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

[avevale_intelligencer]

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.

Comments

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

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\

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

"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.

[pink-sweater-uk.livejournal.com]

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.