THE DOCTOR WHO RATINGS GUIDE: BY FANS, FOR FANS

Torchwood
Miracle Day

Story No. 32-41 Dead is dead.
Production Code Series Four
Dates July 8 - September 9, 2011

With John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Rhys Williams, Mekhi Phifer and Alexa Havins.

Synopsis: All of a sudden, nobody in the world can die. Except for Captain Jack Harkness.

Reviews

Captain Jack and the Crack of Doom by Hugh Sturgess 8/3/13

Before Miracle Day was aired, there was a fear among Torchwood fans - and, weirdly, the New York Times - that the move to Los Angeles might make Torchwood too "Americanised". (Or should that be "Americanized"?) Predictably, some people declared upon broadcast this had indeed happened. This confused me. Firstly, "Americanised" seemed to mean bastardised, but Torchwood has always been, right from the beginning, a chronically incompetent misfire that sometimes doesn't seem to be of broadcast quality. Moving to the US couldn't possibly make Miracle Day any worse than Day One or Cyberwoman. Secondly, there was the idea that the series could be any more Americanised than it already was. The publicity photos of the cast of Series 1, where they're all standing around pointing guns in various directions, or the poster for the "mature" Children of Earth - with Gwen fronting the surviving Torchwood trio, two enormous hand-guns crossed in front of her - are almost comical take-offs of macho American action movies. If anything, moving to America has made it less American; for instance, the show no longer seems convinced that guns are cool.

Miracle Day isn't bad, but it just isn't very good either. That's my opinion, and bear in mind that I was nonplussed by Children of Earth on first viewing, and grew impatient with it the next time around. I find Miracle Day more interesting than the earlier series, but CoE had a tautness because of its length: five hour-long episodes for one story lets you have scope with speed; ten hour-long episodes means a slackness that the writers fill up with irrelevancies and plot-threads that go nowhere. (24 gets away with... well, twenty-four episodes, because it's rushing from beginning to end. Miracle Day drags on and on.) CoE raised the stakes for Torchwood: destroying the Hub, depriving the team of a base of operations, having them hunted by the forces of law and order. The sight of mild-mannered bureaucrats arranging assassinations of retired supernumeraries and discussing whose children to sacrifice is striking, and (maybe) horrifying and compelling, but it's a trick that only works once; Miracle Day doesn't just seem familiar, but disinterested even in itself.

It's almost nostalgic to see Captain Jack and Gwen back again, though Eve Myles has given up any pretense of making Gwen likable and Barrowman looks like his father. Jesus. Children of Earth was only two years ago. There's a (potential) plot explanation for this, but alas he looks the same age in the 1920s flashbacks. I acknowledge that even John Barrowman must age, but it's so dramatic that I strongly suspect his husband has found the painting in his attic.

I've never really liked Gwen that much. The very first thing she ever said to her loving boyfriend was a lie and when he found out she was sleeping with Owen she erased his memory. She's intended as the audience identification character, "the nice one" who's there to remind the others that they're dealing with real people. The trouble is that it's her estimation of herself as well, and so she's insufferably self-righteous. This is a woman who threw an edged tool at a colleague on her first day on the job, missing him but releasing a homicidal sex-alien that went on a murder spree, and then spent the rest of the episode hitting her team-mates over the head with photos of the perp, shouting "THIS IS A REAL PERSON!!!" I never felt that she'd earned her place in the team: when she started giving out orders in Jack's absence in Exit Wounds I genuinely cursed at the screen. I didn't mind her in Children of Earth, where she's almost cuddly, but you don't watch Torchwood to see what Gwen's getting up to this week.

