dead and/or regenerating and/or encased in concrete for most of this episode, night two of "Children of Earth" falls on Ianto, and, especially, Gwen, to show they can be just as cool and swashbuckling as the guy in the retro RAF duds. Though the circumstances Torchwood finds itself in are grim, and though the world itself seems to be in a lot of trouble from the poison-breathing members of The 4-5-6, it's fun to see Gwen so convincingly kick butt for much of the hour, to see Ianto ride to Gwen and Rhys' rescue on heavy machinery, even to see Ianto's obnoxious brother-in-law turn out to be an okay sort in the end as he provided cover with the black ops surveillance crew.

But part two also provides some smaller moments, like Gwen telling an overjoyed Rhys about her pregnancy, or Gwen again trying to play Torchwood recruiting officer with Lois Habiba. (Given what happened with the doctor in part one, maybe they're better off sticking with known quantities for a while. Stupid Martha Jones vacation, razza frazza...)

Keep in mind, as always, that we're following the American broadcasting schedule of this show, so talk about the first two episodes and only the first two, even if you've already seen the whole series because you live in England or are handy with illegal downloads. Any comment I consider the least bit over the line gets deleted, period.

Considering that, what did everybody else think?

Torchwood Children of Earth, part 1: Big science fiction super-mess

As I wrote this morning, I don't have time to give each episode of "Torchwood: Children of Earth" the proper review it deserves, so I'm going to offer up a few quick thoughts after the jump and then open it up to you. Spoilers for episode one coming up just as soon as I smell a hand...

"It's like the whole wide world is bigger. My life is bigger." -Gwen Cooper

I used that quote already in my "Torchwood" column, but Rupesh and Gwen's exchange neatly sums up the awesomeness of "Children of Earth." You can look at the BBC reducing the third season from 13 episodes to 5 as a demotion, or as an opportunity for Russell T. Davies and company to expand the boundaries of what they were doing before -- which is exactly what they've done here.

Some people have compared "Children of Earth" to Davies' annual end-of-season, end-of-the-world extravaganzas on "Doctor Who." While those were never my favorite parts of their respective "Who" seasons, the apocalyptic scope works here because "Torchwood" operates on a more human scale, even though its lead is a time-traveling immortal alien. When all the earth's children stop simultaneously, or when they start broadcasting a warning from The 4-5-6, or when the British government decides it's time to blow up Torchwood, it feels more ominous than if these events were occurring in The Doctor's more whimsical corner of this fictional universe.

The one point I want to dwell on with episode one was how completely suckered in I was by the introduction of Dr. Rupesh Patanjali. I just assumed -- as I was meant to -- that he was the producers means of coping with the unavailability of Freema Agyeman, and that Rupesh would either be a temporary or permanent addition to the team. So I was floored when he turned out to be working in cahoots with the black ops people, and then when he got killed by them to help preserve the story. Well-played, sirs.

Keep in mind, as always, that we're following the American broadcasting schedule of this show, so talk about episode one and only episode one, even if you've already seen the whole series because you live in England or are handy with illegal downloads. Any comment I consider the least bit over the line gets deleted, period.

Considering that, what did everybody else think?

Glad to see me? I guess we're in the next life!

Howdy, folks. Had a fine time on vacation, including stops at Hershey Park (which, while fun, was sadly unlike The Land of Chocolate from Homer's dreams) and the Jersey shore, and randomly shared an elevator with the hilarious Ken Jeong (of "The Hangover" and "Party Down") at a remote Massachusetts hotel. (He couldn't have been more polite, by the way, even as the ride threatend to turn into an episode of The Chris Farley Show.)

I wasn't able to completely unplug, but for the most part, it was nice to be able to watch something like "Better Off Ted" without having to think about what to write about it, whether ABC had a photo or I'd need to make a screencap, etc.

Now I'm back, and after the jump we'll have a link to my latest column, and some other talk about how the next few weeks (involving Comic-Con and the TV critics press tour) will go.

The first order of business is to link to my review of "Torchwood: Children of Earth," which BBC America is running tonight through Friday at 9 p.m. As you can tell if you click through, I loved it, even though the ending was a bit rushed.

