Torchwood, series 2

[Mister Six]

The old Torchwank thread hadn't been posted to in 364 days, so I thought I might as well make a new one.

First episode will be broadcast on BBC 2 on 16th January, according to OG, with an edited, pre-watershed repeat later in the week - which suggests that rumours about it being toned down for BBC 2 were true.

Notably, the BBC press release says:

This time it's bigger and bolder, with more fun, adventure and excitement for the alien-fighting team.

Which can be read the way it was presumably intended - "this season will have fun, adventure and excitement in addition to the amount featured in the first series" - but also has (thanks to the "This time" bit) the subtle implication that the first series in fact lacked all three of these things. Which it did, obviously, but you wouldn't expect the Beeb to admit that.

Also interesting to note how the three nouns here - "fun, adventure and excitement" - contrast with the three adjectives they used for Torchwood series one: "dark, wild and sexy".

There's a trailer here, although the sound is fucked:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=j991VvyNkHo

I'm shocked to say that the trailer actually does look quite fun, although the James Marsters casting looks like cynical nerdbait, and the fact that the whole cast of cunts is back isn't encouraging.

[samadriel]

Aww, you should've bumped the old thread, it had my leaked script in it!

QUERY: while the 'Did you ever cummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm so hard' line from the delightfully shithouse 'Countrycide' is utterly worthy of its infamy, I didn't actually hear anyone else making fun of it directly at the time.  Was a clip of it used somewhere on UK TV, thereby vaulting it to its deserved prominence, or has it just gradually snowballed (oo-er) over time via Youtube or something, so that now it's so notorious we can use it in shorthand form (as seen in the tags below)?

[papalaz4444244]

I don't even remember this line from "Cuntrycide", but that might be because I was shouting "FUCK OFF AND DIE, CHIBNALL!" so loudly all the way through it.

Series 2 has to be better than series 1  - because it couldn't possibly be any worse.

The Crotchwood series 2 trailer looks like they might have actually listened to criticism and made it a lot better. (It's still a ripoff of Angel, though)

[Sheldon Finklestein]

I've been thinking about this, because the trailer actually looks quite fun: just how good would Season Two have to be to make up for Season One? Personally, I suspect that it could be the most brilliant, intelligent sci-fi ever made, and I still wouldn't forget how shit the first one was. No matter how hard I came.

[samadriel]

It's kind of like that 'time-travellers from the '50s" one by Steven Moffat (who I nearly typed as 'Steven Chibnall' there -- amusing!!!) (actually it was by a Ms Catherine Tregenna, and Moffatt hasn't written any Torchwood) -- apart from the 'they're buddies... who fuck...' shite from Owen the Office Rapist, and the white-hot idiocy of stranding a sheltered '50s upper-class adolescent on her own in modern London, it actually wasn't too bad, but there's just no way it can escape from its context -- like you say, it could've been the best science fiction in the world, and it'd still be focused on an appallingly poorly-realised organisation staffed by four kinds of idiot (that's 'immortal', 'rapist', 'robosexual' and 'gappy', for you at the back) and a Token Asian Computer Expert.

I think I might watch Season 2, just for a chuckle, but it'll have to be pretty damn chucklesome.  God bless the Bandwidth Fairy.

[Clone Army]

The only way this could work is if in the first episode, elite assassins from Torchwood 7 (Manchester/Greater Manchester) swing by and kill everyone in the face. It's also worth noting that a better (if better is a term you could apply to Torchwood) version of the trailer is on the official web site.

[biggytitbo]

I reckon they could simply get rid of the one with the horrific face and mouth and it'd immedietly be 25 times better than Series 1.

[samadriel]

_{"Shut up titbo, I need this!"}

(if better is a term you could apply to Torchwood)

Well you couldn't very well use 'worse', could you!

Awesome, one of the episodes of Torchwood S2 is called 'Meat'.  Sadly, not a Chris Chibnall episode (it's by that Tregenna woman who wrote the only remotely tolerable one last season), but could it be?  'Countrycide' Part 2?  I can't wait!

[biggytitbo]

_{"Shut up titbo, I need this!"}
Well you couldn't very well use 'worse', could you!

Excellent! I was going to...

This kiddie repeat...are they going to edit out the gayness I wonder?

[Deadman97]

Torchwood's back?



NOOOOOOOOO!

