Torchwood

Recently the BBC started showing a programme called Torchwood. It's a spin-off of Dr. Who, in that the name is an anagram of it, and it stars one of the companions from the 2005 series of it. It is based on the activities of a bunch of agents from the top-secret agency of Torchwood, who operate seemingly outside of the law, dealing with aliens and alien artifacts. For some reason, they are based in Cardiff (the actual reason being that it is filmed by BBC Wales, but the plot reason being that there is some kind of space/time rift there).

It's had some bad reviews (by critics who gave it bad reviews simple because it is a Dr. Who spin-off), but I've thought it very good, and so have most people that I know. It's like Dr. Who for grown ups. Dr. Who without time travel, but with plenty of gore, some swearing and some lesbians. A good mix, I feel.

Until this week, when there was a plot so ludicrous that I almost found myself laughing.

The plot centered around an alien glove that had the power to bring dead people back to life, albeit for only thirty seconds or so. Fair enough, that's an interesting idea.

It then went on to show us that there was a psychopath on the loose who was murdering people in a grizzly way, painting the word Torchwood in his victims' blood. Now there's a link. Some DNA analysis revealed he had been given their "amnesia pill", which they give to those who find out about Torchwood and Torchwood would rather they forget all about it. Kind of like the "flashy thing" in Men In Black.

Some deeper digging revealed that an old team-member - who killed herself in the first episode by shooting herself in the head - was somehow connected to all this.

So they bought her back to life with the glove. Only she didn't just last thirty seconds. She stayed alive. Spooky.

But then it went downhill. For starters, the dead-but-now-alive woman was shown eating and drinking. She had killed herself by blasting herself with a gun, from under her chin. Surely eating and drinking, yet alone talking, is not really going to happen? Her tongue must have been obliterated, along with most of her mouth and throat. Yet, it was all Ok.

Some "clever" analysis revealed that she was still alive as she was drawing energy from the one who used the glove to bring her back to life. The one who had used the glove was slowly developing a gun-shot wound to the head. Kind of like sympathy pains in pregnancy, I suppose. But dead-but-now-alive woman had disappeared with the one-who-held-the-glove and managed to lock down the entire Torchwood building, cutting all the power, so nobody could get out to stop her.

Then, it was somehow worked out that she had planned all this whilst she was still alive. She had given the psychopath the amnesia pill every week for two years, meaning that he became a bit dependant on it, and when he couldn't get it it would turn him mad at the mention of the word Torchwood. She had then "programmed" him to recite a specific bit of poetry and somehow tied this poetry to a voice-recognition system that locked down the Torchwood building and killed the power. She had also known that somebody would work out how to use the glove, and would bring her back with it, and that she would defy all previous evidence and stay alive, at the expense of the glove user, despite this never happening before.

So the simple question is: Why go to all that bother. Why not just NOT kill yourself in the first place? Not to mention the fact that such a far-fetched plan with so many variables is almost bound to fail (ok, it didn't, but that wouldn't make a TV programme).

There were then a couple of other sillies; they had worked out that the psychopath had caused the lockdown by speaking poetry (an amazing act of deduction that would have Sherlock Holmes gasping aloud), and reckoned another bit of poetry by the same author would reverse it. They tried but it wasn't working, so one of the team had the revelation of "maybe if words caused it, numbers would reverse it", so they tried the ISBN number of the book. Of course it didn't work, because all the power was off as part of the lockdown. How they didn't realise this when reading out all the previous poetry, I don't know, especially given their amazing powers of thought. So the "computer-whizz" reckoned that it might work typing it on the keyboard. "But the power's out" said one, although why he didn't come up with this argument for the poetry recital I don't know. "Ah, " said the whizz, "there's probably enough left in the membranes of the computer keyboards for it to work."

??? Keyboards need power. They also need computers to decode the keystrokes. They didn't have those. But it worked anyway and they were able to effect their pursuit of dead-but-not-dead woman, and glove-holding woman, whom dead-but-not-dead woman had taken hostage.

They pursued them via the tracking device on glove-holding woman's car. It was pitch-black. "How long has glove-holding woman got left before she dies?" asked the boss. "A few minutes, no more." replied the team doctor and ellicit love-interest for glove-holding woman.

A few minutes. Yet, when they arrived at their destination, it had gone from being pitch-black to bright daylight. This was a passing of at least a couple of hours.

So boss-man shot dead-but-not-dead woman. A few times. But she couldn't die. Why he didn't shoot her fifty times in the head, pulverising her to pieces is not explained. You might be alive, but you're going to look pretty stupid walking around like that, love.

Anyway, destroying the glove sorted it all out, but by that point I was so fed up with the ridiculous plot and the continuation errors that I'd stopped caring.

I hope next weeks' is better.