I'm aware that reaction to the final chapters was more mixed in the UK, where "Children of Earth" aired a couple of weeks ago, and it's at this point that I remind you of the U.S.-only codicil to the No Spoilers rule. I'm aware that this blog has some international readers, and/or readers who download shows that have aired in other countries rather than waiting for them to air here. And you're all welcome here -- just so long as you don't give away plot details about things that haven't aired here yet. Don't even try to cleverly hint at something; anything I see as over the line gets deleted.

I loved "Children of Earth" enough that I'm frustrated it's airing in a week that's being cleaved in two for me by travel (and was preceded by a vacation week). Ordinarily, I'd love to do in-depth reviews of each night, but that's not going to be possible here. Instead, look for a post to go live around 10:15 (when the eps are scheduled to finish airing) each night this week, possibly with a few thoughts from me, possibly just asking for your own thoughts. I'll try to do something slightly longer for the finale, but time will be a factor. And, again, I'm going to ask you to abide by the spoiler rule. If you've seen all five episodes but only one has aired here in America, talk only about things in that episode. Do not allude to stuff down the line. Got it?

Now, as for other stuff this week, it's up in the air. I have a lot of screeners to watch and other prep work to do before I head to California on Thursday. I've seen the next few "Nurse Jackie" eps, and I've watched the next episodes of "The Wire" season two and "Sports Night" for those reviews, but I don't know how much time I'll have to work on any of them. With ongoing shows like "Jackie," "Burn Notice" (which I watched last week but didn't write about because of vacation), etc., I may just wind up skipping episode reviews for the next few weeks, unless something's either really special or I have an unexpected pocket of free time. With projects like "The Wire" and "Sports Night," they'll get done when they get done, as I've been saying.

Gonna be a lot of playing by ear around here for a while, and that includes how I wind up covering Comic-Con (which I've never attended before) and press tour. I'm not sure what my technological capabilities are going to be at Comic-Con during the daytime, so the best I may be able to do is post a comment now and again on Twitter with my phone. (Though I imagine Schwartz and company will frown on that during the "Chuck" panel.)

And speaking of tweeting, this'll be my first press tour with an active Twitter account, but I'm not sure how much of it I'll be doing there. It's enough of a distraction as is to be blogging so much that if I was tweeting about every funny and/or newsworthy moment on top of that, I'd barely feel like I was present. A guy like Fienberg is wired to be tweeting, blogging and paying attention simultaneously; I'm not sure I am.

So, to wrap things up, I can't really give you a firm schedule for when posts will be up, how I'll be writing, etc. I just know I'll be writing things at various times. Wish I could be more clear, but I've never done Comic-Con before, Comic-Con has never been before press tour before (which means a lot of news may break at the con instead of the tour), etc.

Got all that?

Russell Davies Q&A on 'Doctor Who' and 'Torchwood'

In conjunction with tomorrow's American debut of "Doctor Who: The Next Doctor," the first of five "Doctor Who" specials that will conclude the tenure of both star David Tennant and producer Russell T. Davies (you can read my review here), I spoke with Davies about saying goodbye to the character he helped resurrect, and about the upcoming miniseries "Torchwood: Children of Earth," which BBC America will be airing July 20-24.

Davies called me as I was finishing up the third episode of "Children of Earth" -- an exciting, epic story in which Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and his team deal with alien invaders who can make our world's children do whatever they want -- and so our discussion begins with that.

What was the impetus behind telling this particular "Torchwood" story?

The main impetus came because in Britain, we were shifting channels. We'd been on a smaller channel as a sci-fi cult show, but this is moving it onto BBC1. It's the main primetime channel, so we needed to do something bit. Also, although I created "Torchwood," I'd been away from it for a while. I wanted to do something new, a different type of storytelling, to give it a big kick and stretch myself as well. So all of that thinking led to a new format. They've been doing this (miniseries) format quite a bit in Britain, where you'll do five shows in five nights. It's a new form of storytelling that I loved, and when the offer came to make "Torchwood" part of this five nights a week thing, I jumped at it. I loved it.

So do you think, if BBC orders another series, you'll stick with this format?