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

"The Gayness" is a pretty bloody prevalent aspect of the series though. It's certainly a defining part (steady) of Captain Jack's character - or rather, Captain Jack's more blatantly sexual Torchwood character. And aren't he and the gormless teaboy in a relationship? Or is that going to be forgotten about?

The kiddies are cetainly going to be asking a lot of stunned and awkward questions if the pre-watershed repeats still feature cuddly ol' Captain Jack ramming his centuries-old tongue down the throat of every bloke he meets.

[Mister Six]

The only way this could work is if in the first episode, elite assassins from Torchwood 7 (Manchester/Greater Manchester) swing by and kill everyone in the face. It's also worth noting that a better (if better is a term you could apply to Torchwood) version of the trailer is on the official web site.

Actually, if they were willing to do a proper pisstake, I'd love for a convention where all the different Torchwoods meet up - Torchwood 10 from Bradford, Torchwood 6 from Skegness, Torchwood 30 from Torquay...

[Mr. Analytical]

It is nice that they've gone for adventurous and fun... I think that's what the series always wanted to be anyway.

It's also interesting how everytime someone is working on something that is a priori shite they immediately go "It's going to be a lot darker..." in truth Torchwood was never really dark or rather the actual bleak bits weren't played as dark at all.  Having one of the main protagonists be a rapist was pretty dark, as was working in an office where everyone sexually harassed everyone else as though they were on a porn shoot.  A bit of blood and sobbing "You're the real monster here Jack..." was never going to cut it.

Real darkness would be Captain Jack sitting in a bedsit with porn and TV dinners all around him for an hour, occasionally weeping and trying to summon up the courage to slit his wrists AGAIN.

[Mister Six]

Having one of the main protagonists be a rapist was pretty dark, as was working in an office where everyone sexually harassed everyone else as though they were on a porn shoot.

You're not wrong at all. The only problem was that the writers thought these scenes were sexy and funny. Which is genuinely more frightening than any shite monsters they had in series one.

"You're the real monster here Jack..."

Torchwood Five unveiled:

[Clone Army]

I'd quite like Torchwood to save the day, once. Rather than be the greatest slapstick threat mankind has ever known.

Episodic Summary of Catastrophes handled by Torchwood and their respective triggers (Series 1).

Everything Changes: Inept Torchwood team almost release dangerous alien technology into the public, Allow alien to eat man, One Gay. -1pt
Day One: Lack of formal training for new staff leads to release of deadly sex gas killing dozens. -1pt
Ghost Machine: Despite absense of alien threat Torchwood team struggle to solve terrestrial rape case and manage to kill one man. -1pt
Cyberwoman: Lack of proper policies in the "where we can store Cybermen" department results in one death (Japanese) -1pt
Small Worlds: Unlimited technology, authority and matching trenchcoats fail to stop some Fairies. Jack gives a child to a metaphoric paedophile. Several deaths. -1pt
Countrycide: Man with gun almost destroys Torchwood team, Obstruct police murder enquries. -1pt
Small Worlds: One murder prevented, Lesbians. +1pt
They Keep Broadcasting Episodes: So boring, gave up here...let's say -1pt
Random Shoes: Torchwood avoid fucking up by refusing to take on important jobs. One ghost relationship, awww. +1pt
Out of Time: Torchwood piss about some more since the finale is 3 episodes away. Rapist/Sky Captain shipping fails to threaten earth. +1pt
Combat: Noel Clark writes an episode. -1pts
Captain Jack Harkness: Matter-annihilating portal through time opened so Torchwood Team can catch Strictly Come Dancing. -1pt.
End of Days: Ill-prepared Torchwood team fail to save world from aliens (their job), open rift after missing X-Factor final, handy Immortality get-out clause saves day. 0pt on average.

Torchwood scores a -6 on the armageddamometer thanks to teen angst episodes. You'd think they'd have got fired by now.

[Dark Sky]

I think the fact that RTD has admitted that series one of Torchwood wasn't up to par, along with comments by Chibnall that it's going to lessen up on the sex and swearing and inject more humour in it is very promising.

Wasn't it someone on this forum who claimed that the head of BBC2 ordered that it be revamped majorly because he hated the first series?

Anyway, I'm actually quite excited about its return!

[Mr. Analytical]

I think the fact that RTD has admitted that series one of Torchwood wasn't up to par, along with comments by Chibnall that it's going to lessen up on the sex and swearing and inject more humour in it is very promising.

  Bollocks.  Those are cosmetic issues.

