(no subject)

[ivyfic]

I had an epiphany yesterday: Torchwood wants to be the sci fi version of Criminal Minds. No, really. Criminal Minds is a procedural about profilers and serial killers, but it's also about what this line of work does to these people. It's about how it psychologically damages them, isolates them from the rest of the world, destroys their outside relationships, and forces them to rely more and more on just each other for everything.

Torchwood is trying to do the same thing, especially in the first season--show how the work damages and isolates the characters. But where Criminal Minds manages to pull this off in an authentic and realistic way, Torchwood...not so much. And while Torchwood has no problem killing its characters to prove the harshness of this world, Criminal Minds, rather than killing them, has no problem taking characters we like and having them go through emotional breakdowns that turn them into people we no longer like or admire. I think that shows the harshness of the world far more than martyring the character, because it destroys the character more completely.

So, yes, I think Torchwood wishes it were Criminal Minds. And let's face it, John Barrowman is no Mandy Patinkin.

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I guess? I dunno, the difference is that the Torchwood folk are all emotional children. Even if you wank it, as you've admirably just tried to do, they're still irresponsible people and that you cannot dismiss by saying they have an unpleasant job that forces them to look at, as Suzie said, the shit of the universe. Frankly, you wouldn't know it that any of them besides her thought as much, given how much fun they seem to have with their job. If this point really was to be made, it would have been. A long time ago.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

What I mean is, this is what the creators have said Torchwood is about. I know I've seen behind the scenes Torchwood stuff where RTD talks about how he wanted to show how the job isolated these people and forced them to depend on each other, etc. So now I'm watching Criminal Minds like, wow. This is what it looks like when they actually pull that off.

I have no CM icon, so this will have to do.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see. It's the age-old question of what matters: authorial intent or audience impression. You know where I come down on that, so I'm still rolling my eyes at RTD on this one.

Oddly, I don't think that Criminal Minds is one of those many, many procedurals my mother watches. I wonder if that's because it does manage to get a lot more disturbing than your average show.