Young and Full of Fluff

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.