I think it's hard to revert to the previous format having done this, but if BBC1 says, "We want to do 13 weeks like before," of course we're going to do 13 weeks. We can do all sorts of things. The six-part weekly thriller is another standard British format that we haven't tried yet. That's what's nice in this digital world: the platforms change, the digital tier gives you new options, and "Torchwood"s been at the forefront of it, since we started on a digital channel.

"Children of Earth" seems more epic, both in its scope and in the production values, than anything you did in the first two series.

Glad you said so. That was the aim. "Epic" was one of the keywords that we used. And it's quite important for newcomers to the show to know they can watch it from scratch. We're going to give them this big huge story where they can understand everything important in the first five minutes and go from there. I love telling stories about scale, and it's a big international story. But at the same time, even if you make things epic, no matter how big the threat is, you've got to have great characters, great actors at the center of it, so everything works on a personal level. So we've got John Barrowman doing wonderful work as Captain Jack, Eve (Myles) as Gwen Cooper, and everyone.

But when you're making an event, five nights a week, it would be wrong to tell a small, detailed domestic story. It's a brilliant production team, because we didn't have any increase in budget. It just looks like we did because they simply worked like dogs. The cast have worked hard, and it's made by people who love this, and with real passion. And the end result shines through.

You said before that you love stories about scale, which anyone watching your version of "Doctor Who" would already know. Every year, it seemed like the finales got bigger and bigger. Is one of the reasons you're leaving that you realized you couldn't top yourself anymore?

There's always further to go. I don't just increase things in scale because I'm mad. With "Doctor Who," every year the finale got bigger, and every year the rating got bigger. We were adding, like, 2 million viewers every year. That's been a great joy, and part of the whole game of "Doctor Who" is that the public joins in, word spreads, and more people watch. Increasing the scale of the program has literally paid off. If the viewers had been deserting the show, I would have done something different. When we get to David Tennant's finale, you will not believe the scale of it. But it's all about the acting in the end. Wait till you see David Tennant in his last episode, and John Barrowman in his last episode of "Children of Earth."

I'm unclear on the timing of this: were these five specials always designed to end David Tennant's time in the role, or did that happen after you started doing them?

No, we always knew they were going to be his last specials. It was his choice. When Steven Moffat took over the show, of course David wondered if he should be continuing, because of course Steven will be the most brilliant showrunner in the world.

It's funny, we've now all moved on, for the most part. We all feel that we've done the right thing. There's not one moment where we'd want to use a TARDIS to go back in and do over again. It's been good, it's been healthy, no regrets. If the handover had gone wrong, I would have felt terrible. We've protected the show, and kept it enshrined for the people in the UK.

I've only seen two of the specials so far, but there's this recurring theme about The Doctor not wanting to take on a new companion because of what happened in "Journey's End."

Poor Donna Noble.

You're a bastard, by the way.

Ha ha ha! He just called me a bastard. Ha ha ha ha!

Well, is there a specific character arc to these specials?

It's what I love about "Doctor Who." It's 46 years old, and now in my final year, we discover there's still a brand new way of telling the stories, which is The Doctor traveling on his own, which was done only once in the old years, Tom Baker with "The Deadly Asssassin." it gives us a chance for him to have a different companion every time. In "Planet of the Dead," we have Michelle Ryan, and in "The Waters of Mars," we've got Lindsey Duncan as the companion; she's almost 60 years old, quite a brilliant actress, a different way than we've gone previously. In the finale, it's Bernie Cribbens, who played Donna Noble's grandfather.

The bigger picture is why The Doctor's traveling alone -- because he's heartbroken, because he loses too much in the end (each time). This is an arc over these last few specials, gradually, especially in "Waters of Mars," which comes up in November, we discover that he travels with a human because he needs a human. He's too powerful, and without that (human with him), he can become a dangerous man. Donna pointed that out to him in her very first story, "The Runaway Bride." That is a story we're telling. We're sort of all heading towards series 5 and the new Doctor and the new companion, played by Karen Gillan. I think it's a nice set-up for her, in that The Doctor needs a companion and we're going to understand why.

Given what you said before about the lack of regrets, I'm guessing the answer's no, but are there any stories you wanted to tell with this series that you didn't get to?

