February 8: "End of Days" (TW)

Sigh.  I suppose it was too much to hope for a decent ending to the season.

This deals with the fallout of opening the Rift last episode, and they give us a potentially interesting set-up of people from various times all showing up in modern Cardiff, bringing various diseases and things with them.  We even get some good drama coming out of it -- the Roman soldier is whatever (and why isn't he pronouncing all his /v/'s as [w]'s?), but the stuff with the Black Death is really nice.  Owen's worries about smallpox or future diseases is also worth exploring.  And at the heart of everything is Bilis, the caretaker from last time who makes a living bringing timepieces from their original eras into the 21st century and selling them as antiques (yes, just like Edward Waterfield back in "The Evil of the Daleks").  They could have gone in a lot of intriguing directions with this, and a show that was freely mixing and matching time periods could be fun.

But alas, that's not what we get.  Instead we get various people having visions of dead/missing loved ones telling them to open the Rift, but rather than attempt to work out what it all means or tell anyone about them, they just spend their time yelling at each other and not listening at all -- and apparently they're all more willing to listen to inexplicable visions than their leader.  So much for loyalty.  The way Owen shoots Jack is a bit shocking (and he gets a good line: "I'm sick of people doubting me"), but as we know he can't die it ultimately feels more convenient than anything else.

Jack prepares to confront Abaddon. ("End of Days") ©BBC

Look, all of this is just about OK.  The interpersonal dynamics among the team take significant steps backwards (all the yelling, remember -- and then there's Gwen's decision to tase Rhys and lock him in a filthy Torchwood cell), but at least there's some semblance of drama, even if some of it feels oddly manufactured -- in particular, Bilis's murder of Rhys (who's still the best character on the show) looks designed to make Gwen act than anything else.  But then, once they decide to open the Rift (which sends all the anachronisms back, apparently), things take a left turn into Stupidland.  Apparently, there's a giant crap CGI beast called Abaddon living under the Rift since "before time" who is the son of the "Great Beast" (so they're clearly trying to tie this in with "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit" for no obviously good reason), whose very shadow kills anyone it touches, and opening the Rift unleashed it.  How to stop it?  Make Captain Jack keep dying until Abaddon can't take it anymore.  "If Abaddon is the bringer of death, let's see how he does with me," Jack says. "If he feeds on life, then I'm an all-you-can-eat buffet."  Even though no one's mentioned that Abaddon feeds on life, or that he uses his shadow to feed, or that too much life will kill him, or that Jack's "can't die" ability will actually have any effect whatsoever.  Yeeeaaahhh...  There comes a point where you just have to accept that this isn't going to make any sense at all and to just go with it.  (Although, if we're going to discuss things that make no sense... why is Rhys back alive at the end of this?  He wasn't killed by an anachronism, he was stabbed in the gut by Bilis.  Why was that sufficiently Rift-y to be undone?)

But yeah, Jack saves the day (incredibly quickly, actually -- they brought up Abaddon just to take care of him in the next scene) and eventually comes back to life -- Tosh actually only says it's been "days" since he died and not actually "three days", but you get the idea -- just in time for an end-of-season cliffhanger: that severed hand starts beeping and bubbling, and then we hear the TARDIS materializing.  Next thing we know, Jack has disappeared.  Guess we'll have to wait for Doctor Who to find out what happens there.

This episode isn't very good, sad to say.  It could have been a lot more interesting than what it was, but instead a lot of potential was squandered in favor of a resolution with a terrible effect.  (Seriously, Abaddon is really poor-looking -- usually visual effects company The Mill is much better at this sort of thing.)  But while "End of Days" is really dumb, bordering on nonsensical, at least it's not offensively dumb.  That might make it Chris Chibnall's best script yet.

That brings an end to Torchwood's first series, and to be brutally honest, it hasn't been a very good run.  The scripts started out really really bad, and while things got a lot better by the end of the series, it wasn't enough to make this show really worthwhile.  Part of the problem lies in the characterization of the main characters.  I'm not sure why they thought it was a good idea to try and systematically make every member of Torchwood an unlikeable sod, but they did.  Gwen suffers particularly because of this, and while Owen's character improves greatly over the course of this first year, he's still kind of a dick.  But the biggest problem might be Captain Jack.  This isn't to cast aspersions on John Barrowman, who plays the character he's been given (and who gives the lines a twinkle here and there that they sorely need), but rather on Torchwood's conception of the character.  The reason Jack was so popular on Doctor Who was that he was a charming rogue who nevertheless was totally loyal to the Doctor.  Here they've turned him into a brooding, tragic character for some reason -- as if what we really wanted was John Barrowman doing his version of Buffy's Angel.

The ratings were good enough that Torchwood was renewed for a second series (and a shift from BBC Three to BBC Two), but it's hard to shake the feeling that they shouldn't have bothered.  The saving grace is that it does start to look as if they know what they're doing by the end of this series; if they stay on this trajectory Torchwood might become worthwhile.  But as is, it's sadly not really worth your time.

(Still, if you want to be cheered up after this, you can pull out your Ultimate Foe DVD and watch a young Chris Chibnall complain about The Trial of a Time Lord being too formulaic and clichéd on the "Open Air" special feature.  It's oddly satisfying, knowing he'd later be in charge of this.)