So it's that time again, where I abandon the strange and often morose wonderings of my blogs, and get down to something specific...
It's Review Time!!
Torchwood: Children of Earth - Part One
The first episode of this brave new structure for Torchwood worked astoundingly well, in this reviewers humble opinion, restoring a lot of faith in the writings of Russel T Davies when he doesn't try to add too much "child humour", as sometimes occurs in Doctor Who.
Starting off with the first freeze of the children, and showing us around the people we would encounter, before we knew any of them had connections to the story was a fabulous opening, and I didn't miss the "Stupidly overwrought and pointlessly dramatic Torchwood Opening voiceover"(TM) at all....
After I watched this episode I had to go and have a bath.... no wait, that sounds wrong. It's not that it made me feel dirty or anything... No, this is all wrong. I'm going to start this paragraph again, do you mind? If you do, tough. Write to someone who cares :P
I had to stop and think for a while after watching this episode, and I still don't really know how to review it, because it's so obviously the first act of a five act drama and an awful lot of it was setup. It was nice giving the characters the space to breath, and I didn't realise how slowly it was moving until I happened to look at the clock during Ianto's conversation with his Sister, and realised we were over half way through the episode!
The family connections were well done, and it was nice to see some backstory for Jack and Ianto, rather than Gwen (being as we know most things about her already!). Jack has a daughter - not overly surprising, but I did like the reason she doesn't like to see him...
Rhys coming up with the realisation that the timings were around British times was nice, and showed how he is slowly becoming involved more in the teams work, and there was some brilliant dialogue, not least "Have you gone bender?" :)
The Westminster elements were well done, tense, not giving too much away about the alien plot, and the pieces were carefully being wrangled into place, which is obviously much easier to do in the telling of one five-hour story.
I didn't see the betrayal of Rupesh coming, which worked as a nice twist, and the whole build up to the cliffhanger was FANTASTIC... with the alien plot elements and the imminent destruction of the hub beautifully intercut with each other.
Minor quibble with the cliffhanger is that we know they are not going to kill Ianto or Jack off, as they're already down to three leads! But even so, it was good, and the "next time" trailer was well edited, not showing Ianto at all (I don't think), and just showing a screaming burned body (which I assume is Jack..).
On the whole, I liked it a lot, and it felt good to have the team back :)
So far - 8.5/10
Let's see how tomorrows goes.
Except I'll be at work till late. So that review might not go up till Wednesday...
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