Not really. Obviously, because I knew almost two years ago that I was leaving, I started thinking about stories. Other dramas I wanted to tell. Every now and then an idea will come into my head, though. I think there's a very good "Doctor Who" story to be told about Twitter, about the idea of communicating in 140 characters. There's a story somewhere, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone on the (new writing) team is thinking of that. They don't need me anymore. And I cannot tell you how much I'm looking forward to being a viewer. Other than the movie (1996's American-produced "Doctor Who" pilot), the last time I got a chance to sit down and watch a brand new series was 21 years ago. So I'm dying!

So have you asked Steven not to tell you anything about what he's doing?

I can't help overhearing little things. I already know far too much. And one or two things he had to check with me to make sure we could overlap material. What I do know is so exciting.

I want to go back to when you took over the franchise. What was the mandate you had in mind for yourself?

Simply, the one very clear thing I wanted to do at the beginning was to get a new audience, and a permanent audience. Because of "Doctor Who"'s long history -- he ran on BBC1 for so many years -- I knew we would get some old viewers who remembered the character fondly, but that simply wasn't enough for me. The BBC is funded by the public in Britain. So we're making a very expensive show, paid for by the public, so I thought I had a duty to spend that money well, and get as many of the public watching as possible, This wasn't a time to make a niche show, and that's so foften what British science fiction is. I knew it had to be lifted out into the mainstream. There was no precedent for that ever happening in Britain.

I wanted children watching. I thought if you're going to bring back this character, you want him to appeal to children; you want a child who, in 40 years time, will be me, bringing the character back again. It deserves the status of being like Robin Hood or Merlin or James Bond -- those rare British cultural figures who just run and run. I worried that, if I'd fumbled it on this reusrrection, it would have been fumbled for a few decades.

And we got lucky in the timing, If we'd been five years later, we would never have been able to afford the program I wanted to make. I wanted it to be expensive. I'm not saying all good television is expensive, because I've worked on some of the cheapest shows in trhe world. But the ambition, and the big picture, and the epic intimacy demanded that. And then all of this was theory, and none of us knew if it would work, but we got on air, and it worked, and it's been wonderful.

And all of that money is very clearly there on the screen, where the original series always looked so incredibly cheap: lots of stories with only one or two settings and minimal movement, where you're all over the place with the action and the special effects.

I so respect those old production teams because having made the show, I can't imagine how they made it on 1/10th of the budget that I had. And they made something I loved all my life. They found different ways of launching themselves into children's memories.

Was Christopher Eccleston always only going to do it for a year?

That was always the plan, and then the plan got fumbled because the newspapers found out about it. Can you imagine what a shock that regeneration would have been if they hadn't known? We got better at that over the years, found ways to keep other secrets. Nonetheless, Chris Eccleston is just a blazing comet of talent, and we are lucky to have had him for even a short time. I'm so grateful to have had him.

And then you got David Tennant, who many people insist is the best Doctor ever.

We cast Chris, and we thought, "Brilliant, but what the hell do we do next? Surely, there's no one who can be on a par with Chris." And the gods were smiling with us when we found David. Just to see him do this, at the same time he's doing "Hamlet" at the Royal Shakespeare Company, I'm so lucky just to have caught hold of that man for a short while.

Was it a coincidence or by design that all of the major companions during your run were women?

It's by design, to be honest. The show has had male companions in the past, and there have been times when he's had three or four companions at the same time, but if you strip the show down to its essentials, it's one man, and one woman. I don't think I would have been happy if it was just two men in the TARDIS. In the year 2009, still, there aren't enough lead roles for women, anyway. At the same time, we introduced Captain Jack, who was a companion for a time before we put him in "Torchwood."

There was that moment where you revealed that Jack would eventually live so long that he'd become the Face of Boe. Was this something you planned all along with the character?

It wasn't exactly planned. I did spend a long time thinking about Jack's immortality, and one day it occured to me there was another immortal character on the show. It made me laugh. To be honest, on the screen, it's couched in terms that are not absolute gospel. There are these spin-off books and comic books, and every now and then I'll see a script for one where they say definitively that he's the Face of Boe, and I always stop those from being printed. I have my own personal theories, but the moment it became very true or very false, the joke dies.

