Torchwood

[avevale_intelligencer]

Hands up who watched it. Comments? Anyone? No-one? Oh well, I don't mind being the first...(correction: ffutures gave it half a dozen words. The first to comment in depth, then...)

Well, let's get rid of the elephant in the room right away. James Marsters, for the TW target audience, is about the most blatant piece of stunt casting since, er well, Christmas actually. He's also very good, and still quite pretty despite the *ahem* laugh lines, and slipped easily into the Spike role to Jack's Angel. It was like the boy had never been away. That it *is*, so obviously, the Angel/Spike dynamic lifted wholesale and without shame, is an issue we may have to return to.

The plot. Well, there was one. It rested on pure coincidence, of course, unless there really is something about Earth in our time that attracts ever' dang McGuffin in the multiverse, in which case that ought to be something for Torchwood to explore and possibly fix. The paralysing lip gloss is a steal from Firefly (hmm), and let's face it, he could have just knocked Gwen on the head (although "Don't let him knock you on the head and lock you in a cargo container" would have been a rather footling third rule). One tasted kapok a bit towards the middle, with all that running around, and Tosh and Owen's incapacitating injuries from which they recover completely as soon as Ianto appears (ah, the healing power of a well-dressed Welshman). But, on the whole, it worked.

Two things, in reverse order: the arc plot hook. "I found Grey (or possibly Gray)." And Jack has a flash of a small hand slipping out of a larger one, against a background of flames. The Countess thinks Gray (or as it might be Grey) is Jack's baby, the one he mentioned being pregnant with in the first episode of series one. Maybe, or maybe it's a child of Jack's more orthodoxly conceived. As long as he or she doesn't come back as a sullen complex teen who's spent his or her life in some kind of hell and wants to kill Daddy.

And the teaser, in which a blowfish-headed humanoid driving a sports car startles an old lady, who mutters "Bloody Torchwood" as she goes about her business. They really need to sort out which world they are operating in: ours, where the existence of aliens and rifts and so on is a more or less successfully kept secret, or some other one where everyone knows what's going on and isn't too bothered. it feels as though they're trying to have their cake and eat it, and that's an uneasy feeling.

Still, I will be watching.

Wittier and more trenchant analyses than mine will doubtless follow...

Comments

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

In Firefly it was drugged rather than poisoned--"Our Mrs Reynolds" was the episode. Apparently they put a barrier cream of some sort on first.

[cadhla.livejournal.com]

As Firefly stole it from Poison Ivy, who stole it from half a dozen folklore sources, not overly bothered.

[valydiarosada.livejournal.com]

A marvellous excuse to watch that episode again. :D Thanks!

(And probably all the others as well... :D)

[contrarywise]

I'm dating myself here, but I remember it being used in an episode of Get Smart that aired when I was a kid. In that case, it was poisoned lipstick applied over a thin layer of something latex-like on the lips.

FYI, here via telynor. We seem to have some interests and perspectives in common. :)