  Even if you remove the awful sex and the horrifically unsympathetic and downright hateful characters you're stillleft with a number of very poorly written episodes.  The stories didn't work.  The fairies one in particular had no tension as there was nothing that could be done and what tension there was in the episode relied upon one of the characters working out what the entire audience knew : namely that Jack is immortal.  That one was particularly disappointing as it was written by the bloke from Sapphire and Steel but it showed that Chibnall cannot run a show... any decent exec producer would have worked the script over a few times before shooting.  I honestly can't believe anyone would have read that script and gone "yeah... that's really good!".

[Ghost of Troubled Joe]

I'm going to give episode 1 the benefit of the doubt, but I seriously doubt there'll be any kind of major improvement, BBC Wales is far too arrogant at the moment to admit when they've made a huge mistake- since when has Davies "admitted" Torchwood S1 wasn't up to scratch? His interview in the Metro a few months back made it quite clear that he thought the only people who disliked Torchwood were online nerds and anyway, his TV show got 1million viewers on a digital channel, so there!

http://www.metro.co.uk/fame/interviews/article.html?in_article_id=43167&in_page_id=11

Torchwood had a mixed reception...
What do you mean, a mixed reception?

Some people hated it.
You mean among online, moaning old minnies? We got the highest digital figures the BBC ever got so, frankly, we were laughing. We're working on ways the second series can be improved, none of which has anything to do with online forums.

Series 2 had better be something pretty damn special to erase all the bad feelings I have towards the programme generally. I mean, fucking hell, "Cyberwoman"?! That alone is the worst piece of genre TV I've seen in a decade.

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

I think the fact that RTD has admitted that series one of Torchwood wasn't up to par, along with comments by Chibnall that it's going to lessen up on the sex and swearing and inject more humour in it is very promising.

Wasn't it someone on this forum who claimed that the head of BBC2 ordered that it be revamped majorly because he hated the first series?

Anyway, I'm actually quite excited about its return!

But as Mr A says, they'll need to have a massive re-think of the entire tone and concept of the show in order for it to work. That means that they have to not make Owen a cunt (easily done, I suppose) and make Ianto and Tosh interesting (probably much more difficult). And they have to have better story concepts with better scripts, which considering Chibnall's involvement, seems like a hopeful stretch too far.

Torchwood II may well be a bit better than the first series, but I can't ever imagine it being anything more than half decent at best. Shame, 'cause Captain Jack is such a good character - he deserves better than this. It's bad enough him being sidelined and underused in his last guest appearance on DW. He was sidelined for most of Torchwood series one, for God's sake.

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

I'm going to give episode 1 the benefit of the doubt, but I seriously doubt there'll be any kind of major improvement, BBC Wales is far too arrogant at the moment to admit when they've made a huge mistake- since when has Davies "admitted" Torchwood S1 wasn't up to scratch? His interview in the Metro a few months back made it quite clear that he thought the only people who disliked Torchwood were online nerds and anyway, his TV show got 1million viewers on a digital channel, so there!

Didn't he say something in DW Magazine about how he was well aware that there were problems with Torchwood that needed to be addressed and ironed out? I'm certain that he said something along those lines. But as I say, they're going to need a pretty fucking massive iron.

[Marv Orange]

I think the proof in the pudding if whether or not they still drive around in a secret organisation vehicle that has the organisations secret name emblazoned on the side with the entire secret organisations Christmas budget spent on blue fairy lights to go on it

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

Well, to be fair, at least Jack saves essential Torchwood expenses by wearing the same clothes day in day out.

Just why does he insist on dressing like a WWII officer? He's been alive for centuries: you'd think he'd like to experiment with his wardrobe now and again. 

[waste of chops]

I think the proof in the pudding if whether or not they still drive around in a secret organisation vehicle that has the organisations secret name emblazoned on the side with the entire secret organisations Christmas budget spent on blue fairy lights to go on it

samadriel's awesome Torchwoodmobile made me literally LOL in the old thread.

[Dark Sky]

  Bollocks.  Those are cosmetic issues.

  Even if you remove the awful sex and the horrifically unsympathetic and downright hateful characters you're stillleft with a number of very poorly written episodes.  The stories didn't work.  The fairies one in particular had no tension as there was nothing that could be done and what tension there was in the episode relied upon one of the characters working out what the entire audience knew : namely that Jack is immortal.  That one was particularly disappointing as it was written by the bloke from Sapphire and Steel but it showed that Chibnall cannot run a show... any decent exec producer would have worked the script over a few times before shooting.  I honestly can't believe anyone would have read that script and gone "yeah... that's really good!".