In general, though, how much long-term planning was there in the series? You got a lot of mileage out of cutting off The Doctor's hand in "The Christmas Invasion," for instance.

I did, didn't I? It's hard to say. Some things are planned. There was never a rigid plan that I followed for five years and never deviated. But the important thing is, I was thinking about "Doctor Who" more than I should have every day. Even the strongest fan of "Doctor Who" will think about "Doctor Who" a lot, then go on to their regular job, and I was thinking about "Doctor Who" all day, every day.

It's like having a great big play shop, I would introduce things like The Doctor having his hand cut off, and I realized I could bring it back in "Torchwood." What you don't notice are the things I introduce that I don't bring back. It's a more ruthless process than it is whimsical. Actually, it's very diligent about what makes sense, and I'm very careful about not losing an audience. If their enjoyment depends on them emorizing a bit of dialogue for 40 episodes earlier, you're in trouble. But we cut his hand off in a special that aired on Christmas, that almost ten million people in Britain watched at the time, and I thought they'd remember that. I can't say that I ever knew that three years later it would end up saving his lfie, but the potential was there. I know my own mind and it's always prodding the idea and finding ways to push it forward. If "plan" means having everything constantly in flux, then that is what we had.

In terms of an idea that you introduced and didn't bring back, it's implied at the end of "Journey's End" that Martha and Mickey are going to join "Torchwood," but they're not in "Children of Earth."

That was genuinely a potential idea. We did actually investigate that, and we did plan to use Martha and Mickey, and then Freema (Agyeman) was cast in "Law & Order: UK," and she was absolutely fantastic in it, and this was before we could confirm the commission of "Torchwood," and it's 13 episodes a year instead of five besides, so lovely, lovely Freema has got a job for life, so of course she went and did that. We're friends, we're in constant contact, and we were able to adapt, so we brought in Cush Jumbo as Lois Habiba, who's kind of the Martha figure. She doesn't act like a Martha clone at all, she's much more innocent and out of her depth. It's plate spinning, it's like that, you just keep things spinning. It was a possible plan, didn't work out, but if there's a "Torchwood" 4, and Freema's available, maybe we could use her again.

Getting back to the idea of scale, one of my favorite "Doctor Who" episodes that you wrote was sort of the opposite of that: "Midnight," which was this low-budget but extremely creepy story with The Doctor stuck on the train with the woman who kept repeating everything and the paranoid passengers.

You'd be surprised by how not low-budget that is. That set is four walls, and a very robust set, and we had to book a whole cast every day for two weeks, because they had to be there all the time. Actors are normally split up, and that was very actor-intensive. We didn't do it to be cheap, but I thought with the great big epic arias at the end of that series, it was time to be more intimate right beforehand. I thought of that idea as I was coming to the end of my time on "Doctor Who." That idea had been in my head itching away -- "What if you spoke to someone who repeats everything you've said for the whole episode?" -- and I had to do that episode before I left. I had to see if it worked. And it worked. That's a great big token of the freedom that the BBC gives us. On a great big popular expensive show, they allowed me to experiment.

If you had to pick a moment, or several moments, from your tenure that you're especially proud of -- that exemplify what you were trying to do with "Doctor Who" -- what would you pick?

The problem is, there's hundreds of them. Because I was so stepped in the show, it's very interesting to go back to the very first episode -- and to be blunt, we hit the ground running with it. That episode is the template for everything we did since. It has the companion being as strong as The Doctor, it brings back an old monster. It's in modern-day urban London. The companion's family is important, the emotion is at the forefront, but there's comedy and chase scenes. Normally, you look at episode one of a long-running series and it seems ancient, and I'm very proud of it because I look at it, all your favorite (kinds of) moments are in episode one.

But there are so many. It ranges from Lesley Sharp in "Midnight" giving the most brilliant performance with David Tennant, to when we won the BAFTA Award. When they played the clips of the nominees for Best Drama in this big posh ceremony, those clips are very often people crying in the rain about serious issues -- Iraq war, or illness, or drug addiction, because that's what usually wins awards -- and in the middle of all this, the "Doctor Who" clip played of thousands of Daleks flying through the air, and then we won the award! It just showed that a program that is so much fun and has so many children watching and so much fantasy, to win a big proper televiison award like that was genuinely wonderful.

