avevale_intelligencer | Still more on Torchwood (bear with me; exorcism is a long and painful process)

Still more on Torchwood (bear with me; exorcism is a long and painful process)

Okay, now that the tumult and the shouting has died down a bit I'm starting to see people saying how good this Torchwood was.

And that's fine. Really, if you enjoyed it and thought it was good, more power to you. Skip merrily on and ignore me for a moment, because I'm going to go into some details

Here's a storyline.

"Once upon a time there was a big rock going to crash into the earth and everybody was going to die and there was nothing anybody could do and it was all really really sad and then somebody found an even bigger rock and threw it at the big rock and the big rock went away. The End."

This is the kind of story I wrote at the age of seven. Well, actually, I think I was a bit more capable than that even then. This is the kind of story Russell T Davies writes *all the time*. I can't swear to it that he starts writing with no idea how he's going to finish (he's said as much, but then he lies all the time as well), but that's certainly how it feels when he pulls another stupid rabbit out of his stupid hat at the last minute. And while, for a dilettante like myself or a natural genius like the Countess, this is perfectly okay, for a writer who is being paid to entertain millions it is lazy and it is sloppy and it is unprofessional.

If you plan your story, then you know what your antagonist's fatal weakness is going to be from the outset and you drop clues. They don't have to be immediately understandable--one of the best feelings in the world is looking back on a story and seeing how all the pieces fit into place and show the way forward from where you are--but they have to be there. It's called playing fair with the audience and it's a mark of respect.

We knew very little about the 456. We knew that they could transmit through children, but not how or why. There was never at any point, till halfway through the last episode, any suggestion that it might be possible to send a signal the other way, let alone how or why. It would, I would think, have necessitated the 456's equipment or whatever being set up for receiving as well as transmitting, and why would they bother to do that? How would the government, or Torchwood, know that they possessed any technology that could achieve it, let alone have it all together in one place and in working order at the right time and in the right place?

Plotting: zero out of ten.

Add to this the fact that the gratuitous emotional manipulation to an insanely excessive degree was present in full force, that the final two episodes were so completely opposed to fun that at the moment they were broadcast an equal amount of fun spontaneously annihilated itself, and that he pressed the damn stupid reset button at the end despite the fact that he had just made it excruciatingly clear that no way was western civilisation coming out the other end of this whole...

...and I can't help wondering what the people who think this Torchwood was good, who talk about "compelling writing" and "coherent plotting" and "he actually pulled it off this time"...what they were actually watching.

But whatever it was, I'm glad they enjoyed it.

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If you plan your story, then you know what your antagonist's fatal weakness is going to be from the outset and you drop clues
And subconciously, you telegraph the ending.

Complete agreement that Davies writes as if he's got his brain in a blender, and his miracle endings don't scan. But I wouldn't blame lack of planning as much as lack of talent. I know many fine writers (and story tellers) who can weave a formidable tale off the tops of their heads.

Well, yes, as I said I'm married to one. And to be fair, I've never known the Countess to pull a rabbit from a hat--there must be planning going on, just on a level she's not aware of.

But I believe it's possible to play fair with the audience and plant the seeds of your ending without telegraphing it to any but the most perceptive, if any at all.

Anyone can pull a rabbit out of a hat, it's pulling a hat out of a rabbit that's the real trick. (OK, where is that from? It's a quote but I unremember of what...)

"But I believe it's possible to play fair with the audience and plant the seeds of your ending without telegraphing it to any but the most perceptive, if any at all."

It certainly is in text, good mystery writers do it, and in music. I'm certain that it is in other media as well. But it's awfully easy to cheat and use a deus ex machina ("What you failed to see, Watson, and I never pointed out to anyone else either, is that the dog had no nose which is why it didn't smell the intruder"), or especially in SF to suddenly pull out $tech-solution, and many authors do that. Asimov was very aware of that tendency and commented on it, his mystery stories (both the SF Wendell Urth and the non-SF Black Widowers) are very good at putting the clues into the story in such a way that looking back or re-reading they are obvious but they aren't to the first-time reader (or at least not to most).

