Miracle Day

This is something I posted on my blog on Tumblr back in June.

On Monday, I had a very exciting day for a Doctor Who fan, because I went to see the newTorchwood. It’s still at least a couple of weeks before the series starts on TV, but on Monday I went to see the premier at the British Film Institute. Don’t worry there will be no spoilers or such in this blog. Just my thoughts and some information about the general story that’s all ready in the public domain via all the official channels.

It was at the British Film Institute on the south bank, which is all very lovely and quite posh, right next to one of my favourite places, the national theatre. It was all very swish. I took my luxuriously soft, opulent leg-roomed reclining! seat in the cinema and felt that my grey sodden hoodie, Monty Python T-Shirt and frayed jeans that were wet around the bottom where I’d stood in a puddle on the way in might be a tad under dressed for the occasion. Slowly around me the cinema filled up with a nice mix of nerds and delightful sci-fi weirdoes. Some of these people looked like the kind of people who were far too obsessed withTorchwood, I looked around thinking I must be one of the most normal and sane in the ro…WOAH!! Is that Tom Spilsbury the editor of Doctor Who magazine!! HOW EXCITING!! After a while, spent trying to spot the journalists I recognised from geeky publications the real excitement started as Russell T Davies walked into the room and headed up towards his seat. As we all sat watching Russell walk up the aisle, there was a sudden, flamboyantly loud “WOOO!” that made everyone jump and sit straight and even the back of the reclining chairs straightened up and tensed. Barrowman was in the room. All previous conversations were drowned out by loud, camp innuendo. Once the whole cast had taken their reserved seats and the lady in front of me had positioned her head in the way of the screen, a man came on stage and encouraged us all to blog about it and tell our friends but not to post any spoilers. So I am following his instructions to the letter - these blogs haven’t turned out quite as revolutionary as I would have hoped.

The big news of Torchwood series 4 is that it’s being co-produced with Starz, an American TV network and filmed partly (official line)/mostly (actual line) in the US. Naturally, all us fans who’ve been with the show since series 1 are worried it’s going to be all Americanised and going after new fans at the expense of all of us. Seeing all the promotional stuff released so far, you could certainly find yourself worrying about this. But then all the trailers on youtube are American so they’re bound to be full of the stuff that they like over there, and of course explosions and guns make for exciting fast paced trailers with deafening tense music, more than the truth of the human condition does. It’s really irritating that Starz keep calling it a “Starz original series,” as if they came up with the idea. When, in fact, the BBC came up with the idea and they’re just paying some money to make the fourth series. Annoyingly – very annoyingly, actually making me almost as angry as when I find out UK Gold have put two breaks in one episode of Fawlty Towers WTF? It’s half an hour! – it’s being shown in America before the UK. They’re literally putting the American audience before us. Which is just cruel to the fans who have loved this show since day one – and by day one, I mean the episode called ‘day one’ in the first series – yes we stuck with Torchwood even through a shite episode like that and now they’re showing it to other people first. What a betrayal! Though, to be fair, scheduling is the job of someone at BBC One not the Torchwood people.

In terms of the content, it is a bit Americanised. There’s no getting around it. But good Americanised. To use my comparison from last week, it’s True Blood style American drama, rather than Vampire Diaries American nonsense. It benefits the show in that they have a bigger budget this series, which means they can do big set pieces with epic explosions, some awesome stunts and even a couple of helicopter stunts in episode one. As well – little known but interesting fact – America is quite big and so setting a show both there and in the UK makes the situation feel genuinely world-wide, unlike in Children Of Earth where we just had to do with being told it was happening everywhere as Ianto read a list of countries off a screen, but the furthest we got from Wales then was England (despite what the Welsh nationalists say and loudly sing about, there’s not that much of a difference). The opening episode is fairly evenly split between the US and Wales, and although notably all the big plot developments happen in America, Wales more than makes up for it with some character stuff with Gwen and Rhys at home which are easily the best bits and by the way Russell, would make an excellent sitcom, employ me please!

All the shows new characters are American. That’s not as annoying as it sounds though because quite early into it you love them all. First up is Esther Drummond, a sexy young CIA agent who, while everyone else investigates “Miracle Day,” is still obsessed by getting to the bottom of the Torchwood mystery. She’s independent, a bit naive and we like her straight away. Her role is basically the same as Gwen’s was back in the first episode of series 1, she’s the American viewer’s way to understand Torchwood, the one that goes “Sorry what?” when a bit of plot or back story needs to be quickly explained and is basically ‘the normal one.’ Then there’s Rex, another CIA agent and the character who most quickly became my favourite. His escape from hospital and journey to Wales is the highlight of the episode, a very funny scene, that does what Torchwood does best, makes us laugh out loud even when the story is very dark. Speaking of dark, the other new character is Oswald Danes played by Bill Pullman, a convicted paedophile and child murderer (Danes not Pullman). I won’t spoil anything for you, but will just say, his performance is chilling and when he’s on screen, you honestly feel uncomfortable as if you’re in the same room as him. Though on Monday I was in the same room as him, so… And of course Jack, Gwen, Rhys and PC Andy are all as brilliant as ever.

Like Children Of Earth, Miracle Day has a story that runs all through the series. One day, everybody on Earth stops dying. People still get old, still get injured and ill, but they just don’t die. It’s the story of how mankind copes with that. Where do you start investigating what caused that? How will earth cope with the population boom? There are no aliens in the first episode (though Russell assures us there will be later), it’s mainly about how humans react, but then Torchwood is at its best when it’s like that. Back in the first series, the best episodes were Random Shoes and Out Of Time which had no aliens in. And Miracle Day doesn’t need them quite yet, there’s enough running about, excitement, explosions, comedy, gore, overblown awesome helicopter stunts, and plot/character development to entertain us. The idea behind the series is really interesting and has lots of implications for humanity so why throw aliens in just now?

Like Children Of Earth episode one works as a great first ever episode if you’ve never seenTorchwood before, but relax fans they haven’t ignored everything that’s gone before. There’s some nice little references back to the past and you’re not going to spend much time going “God, we know all this! They said it in the first series!” because Russell is great at getting exposition in without disrupting the story. The whole Miracle Day thing is bought in, in the very first scene – an execution – which is quite intense and instantly hooks you.

As John Barrowman said in the Q&A afterwards, the BBC is known worldwide for its quality so they would never do anything that would jeopardise that, and they’d never do anything that would alienate the original fans and on the basis of this first episode I think I’ll like it. Just don’t watch the “coming soon…” trailer at the end, I don’t know if that was done for our benefit, but it’s like 4 minutes long, too much!