Can you go back and watch episodes that you wrote and produced and appreciate them as a "Doctor Who" fan? Or are you too occupied thinking of how the sausage got made?

I don't know if this is good or bad, but I've always been able to sit and watch my own stuff and enjoy it. Sometimes, I'll sit down and I'll just catch an episode by chance. I caught the Shakespeare episode ("The Shakespeare Code") by chance the other night and I thought it was magnificent. I really, really can watch it as a viewer. I always cultivated that in my head, you have to train yourself to watch it as brand-new, so you can see its faults and its strengths, so I've always been good at it. So I can watch it on repeats. I still love them. And thankfully, I love watching the old show as much as I did. I can still watch the old classics from the 70s and be as happy as I was when I was a kid.

Torchwood, "Exit Wounds": A very long dirt nap

Spoilers for "Exit Wounds," the "Torchwood" season two finale, coming up just as soon as I tell important people in my life that I love them...

Oh my God, they killed Owen! Um, again. And they killed Tosh! For the first and, presumably, only time.

As I mentioned in Friday's column, "Torchwood" season one was uneven but trended towards awful, while season two was uneven but trended towards pretty good. The finale -- with the return of Spike/Capt. John, explosions and Weevils causing massive property damage and loss of life throughout Cardiff, Capt. Jack spending two millennium underground, and, in the end, Torchwood losing 40 percent of its active roster -- was one of this year's highlights. It was epic in a way that last year's giant monster attack tried and failed to be, because all of the events spun out of character and not CGI monsters, and because this year I actually gave a toss about the characters. Had Owen or Tosh suffered these fates last season, I would have shrugged, and it's a credit to the "Torchwood" writers that they realized they had to start writing their heroes with more consistency and sympathy.

If I have a problem with "Exit Wounds," it's that it once again plays up John Barrowman's limitations. I complained a lot last season about the writers turning Captain Jack into a brooding mope because it missed the appeal of the character, but also because Barrowman just isn't very good at it. You need somebody to save the universe with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face? Get Barrowman. You need somebody to howl in rage about the cruel hand of fate? It's just not his bag. And so the moment when Jack emerges from 1900 years of nothing but dying and resurrecting under 30 feet of earth -- a brilliant punishment for someone with Jack's gift/curse -- wasn't remotely as devastating as it could have been with another actor coming out of the hole. (James Marsters, for instance, would have killed it.)

(Also, as Jack's brother Gray, Lachlan Nieboer sounded so much like Barrowman that what initially seemed like brilliant casting eventually became distracting. I spent half his scenes trying to figure out if Barrowman had dubbed in his dialogue.)

But if Jack escaping his fate worse than death was a missed opportunity, the rest of the episode didn't miss a beat. Tosh and Owen's final conversation was the highlight -- and I loved the choice to have Tosh not tell Owen she was dying -- but I also liked Captain John's anguish throughout, Rhys and Andy having to work together, Gwen's speech to the troops, Gwen and Ianto's grief over the deaths of their friends and, especially, the pounding sound from the morgue that turned out to be Jack waking up.

As others have noted, it's unfortunate that lead writer Chris Chibnall finally figured out how to make "Torchwood" work at the exact moment he's leaving to run "Law & Order: London." No idea whether "Torchwood" itself will continue (with replacements for Tosh and Owen), but if the show can be as good as it was for the last few episodes of this season, I'd like to see more of it.

What did everybody else think?

Credit to The House Next Door for the screen capture at the top.

All TV: Enough 'Who's to make your head spin

Today's column looks at the "Doctor Who"-heavy weekend, which includes the season four Christmas episode (with Kylie Minogue), episode two of "The Sarah Jane Adventures" and the season two finale of "Torchwood." Minimal spoilers for all, in case you're worried.