"I never saw that coming (but I should have done)!" is a good reaction. "That doesn't follow!" is not...

Okay, so anyone who has had any begining writing or lit course knows about foreshadowing as a writer's tool. I guess where I disagree with you is I don't consider it an essential element. In fact, some of my favorite stories plant seeds of misdirection, making the surprise ending a...surprise. O. Henry was a master of this. ee cummings as well. Ruth Rendell.

If you're talking about building a plausible foundation for the chosen ending, I'm in agreement. Davies shows deep levels of ineptness in this area.

I agree with all of this.

I've forgiven him in the past, as I enjoyed the ride to get there.

In the chicken and egg Universe... do I have a Masters in Film & Media because I get immense stimulation from visual storytelling... or is that because I get immense stimulation from visual storytelling that I have...

In moving image, in fan terms, I've always been able to forgive plot and character problems, if the pace and visual storytelling carries me past it. It means I've genuinely got real enjoyment out of stuff I know is pants. But it's pants on its own measure, if that makes sense. The bits in it that I respond to, are internally consistent. So I can ignore the lesser bits, and still declare it satisfying... and within it's own terms, 'good'. In current jargon, I like 'high concept' moving image. Where the 'event' of the pace, effects and emotional manipulation takes over. Plot takes over from narrative, action takes over from character development, etc. Very much Davies. You forgive the 'other' skills in writing, the cause and effect relationship, the character interaction and growth, the slow and steady working into a new scenario building to chance and growth.. in order to have a lot more bang for your buck.

I have done this, as you know, with a lot of the new Who stuff.

However. As you point out above, he completely stuffed the writing, and the audience. He broke the terms of the agreement. So there is no forgiving of the problems.

And with RTD, once you let in one plot and character and narrative problem, the entire house of cards fall. So it's ash in seconds.

Technically, he is a gifted writer and visual storyteller. The ones who liked it, are still responding to the over all "grab and take you with it" I'd suggest.

What I think is interesting, is that in terms of what makes a writer "great" is more than their technical expertise. It's their soul. It's their expression of meaning. Fantastic writers are people who are technically proficient AND have soul. We all know writers who have great soul, but can't write worth a damn. You forgive it, as the story which illuminates the soul bit, keeps you going. Great storytellers, not that good as writers.

Rarer, is it really good technical writing, and not much soul. Davies can be a superb technical writer in visual storytelling... grabs you by the throat and keeps you going past the epic structural problems.

However, this time, the lack of soul was just so blatant. And really, he broke his own technical prowess. He constructed one story... and delivered another, in the final moments. Shoddy shoddy work.

And the people who are really seeing it.. are writers. The ones who understand the craft. We're looking at the skeleton and bones, and others are still seeing the flesh and costume.

A lot of people I know feel betrayed by it, but they don't know _why_. They understand they have been taken for a ride and the _should_ feel elated... but they don't, they feel sick. Watching a child being shaken to death makes then feel sick. But they know it 'had to happen'. But emotionally, in their soul, they understand it was 'wrong'. And there is conflict between their feeling pleased by the power of the drama, and their moral/soul sense.

In discussion, they've realised their unease is over their own manipulation. There were/was other ways it could pan out, and Davies locking it down to one, wrong choice - setting up Story A and then switching to Story B. That he set up a world where there was always an option on hope, and shut it down, by changing the world view. And they know that feels wrong on many levels.

Some are muddling the feelings of horror at Steven's death, with the feeling that the story was 'wrong'. Some of those are then defending it as "Yes, I know it made me feel bad, but kids do die and that's *real* and it proves he's a great writer." And they are then going outside the story, outside the diagetic world, to 'prove' that this was a realistic situation. To shore up his massive blowing up the narrative pathway with "But it does happen in the real world..."