Well as I said, RTD has admitted the first series wasn't up to par as there "wasn't enough time" to develop the series properly.  Chibnall has said that there hasn't been a major revamp, but it doesn't need a MAJOR revamp, just tweaking to make it actually work. 

Characters and stories will improve anyway simply because one series is in the can and people can see what worked / what didn't work and build up from there.  It's the tone of the show which is the interesting deliberate change.  Less emphasis on sex and swearing is important because it means that instead of ratings grabbing childishness (remember all the trailers showing spurting blood and lesbian kisses?) they may actually make it a more FUN programme dealing with more interesting storylines.

As for characters...I know she's only in three episodes or something, but Doctor Who's loss of Martha is Torchwood's absolute gain.  But hopefully they will sort out the other characters as they were absolutely awful.  At least we know that Jack's gonna be cheerful this season rather than the weird "dark brooding" character they turned him into which Barrowman turned out to not be very good at.

I'm going to give episode 1 the benefit of the doubt, but I seriously doubt there'll be any kind of major improvement, BBC Wales is far too arrogant at the moment to admit when they've made a huge mistake- since when has Davies "admitted" Torchwood S1 wasn't up to scratch? His interview in the Metro a few months back made it quite clear that he thought the only people who disliked Torchwood were online nerds and anyway, his TV show got 1million viewers on a digital channel, so there!

Well in that very quotation Davies says that they are working on improvements to series two; he just laughed off the idea that they were changing things to appease a small number of online fans.  Torchwood did get high ratings and is - I believe - more popular in the US than New Who is.  Kinda hard to believe, though.

[Ghost of Troubled Joe]

Well the fundamental thing they really need to change is to not set it in Cardiff, which was a stupid idea in the first place as Cardiff is neither "dark", "wild", nor indeed "sexy". If there's a single shot in the new series of Jack standing atop a building, looking out over the particularly unspectacular Cardiff skyline, I'm afraid I'll have to put my fist through the television.

[Mister Six]

Episodic Summary of Catastrophes handled by Torchwood and their respective triggers (Series 1).

It's worse than that:

Day One: Lack of formal training for new staff leads to release of deadly sex gas killing dozens. -1pt

Commanding officer allows alien to escape and kill dozens of men because she threatened to break flask containing severed alien arm; flask broken and subsequently fixed - arm unhurt. -1pt Only reason alien knew flask was worth breaking was because commanding officer informed her of such. Nice negotiating plan, Patrick Swayze. -1pt.

Ghost Machine: Despite absense of alien threat Torchwood team struggle to solve terrestrial rape case and manage to kill one man. -1pt

Man killed because one of the team - a rapist himself - decided to go on a crusade that consisted of harassing and bullying a pensioner who's clearly already crippled by his own guilt.

Cyberwoman: Lack of proper policies in the "where we can store Cybermen" department results in one death (Japanese) -1pt

Subsequent failure to deal with a single Cyberperson by just shooting it a lot results in additional death (caucasian). Cyberperson eventually dealt with by just shooting it a lot. -1pt.

Small Worlds: Unlimited technology, authority and matching trenchcoats fail to stop some Fairies. Jack gives a child to a metaphoric paedophile. Several deaths. -1pt

Fairies allowed to take child because of some spurious claims about them having unlimited power, despite no evidence of this beyond the rantings of a deranged child. -1pt.

Out of Time: Torchwood piss about some more since the finale is 3 episodes away. Rapist/Sky Captain shipping fails to threaten earth. +1pt

Torchwood fails to understand why sticking some people in the modern day without proper debriefing might result in suicide. -1pt.

[Mr. Analytical]

Well the fundamental thing they really need to change is to not set it in Cardiff, which was a stupid idea in the first place as Cardiff is neither "dark", "wild", nor indeed "sexy". If there's a single shot in the new series of Jack standing atop a building, looking out over the particularly unspectacular Cardiff skyline, I'm afraid I'll have to put my fist through the television.

  BBC Whales at its finest, the ultimate is provincial relativism : "The only reason that London, Liverpool and Manchester have greater cultural significance than Cardiff is because they're shot well.  Jones the Camera?  break out the helicopter!"

