{"id":609,"date":"2009-08-02T10:27:13","date_gmt":"2009-08-02T18:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=609"},"modified":"2009-08-02T10:30:39","modified_gmt":"2009-08-02T18:30:39","slug":"torchica-syndrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=609","title":{"rendered":"Torchica Syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently watched the new season of Torchwood<\/em>:\u00a0 “Children of Earth”, a five-hour single-thread miniseries, as opposed to the more numerous standalone eps of previous years.\u00a0 I’ve never been a huge Torchwood<\/em> fan.\u00a0 Creator Russ Davies notoriously refered to it as “Doctor Who<\/em> for grown-ups”, but it wasn’t, not really; it was just Doctor Who<\/em> with a lot of implicit gay sex.\u00a0 And while, yes, it was nice to see the whole gay\/bi\/interspecies thing played not only as perfectly cool but as essentially unremarkable<\/em>, that didn’t make up for the generally lame, technobabbly sf elements so reminiscent of shows from Who<\/em> to Voyager<\/em>.\u00a0 Thanks for the gender tune-up, Russ: next, think you could maybe hire someone with at least a rudimentary knowledge of science<\/em>?<\/p>\n

So I started watching this new season with low expectations, but nothing better to do.\u00a0 And the bastards hit me in the gut with what might be the most nihilistic, creepy, and adult<\/em> vision of first-contact I’ve ever seen on series television.\u00a0 They did it by focusing not on science, but on politics<\/em>.\u00a0 For four and a half hours they had me wondering if I’d found my new Galactica.<\/p>\n

And then in that final half hour, they proved that I had.\u00a0 By totally fucking up the ending.<\/p>\n

First the good stuff \u00a0(listed, for those who’ve yet to see the show, in a nice white font that can only be read via text selection):\u00a0 A genuinely creepy, <\/span>alien<\/span><\/em> first-contact experience, almost reminiscent of John Wyndham.\u00a0 Endless realpolitick jockeying behind-the-scenes; hapless civil servants forced to the front lines because none of the actual ministers want to be held responsible if things go south.\u00a0 An arrogant US presence that shoves to the front of the line and takes over not because the Brits are pussies, but because the Brits realize that in acting without ratification, the US will make a most convenient scapegoat when the dust settles.\u00a0 And finally, when the nature of the alien demand is fully understood\u2014 they want ten percent of Earth’s child population as a “gift”\u2014 the speed with which the backroom dealing goes from outraged refusal to haggling to, inevitably, an understanding that the children of everyone sitting around this table will be “exempt”. From there it’s just a small step to deciding how the “gifts” will be selected from the rest of the population:\u00a0 “And if we can’t identify the lowest-achieving ten percent of this country’s children, then what are the School-League Tables for?” <\/span>This is powerful stuff, and there are no easy answers.\u00a0 Give Davies that much: the people who die, stay dead, and some of those deaths are downright pointless (I mean that in a good way).\u00a0 He doesn’t use idiotic technobabble to shoehorn a happy ending onto the proceedings.<\/p>\n

But he does<\/em> use technobabble\u2014 senseless, absurd, out-of-the-blue technobabble.\u00a0 It would be an unremarkable resolution to any episode of latter-day Star Trek<\/em>\u2014 hell, it would be an unremarkable resolution to any ep from previous seasons of Torchwood<\/em>\u2014 but when you’ve spent four and a half hours raising the bar, par-for-the-course becomes outright betrayal.\u00a0 And all that technophilic gibberish is used to justify an end game that makes the series finale of Enterprise<\/em> look strong.\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 The aliens are advanced enough to flit around the universe on beams of light, to hack the brains of billions of children to make them chant their mantras on command, and they’re vulnerable to that<\/em>?\u00a0 What is this, fucking Signs<\/em>?\u00a0 Why don’t you just reverse the polarity<\/em> while you’re at it?<\/p>\n

Maybe Signs<\/em> isn’t the best example.\u00a0 Because there’s this other show<\/a> out there that also raised the bar, and expectations with it.\u00a0 A show that led me along for four glorious years, gladly overlooking the wobbly bits, because they were so obviously, so lovingly building a mystery\u2014 doling out clues, letting us glimpse bits of the jigsaw\u2014 only to spit in our faces at the end and tell us the mystery didn’t even matter because it was “all about the characters”.\u00a0 As though you can have plot or<\/em> people, but not both.\u00a0 As though narrative rigor is somehow the enemy of good drama.<\/p>\n

I sense a pattern: 95% front-loaded genius, blown in the final stretch.\u00a0 Genius, in both cases, at least partly because the writers invested adult character development into a genre notoriously wanting for it.\u00a0 Blown\u2014 in both cases\u2014 because they forgot that adult characters were necessary but not sufficient.\u00a0 Blown because they didn’t care about narrative logic.<\/p>\n

Fellow mammals, I hereby coin the term Torchica Syndrome<\/em>.<\/p>\n

You may reasonably point out that two case studies doesn’t comprise a “pattern”.\u00a0 You can’t even derive a standard deviation without at least N=3.\u00a0 So if you pushed me, I’d add X-Files<\/em> to the list.\u00a0 But Carter didn’t wait for the very end to fuck up.\u00a0 He got started on that years<\/em> early.<\/p>\n

Besides, as an old buddy of mine is fond of pointing out, the best regressions are always drawn between two points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently watched the new season of Torchwood:\u00a0 “Children of Earth”, a five-hour single-thread miniseries, as opposed to the more numerous standalone eps of previous years.\u00a0 I’ve never been a huge Torchwood fan.\u00a0 Creator Russ Davies notoriously refered to it as “Doctor Who for grown-ups”, but it wasn’t, not really; it was just Doctor Who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=609"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":615,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609\/revisions\/615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}