Better late than never reviews: Martha on Torchwood & Terminator finale

So I was cleaning out my DVR last night (when the hard drive gets above 70 or 75 percent capacity, it tends to slow down and maybe even pixellate new recordings) and realized that, while I had watched both the latest "Torchwood" and the "Sarah Connor Chronicles" finale, I never got around to blogging about either one. So brief, belated spoilers for the two skiffy shows in the current rotation coming up just as soon as I finish my homework...

I'd been looking forward to Martha Jones showing up on "Torchwood" for a while now, and her first episode didn't disappoint. I thought Freema Agyeman really grew into the role during her first season on "Doctor Who" -- especially from "Human Nature" on -- and it was nice to see her in a capacity where she got to be 100% awesome instead of her usual 70% awesome, 30% crushing on David Tennant. She was confident, funny, sexy (and her flirtiness brought out the vintage Captain Jack that hasn't been on display as much this season as I would like), and she fit in well with the crew, particularly the doomed Owen.

I wasn't spoiled on Owen's death -- and I have no idea if they're going to use some alien tech in an upcoming episode to bring him back, so please no spoilers for people following the slightly-advanced British schedule -- and was therefore shocked to see him take a bullet from the ubiquitous Alan Dale. A very creepy, scary episode and another sign that team "Torchwood" seriously got their act together for season two.

Speaking of improving as they go, I thought "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" got quite a bit better after the first few boring episodes. Specifically, the introduction of Brian Austin Green, of all people, signaled the moment when I began to think this show might have more legs than I initially thought. For whatever reason -- my guess is a network note about making the main character more relatable -- the producers decided to soften Sarah from the homicidal nutcase she was in "Terminator 2," and so they wound up giving all of movie Sarah's most extreme, memorable qualities to Derek Reese, and the former David Silver somehow pulled it off. I bought him as a hair-trigger commando from the future, and he gave the show an unpredictable quality that it didn't have with the original troika.

The finale also featured one of the great "do more with less" moments I've seen lately. With the weekly budget obviously much lower than for the pilot, there was no way to actually show Cromartie massacring the FBI tactical team, and so they shot virtually all of it from the point of view of the bodies falling, one by one, into the pool far away from Cromartie's hotel room. It helped that they scored the whole thing to Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around" -- any scene feels more epic when it's accompanied by a number from one of Johnny's America albums (see also the opening of the most recent season of "The Shield," where Johnny's "I Hung My Head" kicks an already powerful opening sequence into something magnificent), and the song itself is about Judgment Day.

Still, despite the improvements, I'm still not sure if there's a long creative life in this concept. (That's assuming Fox even renews it, considering how much the ratings slipped from that big debut audience, and the fact that the network has committed big money for next season to sci-fi shows from Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams.) It's a Gilligan or Fugitive premise, where the characters can only come so close to accomplishing their goal before the end of the series. And unlike "Lost," where getting off the island was also the chief goal, there aren't enough interesting detours along the way to get in the way of that. Either they're going to get their hands on the Turk and then realize that it's not the start of SkyNet, or they're going to spend seasons chasing the Turk as it continually changes hands; either way, I expect it to get old.

But, like a few other shows this season ("Journeyman" and "Life," to name two), "Sarah Connor Chronicles" turned out to be more entertaining than I at first thought it was capable of being. I won't exactly miss it if Fox doesn't renew it, but I don't regret sticking with it to the end of this season.

What did everybody else think?

Torchwood, "To The Last Man": No time for love

Brief spoilers for last night's "Torchwood" coming up just as soon as I hit all the local pubs...

"To The Last Man" was like an amalgam of two season one episodes: "Out of Time," where Owen fell in love with the time-displaced pilot (and which Owen invoked several times in this episode), and "Captain Jack Harkness," where Jack and Tosh were stuck in a World War II dance hall where Jack had one perfect romantic night with his namesake. As those were arguably the two best episodes of the very problematic first season, it's not surprising the show would try the (time travel) + (doomed romance) equation again, and if this story lacked novelty, it was executed well.

In particular, I liked the pre-credits sequence with the 1918 members of Torchwood, as well as the matter of fact nature of our soldier's annual wake-up day. When you're around Torchwood long enough, the extraordinary becomes routine, and it quickly became clear that everyone enjoyed his company -- just not as much as Tosh.