Which is pants. There was nothing realistic about the Vomit Monsters from Planet McGuffin. You can't work with a McGuffin, no matter how much you try and put emotional weight on it, by making the 'units' of McGuffiness 'children'. There is no reality to that death, as it only serves a totally ballsed up narrative path. And so when we say "But it was wrong" they hear "It's wrong to kill kids" when what we're saying is "It's wrong to manipulate the audience this way, and then torture a child for entertainment on the pathway." And they say "But kids do die... he had to die..."

ARRRGGHHH!!!!!!!!!!

We see so many different things, when we watch movies and tv, and when we read books and stories.

So many of us are seeing this, and looking at the shit writing, the terrible audience manipulation and the utter void of meaning. Others are seeing flash bang whizz and inserting their own meaning into the structure in front of them...

Years ago, I had a conversation with Harlan Ellison, about Chris Carter's Millennium. He said he despised what Chris was doing with the audience, playing with them, and treating them like schmucks. And you don't do that to your audience. Millennium was still running, and I really liked it, so I couldn't quite get there.

I understand it now. When 'high concept' is the death and torture of innocents... just for shock value. And that's before we get to setting up story A and delivering story B in the final reel...

And how does it affect your argument to know that actually, the plot of this five parter was a developed by a *writing team*? That, unusually, Euros Lynn (director of the whole five episodes) was present and involved in the planning meetings at which the storyline was "broken" (as they say in the biz), well before even a single line of script was written or, indeed, a single epsiode allocated to a particular writer for drafting?

To me this suggests that what we've been seeing as RTD's personal failing is actually part of the Upper Boat culture; that this is actually how they believe SF stories *should* be resolved. Or perhaps that they just don't think plot resolutions are nearly as important as emotional ones.

But yeah... That is Children of Earth's one seriously glaring flaw: The resolution is rushed and illogical. Even allowing for the reversibility question you raise, there's the problems of (a) how they happen to have the needed gear ready to hand and not to do more than 30 seconds work on it to adapt it to purpose; (b) how they know it's actually going to work (or are they just desparate enough to try it on the off chance?) and (c) how, after the fact, they know it *has* worked. They see one individual of the 456 destroyed (and then miraculously sucked away, complete with the nasty mess of "blood"(?) on the windows), and one boy die. The rest... Presumably, it's just a case of waiting to see what happens next? And as it turns out, vast armies of 456 *don't* turn up and wreak terrible vengeance. Or at least, they haven't yet...

Was the individual just a lone rogue drugs dealer, bluffing about having the power to wipe out the species? Or was he actually hooked into the 456s power stucture at a very high level? The mere fact that he could take control of the planet's children on mass, make them "stop", surely gives him the power to end the human race within the length of time we would normally call a generation...

So yeah, lots of unanswered questions. Some are maybe deliberately ananswered, to leave scope for future stories about the 456... But as ever I'm left with the feeling that these questions are unanswered because they weren't asked, because they simply aren't where the writing team's attention was focussed.

What's good - DAMN good - about Children of Earth is what they did focus their attention on: The first seriously meaty attempt in decades, frankly, to use an SF plot to unpick some of the scariest and most relevent questions of our time. To actually hook a mainstream audience effectively enough, for long enough, that they could spend an entire hour going through the logic, and the illogic, and the compassion and the dispassion and the horror, without said audience reaching for the remote and hopping to something fluffier and less demanding, and get the whole nation talking about it the next day.

As someone said, a lovesong to Quatermass, in more ways than one.

"Enjoyed" is not the word. =:o\

Edited 2009-07-12 16:00 (UTC)

"Enjoyed" is not the word. =:o\

On that we agree.

If it's the culture of Upper Boat, then it seems very likely that he's the one who largely shaped it. Which explains why other writers on these shows, even better ones than RTD, have been guilty of the same failings. The ending of "Silence In The Library"/whatever it was was a similar fudge.

As for unpicking the scary questions, I'm not convinced. The comments I have seen that touched on that have mostly been about how scheming and evil the politicians were, how the military can be a tool of oppression, and so on and so forth, and realWho did all that back when it was essential family viewing. We don't need a telly programme to tell us those things these days. They're so clichéd their essential truth is all but obscured.

