I've Been Watching...

Not Doctor Who this time, but Torchwood. In particular, rewatching Children of Earth.

I can't remember if I complained about this last time, but I do want to focus on one point, in the hopes that we won't be seeing this in Miracle Day. (Actually, two points, but first...)

RTD tries to tell the big story by focusing on a few key people and showing the impact on them (a not uncommon technique). To see the horror of all the kiddies being taken over, we get the reactions of government guy (who's name I've already forgotten), the daughter, and the sister. As if we're supposed to care about any of them. The government guy has already been painted as evil, the daughter is a complete nothing, and the sister is just annoyingly Welsh. You need to have characters we give a damn about in order to side with them and feel the big threat. So far, this hasn't happened in Miracle Day.

(RTD also likes to show the big picture by cutting across many, many news readers looking at the camera and talking. Probably because this is cheap, and tries to get the bigness across. Only, these are all impersonal people, so why should we care? And yes, we do have this already in Miracle Day. Oh joy.)

The other point is the padding. Because time is supposed to pass, episode two is a complete filler where Torchwood team is taken apart, and then reunited. Without that much trouble it seems. Apparently getting your hands on a large forklift and driving it into a secret government facility without anyone noticing isn't even slightly a problem. You could skip episode two and not miss a thing. And in Miracle Day, the entire first episode is... reuniting the Torchwood team. Oh happy day. Sigh.

Series One and Two were not sole RTD run productions, so had variety. But now RTD is calling the shots, and this is someone who wants to write the personal stuff and can happily flag away the science with a badly thought up sentence. It happened in Children of Earth, and is threatening the same in Miracle Day.

[END]