Even the ideas I thought most feeble are transformed into virtues with the benefit of great writing in Children of Earth: Day 1.
Everyone knowing about the Daleks and Cybermen has seemed to me to compromise the promising scenario of a covert organisation working to keep an unknowing public safe from an extraterrestrial threat. But in Gwen’s speech to Dr Patanjali, Russell T. Davies sold me on it totally for the first time in Torchwood or the mother series. In the trailers, the insane concept of all the children stopping seemed ridiculous (and derivative of The Christmas Invasion) but RTD made it sinister. And then there’s Jack living through the entire 20th century (let’s not mention the last two millennia) to which RTD, apparently effortlessly, added a whole new emotional dimension. Even before some Cardiff slag mooned Ianto from the triple deadlocked arsemobile I found myself actually enjoying Torchwood…
I was wary of hype. Even after being pleasantly surprised at the quality of last week’s trilogy of Radio-4-ified Torchwood Afternoon Plays, the claims of those who’d seen the National Theatre preview that it was “the best hour of Torchwood yet” left me thinking “and it could still be sh*t”. But though it had its flaws (mostly in the last 10 minutes) this is… well, let’s just say, I likes it.