  If they'd wanted Torchwood to be actually bleak rather than "daaaaaark" then Cardiff would have been a great place to set it.  A town whose contribution to the British cultural map is an opera house built with cash taken by the government from other areas and populated by largely out of work provincial bumpkins whose accents make them sound as though they're constantly imitating a pakistani version of the elephant man and whose language requires them to shower each other with phlegm each time they greet each other.  They'd have had half the nation slashing their wrists in despair at the end of the first episode if they'd done it right! 

[Mister Six]

Characters and stories will improve anyway simply because one series is in the can and people can see what worked / what didn't work and build up from there.

Yeah, but the problem was that what didn't work was everything, from the casual re-use of props for different purposes to the lack of an arc plot. The protagonists were either repellant or boring, and always uniformly incompetent; the setting is absurd; the relationships were astoundingly adolescent - sex is ALWAYS bad and dangerous, and being in a stable relationship is boring, apparently; the effects were subpar; the tone was uneven; the individual episodes were usually plodding and clumsy; and the "universe" made no sense (nobody believes in aliens despite the Cyber-invasion? Torchwood is a secret organisation that the police know about? They drug Gwen with amnesia pills in the first episode but leave the bouncer from the second episode alone? They don't investigate crimes, except when they do?).

I mean, they even fucked up Captain Jack, not only by turning him into a mopey Angel knock-off - which seems to have been reversed by his appearance in Who, thank god - but also by turning him into a big mystery figure instead of the audience's identification figure.

Seriously, I'm no writer and I certainly couldn't run a show, but I reckon this would have been a better way to go with it:

After escaping from the GameStation, Jack lands in modern-day Cardiff (I know, I know, but if that's a condition of getting it made...), knowing that The Doctor will have to go there at some point to refuel. While snooping around The Rift, he comes across a non-shit version of the Torchwood team having some alien crisis. He helps out, coming up with a cover story on the fly to explain why and how he knows about this stuff.

Turns out that despite the losses in the Dalek invasion, Torchwood is still active, still a huge organisation and still operating across the UK. It's also following the original conceptual remit of trying to beat MI5, etc to alien technology so that the British Empire, not the British Government, gets hold of all the gizmos. This leads to lots of awesome infiltration and con-man stuff for Jack (which was the original point of his character, remember?) after he is hired, and adds an element of danger, because they can't just tell the police or British Army to hop it every time they cross paths.

Jack is placed in a small field team of five or six members. This way the character asking all the dumb questions is one that the audience actually likes, and the focus is on him, not bleedin' Gwen. As the series progresses (or possibly just in the first episode), Jack realises how dodgy Torchwood actually is, and decides to take it down from the inside, by stockpiling alien tech as and when he can, and bringing together those who have doubts about the Torchwood system - some of whom may be moles. So you have an ongoing arc plot with lots of exciting wheels-within-wheels and subterfuge, plus monster-of-the-week investigations, plus a Torchwood whose funding and status within the intelligence community makes sense, plus a sense that this is something different rather than just Doctor Who or Sarah Jane Adventures with snogging and blood.

Posted on: January 04, 2008, 11:03:58 AM

  BBC Whales at its finest, the ultimate is provincial relativism : "The only reason that London, Liverpool and Manchester have greater cultural significance than Cardiff is because they're shot well.  Jones the Camera?  break out the helicopter!"

If they wanted to do dark and grim, they should have set it in Glasgow. At least that genuinely has a nasty image in the British subconscious.

But I supppose BBC Scotland are too busy making another shite sketch show.

[Mr. Analytical]

I see Jack as a Picaresque character.

Torchwood had been around since the Victorian era right?  Torchwood should have been a hide-bound organisation.  Lots of old rules, old ways of doing things, old morals.  You saw this a bit in the end of series 2 of Who when they were going on about the British empire despite the fact that there really is no such thing anymore.  Jack's charm and outsider status should have made him a new broom, sweeping through the organisation and its old attitudes with style and a con man's tricks, fighting aliens but also fighting the bureaucracy that is Torchwood.

I agree that the decision to draft in Jack and then create a new character to be the audience's PoV really does make no sense.  Jack should have been the PoV character and the main protagonist as opposed to the moody boss.

[Darrell]

It's never too late to post this heartwarming musical tribute to 'Ghost Machine':

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSmyzj64f18[/youtube]

I am not in it although you can hear me on cheap borrowed electronic keyboard and distressing falsetto backing vocals.