Owen's eagerness to compare his problem to Tosh's was a good touch, and a continuation of the closer-knit team this season. Last year, every team member kept to themselves, kept secrets from one another, and it got unpleasant after a while. Here, Owen sees Tosh rushing headlong into the same kind of relationship that messed up his head for so long, and he actually takes steps to help her, because she's his teammate and his friend.

What did everybody else think?

Torchwood, "Sleeper": A farewell to arms

I'm coming down with some kind of flu bug, so this review is going to be pretty short. (Ditto tomorrow night's "Breaking Bad," unfortunately; at least I wrote my "Wire" post before I started coughing.) Brief spoilers for "Torchwood" coming up just as soon as I explain the "Jessica Fletcher" joke to the young people in the audience...

After being so jazzed by the lighter, more confident tone of last week's "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," I felt very frustrated with the first 10 minutes or so of "Sleeper," which seemed to be backsliding to all the things I didn't like about last year: plots with minimal logic (in retrospect, Torchwood was right to look into this case, but at the time I had no idea why they were there), everyone yelling all the time, Jack reinserting the stick up his butt, etc. Who, I wondered, thought that doing a Guantanamo allegory was a good fit for this show?

But then we discovered what Beth really was, and the episode began to click. When I described the basic plot of the episode in my column last week, someone said it sounded similar to Boomer in "Battlestar Galactica" season one. And while there are parallels, "Sleeper" went more into the visceral horror of finding out you're not who you think you are, particularly those moments where Beth's body began operating independently from her mind. The scene in the hospital where she killed her husband without realizing it sent chills down my spine, as did throwaway moments with the other sleeper agents, like the woman who let the baby carriage roll into traffic.

I'm not sure I completely followed the rest of the story -- Why would some of the other sleeper agents be willing to blow themselves up? How is that even possible with such a bad-ass forcefield? -- but the episode moved quickly and there were enough moments of sheer terror to engage me as it went along.

I still prefer the Jack of last week (or of "Doctor Who"), but this wasn't bad at all.

What did everybody else think?

Torchwood: First you wanna kill me, now you wanna kiss me. Blow.

Brief spoilers for the "Torchwood" season two premiere coming up just as soon as I trademark the name "Bikini Cops"...

Now this is the show I was hoping for when they gave Jack his own spin-off.

Like I said in my column, Angsty Jack is a complete waste of both the character and John Barrowman. Brooding, he's a bore. Charming and happy and perfect, he's wonderful. And the overall mood of "Torchwood" seems to have brightened right along with Jack.

The blowfish car chase/hostage situation was done with just the right light touch; a deadpan moment like a blowfish-headed alien driving a red convertible isn't the sort of thing this show could have pulled off last year. (It was maybe the most "X-Files"-ish moment of the series so far.) The team is getting along better instead of betraying each other every five minutes (Jack's absence having forced them into it), and the main story with Captain Jack vs. Captain John managed to ride that Whedonesque funny/scary/funny/tragic wave really well.

James Marsters' presence obviously helped -- I imagine the scene pictured above exploded the heads of half of skiffy fandom -- but the entire production felt far more confident, whether it was John's violent arrival, or Jack entering the bar for a Wild West-style shootout, or a paralyzed Gwen trying to will Ianto and the others to find her. The execution on almost everything was spot on.

It wasn't perfect -- the "it would activate the bomb" excuse for not cutting off John's hand was lame, and the writers really need to make up their mind about whether Torchwood is a super-secret organization or so well-known that old biddies make derisive jokes about it -- but it was a vast, vast improvement over nearly all of season one.

What did everybody else think?

Torchwood: Adult vs. mature

Today's column looks at the upcoming debut of the sexualized "Doctor Who" spin-off "Torchwood," which I found really disappointing:

What defines a work of entertainment as adult? Is it just about the content -- the type of language used, the level of sex and violence -- or something deeper?

Not to get all philosophical here, but I ask because I've just finished watching the first four episodes of "Torchwood" (Saturday at 9 p.m. on BBC America), the so-called "adult" spin-off of the new "Doctor Who" series, and I'm having a hard time figuring out why the new show gets tagged with the mature label and the original doesn't.

To read the full thing, click here.