Torchwood: Children Of Earth: Day Five
Things definitely get much darker in the conclusion. It may seem harsh but so is reality, so an in-depth look into this kind of What If seems more complete having looked into the darker corners.
Humanity is at times disturbing and ignoring it and its possibilities doesn’t make it go away. Gwen’s observations about The Doctor make a compelling case.
The reason for the 456’s demand is incredibly shocking but again, if we can imagine time-travelling Terminators, planet-busting bombs, and phone booths that are bigger on the inside this really doesn’t seem quite so farfetched.
Frobisher’s conclusion is quite disturbing, made doubly so because Peter Capaldi’s performance was so strong.
And Jack…what can you say about Jack? Both Harkness and Bauer are from a similar cloth in that practical considerations in extreme situations always tend to lead them towards the utilitarian solution – the most good for the most people with certain moral absolutes thrown in. In the real world you’d want them in an extreme crisis but you’d never want them to be role models. You can never completely agree with them but the gift of television is that you don’t have to. It’s just fascinating the problems they face and the solutions they find, right or wrong.
Its television that posed unique, fascinating, and sometimes important questions with no straight answer but lots of ideas – let’s see America Idol do that.
No one is likely to agree with every decision in this miniseries but at the end of the day it was television that made you think and made you feel and that’s a special gift in a time of such vacuous superficiality.
Ratings slipped from the fourth episode down to 5.8 million making the most watched episode the fourth which was unquestionably the best of series. At this point I think some form of a fourth season is all but guaranteed, the only question being the form it will take but I think it is undeniable that this miniseries has raised the bar significantly for Torchwood and it finally feels as if they have hit their true stride. They’ve dropped the sex appeal they seemed to rely so heavily on during their first season and have begun to take risks and make hard choices. I can’t wait for the next chapter in this saga.
Ben Rawson-Jones of Digital Spy put it very well when he called Children of Earth “a powerful human drama, reliant not on special effects but incredible acting, direction and writing” that was a “massive success.”
What more is there to say? What more is there to do but wait for the award nominations to come rolling in? Oh, and buy the DVD or Blu-ray when available.
And fear not, Captain Jack will be back in Doctor Who later this year.
