These are your favourite things

I undertook last night to defend Torchwood against its critics. Having seen last night's episode I'm less enthusiastic about this task than I was - about the kindest thing that could be said about episode 3 is that it was a load of old tosh. Still, I feel much more kindly disposed towards the series than Justin or Dave - and some of their criticisms strike me as not so much unfair as irrelevant.

I'll set the scene with a couple of Russell T. Davies' earlier hits.

DOCTOR: Look at these people, these human beings, consider their potential. From the day they arrive on this planet and blinking, step into the sun, there is more to see than can ever be seen, more to do... no, hold on... sorry, that's the Lion King... but the point still stands!

HOMELESS MAN: Big Issue?
VINCE: Yes, it is! Unrequited love - it never has to grow old and it never has to die!

A lot of Davies's dialogue - a lot of his best dialogue - is like this: elaborate, tasteless and entirely unbelievable, but at the same time moving, funny and enthusiastic.

Especially enthusiastic. Davies's imaginative world has three consistent features, all of which play in the direction of upbeat. There’s faith: faith in love and desire (which are seldom far apart); faith in emotions, and letting them out and acting on them; and ultimately an optimistic faith in people. Nothing is more characteristic of Davies than his setting a vision of the end of the world, in the eponymous Doctor Who episode, five billion years in the future:

DOCTOR: You lot, you spend all your time thinking about dying, like you're going to get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming, or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible. Like maybe you survive.

Then there’s sex. For Davies there’s always sex - he’s described it as the single most basic plot driver, whatever the plot is. The promise that Torchwood delivers on (or at least promises to deliver on) was made by Doctor Who as long ago as Captain Jack’s first appearance, and as recently as the Doctor’s parting with Rose. (And remember the Doctor and Rose tumbling out of the Tardis into Victorian Scotland? Why were they so unsteady on their feet - and why were they giggling so much?)

The third key element of Davies’s vision - and the one which seems to have given Dave and Justin the most trouble - goes back, I think, to Davies’s early days as a screenwriter for children’s TV. It’s a quality which Torchwood and Doctor Who share with Buffy and Serenity but not with Star Trek, let alone Star Wars. It’s a kind of unencumbered, disrespectful, not-quite-adult lightness, flippancy even. This is partly about the dialogue - you don’t ask whether a line is credible, you ask whether it sounds good in performance - but it also goes deeper, to the level of character. You don’t say, What does the willingness to do this say about Character X? or How will Character X handle the consequences? You say, Would Character X do this? What about you - would you? What about if you could get away with it, would you then? The characters aren’t burdened with foresight or moral reflection, and the writing doesn’t take up the slack with foreshadowing or ominous sound effects. They do what they do, and the consequences come along later to bite them - or not, as it suits the plot. And what they do is what you would do, if you weren’t too inhibited, too boring, too grown-up. I felt quite comfortable with this element of Torchwood - or rather, I wasn’t consciously aware of it - until I read Dave’s comment

The writing team has a low opinion of their creation’s integrity; three out of six are office thieves.

and Justin’s:

A member of the Torchwood team is revealed (in a *hilarious* scene) in the opening episode as a bisexual rapist who traps his victims using an alien aftershave he’s borrowed from work that makes him irresistible.

Office thieves? Rapist? They borrow stuff from work (including the said alien atomiser which induces immediate desire in anyone who gets a whiff). Sure, they’ve been told not to do it - but with stuff like that lying around, well, you would, wouldn’t you?

Youth, sex and optimism: the trio embodied in Queer as Folk in under-age Nathan, amoral Stuart and the eternally hopeful Vince, and subsequently rolled into one in David Tennant’s Casanova, John Barrowman’s Jack Harkness and (most strikingly) Tennant’s Doctor. This isn’t a world where gains are wiped out by their cost, where dilemmas are unresolvable or where darkness means more than the absence of light. It’s a bright and mostly beautiful world, where external threats needs to be resisted because people matter - and people matter because of their capacity to love. It’s also a world brought to us in a hectic patchwork of action scenes, character development, horror, plot exposition, character-based comedy, backstory exposition, beautiful camerawork and moments of calm, still wonder.

It’s not Our Friends in the North; it’s not even ER. It’s not trying to be. But what it does, it does well. At its worst it’s tosh (albeit beautifully-executed tosh), but at its best it’s good.

Update 31/10

Whoa, comments! Sod the politics (and the music), Whoblogging is obviously the way to go.

There's some interesting stuff coming out. Jonn:

"So far the pattern seems to be that a) the Torchwood team have moral compasses that are spinning wildly; b) Gwen is already getting corrupted by it all (look at the shooting range scene); c) Jack isn't nearly as concerned about these missteps as he should be
...
but I trust the moral grey area stuff to be going somewhere. In fact I suspect it's what the show is going to be all about."

biscit:

"Torchwood are supposed to be acting in humankind's best interests- they keep a lid on things because others can't be trusted. But the thing is can they? This isn't subtle extrapolating, the question is more or less baldly asked by Gwen, a policewoman brought in to be the team's moral compass.

This is a post watershed show, there is scope for the central characters to be devious and amoral."

A couple of preliminary thoughts. Firstly, I think RTD is a genuinely amoral writer, partly because he sees morality as anti-sex and partly because he likes people. In other words, I think he'd argue that if you just wind people up and let them go it'll work out for the best, probably, for most people - and that even if it doesn't always work out well it's still a better alternative than trying to control them. So I don't think an RTD character is ever going to be riven with self-doubt - or if they are they'll probably grow out of it (cf. Vince). Secondly, there's a question of genre (and in this respect I stand by the comparison with Buffy); you could even say that a basic character makeup of looking for fun and acting without forethought (but learning from the consequences) is a genre convention for this kind of drama.

That said, even I found the shooting-range scene hard to take. I haven't seen lethal violence made to look so attractive since the Matrix - and even that didn't make it look so sexy.

So, I dunno. Two basic possibilities, I suppose. Perhaps it really is just the Double-Deckers with added sex and guns, in which case I'd reluctantly concede that RTD may have pushed the young/sexy/optimistic thing a bit too far into amorality - and amoral nastiness at that. Or perhaps there's some dark stuff coming, but it's not really being foreshadowed - which would fit with the lack of overt morality and the "act first, reflect later" thing. (Let's not forget, the first episode included a character who'd become a serial killer for the love of Torchwood - and who killed herself onscreen. That's pretty dark.)

The big question for me is what they're going to do with Captain Jack - the second and third episodes have suggested that he's not the best person to look after the kids he's surrounded himself with, what with being an amoral bisexual seducer, but also that he's so damn attractive that you probably wouldn't care. Gwen's relationship with her partner - who's been laboriously established as a boring old Welsh spud - is going to be one to watch, I think.

One last update 2/11

It occurred to me today - not that I'm brooding over this obsessively or anything - that the key to Captain Jack may be that odd scene with Gwen where he told her that he couldn't die, and added that if he could find "the right kind of doctor" he might become mortal again. We all spotted the D-word, of course, but was there something else going on there? Why would somebody who'd just survived being shot in the head want to be mortal again? What this suggests to me is that, despite all the tall buildings and general Neoish posturing, the Captain Jack we're seeing is damaged goods. He's survived a major trauma (none more major) and been abandoned by his closest friends - and now, perhaps, he's trying to outrun the effects by turning stress into duty ("Gotta be ready!").

Alternatively, perhaps it really is just a load of old tosh.