SPOILERS: If you
haven’t seen Torchwood: Miracle Day, just don’t.
I love Doctor Who. As a child I used to watch the Fourth and
Fifth Doctors’ adventures on PBS. When the 1995 Fox TV movie came out I tuned
in with glee. And when the 2005 series returned to the BBC, I watched every
episode and have continued to watch up to the present. So when Doctor Who spun
off the series Torchwood, starring Captain Jack Harkness, I felt like I was
just getting even more of what I loved. Then I saw Miracle Day. I almost
stopped watching Doctor Who because of that series.
Here’s a little backstory for you. Captain Jack Harkness is
a time traveller from the 51st century. He used to be a Time Agent
(some sort of law enforcement officer) but has since become a con artist. He
runs into the Doctor and Rose during World War II and for a while travels with
them until he is left for dead fighting Daleks. Miraculously resurrected by
Rose (powered by the Tardis matrix) he ends up back on earth leading the
Torchwood team in Cardiff, Wales. Torchwood is a secret British organization
investigating alien life on earth. It is based in Cardiff, because apparently
Cardiff is built on top of a rift in space and time and all sorts of odd things
wash up in that town (it of course has nothing to do with the fact that the
Doctor Who offices are based there). For two seasons, the Torchwood team
investigated various alien occurrences on earth, giving a slightly more adult
take on the world of Doctor Who (lot of sex). Sadly the show didn’t gain as
much fanlove as Doctor Who and was only able to squeeze out another half season
(the six episode titled Children of Earth storyline) before it was shut down.
This is where the story of Miracle Day begins. Because the
BBC no longer wished to produce Torchwood, in steps Starz (an American cable
network). Starz decides to finance a series of Torchwood, subtitled Miracle
Day. The problem is that by the end of Children of Earth, only two members of
the Torchwood team are even still alive. The immortal Captain Jack (oh yeah,
forgot to mention that, he can’t die because of what Rose did to him) and Gwen
Cooper who was our window into the team initially when she was recruited in
season one. So since only two members of the team are still alive, a whole
bunch of new characters are cast. Also, the bulk of the show is shot in America
as opposed to England. So really, the show has very little feel to the original
Torchwood.
Besides introducing so many new characters to the show,
sadly those characters never lead into anything interesting. We meet a child
killer who was supposed to be executed the day the Miracle happened and so he
survived. As he goes on to became a media celebrity we as the audience suspect
some great revelation will be made about his character that he is somehow a
devious mastermind. But no, nothing pays off with him and he is unnecessarily
crammed into the finale though he has no reason to be there. There is also a PR
woman who seems to be everywhere our heroes are. Again, there is the suggestion
that she is more than she appears to be, but this suspicion never pays off and
she ends up just being there.
There is also a problem with the logic of the series.
Straight up at the beginning of the series we are told that Jack’s blood IS NOT
behind the miracle. In fact Jack’s blood has absolutely nothing to do with his
immortality. He became immortal at the end of Doctor Who Series 1 in 2005 when
Rose resurrected him using the Time Vortex she absorbed from the TARDIS. This
made Jack a living fixed point in time, which we learn in Series Three from The
Doctor himself. It has nothing to do with Jack’s biology. And yet at the end of
the series (which honestly I think was written on a cocktail napkin one night
when the writers realized they needed to end this shit) it is revealed that
yes, it is indeed Jack’s blood that was used to cause the miracle. They poured
his blood in a giant rock vagina that runs through the earth from Beijing to
Rio. And then they poured his now mortal blood into the giant rock vagina and
that fixed everything. Completely ignoring all the conspiracies about evil drug
companies and weird mystery characters, and instead just showing a family of
evil people mucking about. |
| What I wish I was doing instead of watching this. |
No fiction is perfect. There are flaws in everything. But if
the story can’t be interesting enough to make me ignore the flaws then you
might as well just pack it up and go home. While I find it highly doubtful, I
hope that Torchwood can one day come back if only to redeem itself from this
travesty. I am actually going to actively ignore BBC America just so I can
avoid this show rerunning on it.
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