Torchwood - Sleeper

[ivyfic]

Yes, Torchwood gets the special SGA icon cause clearly there's no Geneva Convention in the Hub, either. Holy crap, show. Let's take a not even thinly veiled story about terrorists and sleeper cells and suicide bombers and show it no respect whatsoever. Who thought this was a good idea?

The Torchwood team once again showed that particular combination of poor planning and questionable ethics that seems to be their status quo. Unexplainable only slightly weird attack? Let's grab a woman off the street and interrogate her (hey, it turned Ianto on). When that doesn't work, we'll just show her around our super-secret organization. Wait--she's gathering intel? How does she know so much about Torchwood??? Could it possibly be the guided tour? And now we'll torture her with a device that killed the last test subject. Cause Captain Jack apparently subscribes to the Greg House school of diagnosis--that is, inflict as much pain as possible until things start making sense.

But what really bothered me was Gwen. Holy crap, Gwen. You do not lie to people in situations like this. You don't promise a happy ending you can't deliver. It's not compassionate, it's cruel. What Gwen is doing is making herself feel better, not making Beth feel better.
Beth: I'm not human!
Gwen: Yes you are!
Jack: Um, no.
Beth: Wait--I can have babies?
Gwen: Uh...sure! If you really want it, I'm sure you can.
Jack: Um, no.
Hope is one of the cruelest weapons in the torture arsenal, and whether Gwen is doing it intentionally or out of a deluded optimism, she's the one who changes it from an (arguably) painful but necessary investigation against an enemy to torture. Sorry. And I hate having the show pretend like she's the ethical one. Ugh. Somebody needs to loan the writers a copy of Death and the Maiden.

And Ianto's role now, apparently, is to stand around in a suit and say snappy one-liners. Cause he sure didn't do anything else this episode. He seems to be back under the sexual thrall of Jack, though--how else do you explain him running after Jack the moment Jack's clothes were marginally mussed?

ETA: And did I mention how pointlessly gratuitous this show is? Showing a guy getting repeatedly stabbed? Baby rolling into traffic? No need. X-Files managed to freak me out twice is much with half as much on-screen. It seems like the only reason for most of that is to be "edgy" and "adult" which is a piss poor reason.

In conclusion, if you don't distract me with boy kissing, I'm forced to examine the actual plotholes. So, Torchwood? Bring back the boy kissing.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Would you be happier with hot lesbian action?

I guess what I'm saying is I like it best when it's campy, which last week certainly was. It's a bad show, I'm not arguing that. I like a lot of bad shows. But given how fundamentally flawed it is, I hate it when they try to take themselves seriously cause that's no fun at all. And Torchwood has a history of gratuitous emo porn. The writers have as little restraint as those on fanfiction.net.

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

No, the type of sex doesn't bother me, it's the fact that the show claims to be about aliens and a team of experts stopping them and is actually about a bunch of sex-crazed incompetents instead. As you said, if they were simply campy all the time that would be fine. But there's enough darkness and enough occasional serious story there to suggest it should be a serious show, in which case the oversexed element doesn't work.