Oh Jilly Kitzinger, How I'm Missing Yer
Torchwood Miracle Day: The Gathering
As this episode begins we see that two months have passed since End of the Road, which is probably about as long as it took for Rex Matheson to persuade his boss that he had nothing to do with Esther and Jack’s shambolic escape. The intervening period has seen the economy slump into a depression, with the insurance companies going bust and China closing its borders. Things have reached such a pretty pass that radio stations are hiring television dramatists to read the news. Even worse, Gwen has started up as a drug runner, and this involves her usual subtle approach: ram-raid a high-street chemist, shoot the security camera, and then take your balaclava off (depression-bought headwear is often itchy) even though anyone might wander by. No doubt it’s worth it though as there’s clearly a roaring trade to be had in Rinstead Pastilles, Haliborange and Verruca Socks. I felt a twinge of pity when writer John Fay’s name came up. The brilliant Torchwood: Children of Earth – Day Four seems a very long way away just now.
Superficially similar ground is being covered by Torchwood: Miracle Day. Martial law is enforced, and instead of the children being collected as in the earlier series, now it’s the old, infirm and dying. But where the writing in Children of Earth was both horrifying and satirical – as in the famous COBRA scene – the current series picks at some interesting ideas before swamping them in bathos. One such moment was when Rhys told Gwen he’d been offered a job driving category ones: “I won’t take them to the ovens just to the camps”. The fact Gwen didn’t protest and that Rhys was even considering the job nicely demonstrated the kind of compromises that living in such a society would entail.
Unfortunately a power cut then made them so randy that suddenly having another child seemed a great idea. Why not? Maybe the kid could grow up to be a death camp driver just like his/her dad – it’s a career after all. Or perhaps they’d always liked the look of the young girl at the end of Threads and decided it would be great to have a child growing up in similar circumstances. Whatever their motives, it was a moment that nicely summed up how Miracle Day continually pulls its punches. In the same way that the characters may be living in a despotic society with a crumbling economy but at least they can still get their groceries delivered.
If the depiction of a disintegrating society wasn’t flawed enough – sending in SWAT teams to pick up old men at a time when money to finance the armed forces is dwindling – it’s the more basic plot problems that really stand out. I can see the point in moving the action forward two months, as you can then show more starkly the impact of the Great Depression (although see above), but it wasn’t exactly obvious what the main characters had been doing during that time. Gwen has been selling Germolene on street corners, and Esther has got Jack into Scotland while draining his blood and experimenting with a different shade of foundation, but what were their plans for taking on the Three Families and uncovering the mystery of The Blessing?
If Oswald Danes hadn’t appeared would they have just hung around until they gave up the mission and got jobs with Rhys as death camp drivers? It’s possible, of course, that they were waiting for Rex to come good, but as he’s previously been as useful as the proverbial marzipan dildo, and couldn’t spot an office mole if she had “I’m in league with the three families” tattooed above her permanently arched eyebrow then that was somewhat optimistic of them. How many more clues does Rex need for goodness sake? Charlotte even hesitated and looked suspicious when he asked her to e-mail him a PDF.
Things got momentarily interesting when the “Harry Bosco” concept was introduced. Bodies like the Glasgow Media Group have been looking at the use of language in the media for many years, and the how nuances of language can actually influence consumers and strengthen power structures. But at this point I was flailing hopelessly in the deluge of exposition and padding – just as Rhys was meaningfully fingering a tunnel in his beach ball the South Wales Area Troop Special Weapons and Tactics (SWATSWAT) crowd burst through the doors armed with sledgehammers to crack a nut and the main revelation was further delayed.
Even when Rhys finally revealed the significance of Buenos Aries and Shanghai, the implausibilities continued to multiply. Oswald Danes really wanted to come with them – after all, he wants to be in the final episode – but the reasons why they had to take him were barely credible. Surely they could have just buried him in a big box? If they wanted to be humane they could always have slipped him some sandwiches, a bottle of Tizer and a variety bag of Monster Munch. If spades or a suitable garden weren’t available why not retcon him like the surveillance guy across the road?
You couldn’t help but be relieved when we finally encountered The Blessing. Even Jilly Kitzinger must have welcomed possible death rather than spend another few weeks holed up in a hotel room eating the club sandwich and watching frame-by-frame coverage of the China Open snooker tournament. After yet another brief assignation (like my old dates they all end “Goodbye. We won’t meet again.”) this time with someone who made your average social networking site founder look charismatic, she at least knew she was about to see The Blessing at last.
Sadly for her she had to wait, inexplicably, for Jack and his cronies to arrive in Shanghai before she was finally taken to the generic warehouse that held the key to the whole series. On a conceptual level The Blessing reminded me of the Total Perspective Vortex from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Just as the Vortex demonstrated your exact significance in the Universe, in a similar way “The Blessing shows you to yourself”, so when she finally confronted The Blessing, I was fully expecting Jilly to say “Oh God – I wish I was still in Six Feet Under.” In the end I didn’t quite catch what she said as I was entranced by the fact that, after all the kerfuffle of the previous nine episodes, the main plot device turned out to be a giant arse crack.
Logic and sanity suggests that I really should say “Goodbye. We won’t meet again” to Torchwood. Most of the episodes of this series are so far removed from Children of Earth that I’m beginning to suspect that the scripts have been got at by Harry Bosco. And yet it’s hard to dislike a series that culminates in a Giant Arse Crack of Doom poised straining above a pipe leading to Buenos Aires. It’s a series, like its chief protagonist, that somehow never dies, that holds an audience (at least in the UK), and has given me more enjoyment in the last few episodes than I would have thought possible. Jack and his show may be getting tired, but, despite everything, I’m not sure I’m ready to say goodbye just yet.
