Pullmanary Hyper-Tension

Torchwood Miracle Day: Escape to L.A.

‘Sure thing! Hot-diggity.’

So has Gwen got a job? Does Jack pay her? She tells Rhys that she’s working when she’s in LA, so I hope there’s cash involved. I doubt she’d do it just for the pleasure of Jack having a gleg at her tits when he gets out of the lift in the Phicorp building.

Ah, Phicorp, a company so evil their logotype’s written in the Spider-man font. And they’re not the only evil ones. I don’t understand why, at least according to television, America seems so full of horrid people who somehow achieve fame and glory by appealing to the lowest aspects of human nature with vague jingoistic sentiments about how great America is. But it’s not, it’s too big a place to be unified and just, because it has far too wide a range of opinions and peoples. The curse of extreme conservatism is perhaps its greatest shame, and though exposing these views on television is brave and worthy and proud, it does occasionally make for unpalatable viewing. But even in America, could a child-rapist and killer rise to power? Could Oswald Danes really set out on what’s presumably a course to the Presidency? It’s absurd, and it’s not the only thing.

Researching this article (no, really), I learned from Bill Pullman’s Wikipedia page that he lost his sense of smell after an injury in his youth. It’s perhaps fortunate for him, given that it means he can’t detect the steaming pile of shit he’s accidentally wandered in to. He spends most of this episode mooching around sniffing towels and listening to water, and to a fan he comes across as little more than an ageing Tom Baker anecdote. And yet he’s eminently watchable, even given his quirky, affected performance. Another glance at that article reveals that this is the only thing I’ve ever seen him in, but it’s clear he’s having a whale of a time, doing something he doesn’t normally get to do, and letting it all out. It’s quite a theatrical performance, but not in a bad way, like, say, Colin Baker. There’s a great moment when he raises a baby into the air in a public appearance and the baby starts waving at the camera.

It’s been an odd series, Miracle Day. The first episode managed to set up the entire series without bothering to explain what Torchwood or any of its lead characters were, the second episode put its main actor in an aeroplane seat for an hour while his friends ripped open the floor of the plane and tried to fix stuff with whatever was to hand, in the process making itself unnervingly similar to that episode of Father Ted where Ted climbs out on the wheel of the plane to fix a fuel pipe with some sellotape. The third episode was structured as a farce, with people running around corridors and just avoiding each other when the vicar walks in (or in this case, the woman in the red coat). Hidden underneath all this fluff, there’s a genuinely interesting tale of drug companies and big business manipulating the world to sell more of their product, but it’s lathered in a foam of popcorn action and one-dimensionality. It’s as if Disney had made Edge of Darkness, and decided to put Captain Jack Sparrow in the Bob Peck role. Bits of it seem like a cartoon. Compare this with Torchwood’s magnificent Children of Earth from a year or two back, and see how triumphant the series can be at its best. That was a political thriller that happened to have aliens in. This is Buffy, without the subtext but with grown-ups. The X-Files did it twenty years ago.

Escape to L.A.‘s opening features some vague attempt at humanising the characters by having one of them say goodbye to her sister. It’s the sort of lazy writing that can be thrown together in a single scene to create a bit of personality, then instantly be forgotten about as the story kicks along. You’re left wondering: why isn’t Esther’s relationship with her sister the key focus of the story? And then – brilliantly – Esther calls the social services to come and check on her sister’s children, with the subtle suggestion of betraying her sister in the process. It’s moments like this, of twisting between the twee and the magnificent, that make Torchwood such an unbalanaced series. There’s sincerely something decent there, struggling to get out, but it’s mired in a desire for the regulars to run around and act like children. Even Rex makes a comment about Jack and Gwen – she’s Welsh, you know – coming out with children’s dialogue and behaving like the whole thing’s a game. They do, and it severely undercuts the story. As for Alexis Havins as Esther? She’s acting her socks off. Bless her.

Looking back, the only person who seems like a real character in this episode is Rex’s Dad, a scruffy criminal-type straight out of The Wire, who thinks the whole Miracle Day event is an experiment run by the Government. ‘I’ve been dying out here for fifteen years,’ he says, ‘you never once cared.’ It’s the only line delivered in the episode with real conviction. God bless you, sir.

I’ve been trying to decide whether Torchwood has anything meaningful to say about any of the subjects its glances at – or even whether it should have anything to say about them. There are some hints about the influence the media has in placing people in power, which seems topical, if nothing else; and there’s also clearly some loose desire to pull apart the pharmaceutical industry, through Phicorp (I’d be interested to know dodgy US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s view on all this, by the way). The trouble is, what could be deep investigations into the machinery of society get juxtaposed with silliness involving magic contact lenses and Eve Myles doing a comedy accent. That’s not to say these things can’t sit side-by-side, but there’s something in the nature of it when shown here that just feels askew. I come back to a word I used further up-review – unbalanced. There’s no meat here, no power. The series wants to be a brave exposé of industry and right-wing politics and Tea Party values, but it’s much easier to deliver black-suited Sunspec Assassins being sinister before they get shot… in the throoooat. Just when you think it can’t get any lower, the team manage to extract an image of someone’s retina from an iPhone camera, surely the modern-day version of that mythical ‘Enhance!’ technique that every crime show uses to develop a detailed picture of someone from a low-resolution CCTV picture.

So what’s left? I can’t quite escape the feeling that the series would be much more watchable if it were just about Oswald Danes’s ascension in the media and Dr Juarez and the medical crisis, and Jack and Gwen weren’t in it. I’d be happy to bring Rhys in instead. That said, the greatest fun is to be had watching the freckles develop on Eve Myles’ face now that she’s exposed to the sun-drenched atmosphere of the US of A. At least it distracts from her acting.

Oh, and like an early 90s BBC children’s drama (I’m thinking Watt on Earth or The Demon Headmaster) the villain seems to be a triangle on a screen. I think it’s related to the Mysterons.

‘I don’t wanna live forever… ‘specially like this.’