Quatermass? Well, maybe, but the one with John Mills (the one to which, if any, this was an oh Marge, or to be less polite, of which it was--structurally--a ripoff) showed me, when I watched it originally, that the Quatermass productions had been successful in spite of themselves. Kneale's standpoint was similar to Lovecraft's, that humanity was a pathetic puppet of vast indifferent forces beyond its understanding. This was never a philosophy likely to find much favour with people in general, and as with Lovecraft, the audience at large enjoyed the Quatermass stories and let the philosophy go, which puts the onus back on the storytelling. That last Quatermass, in which the defeatism and the negativity were most blatantly displayed, was I think the least successful in storytelling terms, and its failings were the failings of Children of Earth.

Edited 2009-07-12 19:23 (UTC)

Yet paradoxically, pretty much all of the Quatermass stories display a lingering hope in Humanity's goodness and knowledge as much as its defeatism and negativity. Experiment has Earth saved by an appeal to the last remnants of humanity in three astronauts, Pit ends with an act of self-sacrifice combined with knowledge, and even the Mills one ends with a heart-rending reconciliation and joined action by two individuals of different generations to end the threat - at least for now. Kneale could come across as very cynical and embittered about the mass of the human race in his work, but ultimately the Quatermass stories always give that crucial shard of hope. That last inch that refuses to give in, to put it in V For Vendetta terms.

It's funny you know, how your own life experiences affect what you're prepared to swallow. I was watching TORCHWOOD: CHILDREN OF EARTH and I managed to accept as believable:

A man who cannot die.

Aliens in undetectable spaceships.

Mind control that allowed them to make every child on Earth stand, speak and point in unison but not apparently make them march to pick-up points.

The same aliens using human children as symbiotes and sources of good-time drugs while they live in an atmosphere no human could tolerate for a second.

But I balked at the assurances that the Senior Civil Servant gave that he could get 350,000 children away from their parents and to the aforementioned pickup points within twenty four hours, no problem Prime Minister.

'This man,' I thought, 'has never tried to move even a single child anywhere they didn't want to go and has probably been lied to by all his subordinates for the last ten years.... '

'Let's see, the fact that the children have just called out 10% of the number of children in each nation has been spotted by the media (and I bet someone in the know leaked it)... There's no way he can have enough elite, super-obedient troops to get that number of children moving and the regular Army-Oh isn't immune to mutiny: especially if any of their own kids get caught up in the sweep.'

'And the Civil Service will either loose the instructions or go home early: grand thing flexitime. This feels very like the point in one of my carefully crafted RPG scenarios when the players turn to me and say 'You what?' and proceed to pull down the whole unlikely edifice...'

And that was the point where it all fell to pieces for me as my disbelief suspenders snapped. Cap'n Jack facing down the Ambassador without much of a plan or a single operative brain cell flowed past me and I did not even twitch. I did laugh at the line about the School League Tables though...

And then the Army moving in like a bunch of invincible robots: in real life half of them will misread their orders or the maps and about twenty five percent will find some reason why they aren't allowed to go on child kidnapping expeditions for health and safety reasons. The authors clearly have an exaggerated estimate of the power and competence of government. They should suffer as I do in the lower bowels of the State and that will teach them.

Oh, and why can't a man who has just lied to the entire nation manage to lie to his subordinate and tell him, yes, yes, of course your children will be perfectly safe. I wouldn't dream of using them in a pointless and Machiavellean scheme to preserve my political career...

I object to my emotions being manipulated as blatantly as this series does. I object even more when the authors have to pull psychologically ridiculous moments like this because they can't be bothered to write an extra two minutes into the plot when the Big Civil Servant discovers he's being betrayed.

(Portions of this review have appeared in ALARUMS & EXCURSIONS).

And the quote about a hat out of a rabbit comes from THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST by Heinlein. Hilda to Lazarus Long.

Michael Cule

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Still more on Torchwood (bear with me; exorcism is a long and painful process)

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