Now that the series has been shifted to America, Gwen's no longer our identification character. Instead, she's this bloody useless waste of space with no identifiable plot function. Captain Jack is the mysterious man with secret knowledge. Rex is the hard man with a heart of gold. Esther is the naif. Gwen is... Gwen. She cares about her family. She wants to rescue her dad. Realistic, perhaps, but it's annoying to listen to her increasingly shrill denunciations of anyone less worthy than herself. I think she tells Jack everything is his fault once every episode. (I cheered when he basically told her to STFU in Immortal Sins, and would have forgiven him if he'd punched her lights out.) She insists they devote vast amounts of time to watching out for her family, despite Torchwood's shoestring logistics and other priorities. I think her nadir comes when she tells Rhys that it's fine if he gets a job driving Category 1s to the modules, because they need the money. OK, so we have established you are a hypocrite. She utters a self-serving monologue about how everyone's abandoning their principles when it comes down to it, but at least all those whom she's already condemned as monsters, vermin, Nazis, etc. didn't rant self-righteously before joining the queue.

Rhys, by contrast, is lovely until he starts dishing out vigilante justice. We also meet Gwen's parents. Her dad is played by the undertaker from Remembrance of the Daleks and I don't believe I have a single nice thing to say about her mum. Almost everything she says to her daughter is a criticism or an order.

Gwen's presence is simply made superfluous by Rex and Esther. Both fulfill her traditional role: the "ordinary" person who is drawn into the world of Torchwood against their will. They also happen to conform to the roles of Owen and Tosh, respectively. Rex is also a pathologically self-seeking and uncaring individual who is nevertheless motivated by principle, while Esther is the slightly drippy tech support who is utterly unused/unsuited to the high-octane danger she's surrounded by. She also has a very heavily implied unrequited love for Rex, like Tosh had for Owen. She even dies from a gunshot wound.

Rex begins the series hoping to use a colleague's young wife's leukemia to advance himself and describe's Esther's sister's mental illness as "irrelevant". When the team steals a car, he also helps himself to the owner's dry-cleaning. He only feigns sympathy for Dr. Juarez's family to lure the CIA into a trap. Gwen calls him "soulless" (yeah?). He is, by all standards, an unlikable man, but you don't dislike him. Like Owen, he's honest about who he is. He doesn't try to disguise the fact that he's a bastard. For Gwen, this makes him scum, but to me it makes him fun. I spent the series wanting more of Rex. Mekhi Phifer was inexplicably criticised by other reviewers for over/underacting, but that never registered for me. I liked him. I'd be willing to see him in another series of Torchwood.

It also helps that Rex is about the only competent person in this new Torchwood team. Torchwood as a series has generally been a bit clueless about putting its money on the screen, hiring decent actors and writing decent scripts. It depicts the bungled, immoral activities of charmless, unpleasant people. Jack's crew are so unprofessional and incompetent that it's actually become a unique selling point: as Torchwood has always wanted to be a glossy, sexy American cop show but failed in a uniquely grotesque way, it's fitting that Captain Jack wants to be a dark, mysterious hero-avenger and is basically a bit crap at it. Rex, on the other hand, knows what he's doing. He's a trained member of the CIA and he consistently out-performs his more veteran allies. And we'll note that he dumps these losers to go back to the CIA as soon as he can.

Strangely, the series seems to be on his side. Suddenly, it's stopped worshipping the ground its heroes walk on. Rex tells Gwen and Jack in Episode 2, Renditions, that they aren't that smart, they're just "involved" and thus essential. This is before Jack and Gwen hang around an airport because they haven't realised they're already past customs and so can walk out at any time. "God, you're idiots," Rex exclaims, and we aren't exactly encouraged to disagree.

It does raise the question of why we should be watching the adventures of two idiots who constantly screw up, ruin their own plans and need Rex to save their arses. As though realising this, the authors have made Jack essential to the storyline. Episode 7, Immortal Sins, gives us a look at Jack's exploits in 1920s New York, but it's a bit dull, to be honest. The central conceit - of Jack becoming the only mortal man in the world - is a neat one, but again not much that's interesting is done with it. The trip to America also seems to have sapped John Barrowman's already meagre acting ability. He can barely deliver any lines at all convincingly. Even making "I hurt my arm" sound naturalistic seems to be beyond him. For me, this is the central problem of Miracle Day and Torchwood as a whole: John Barrowman was cast because of his charm, energy and charisma. But in Torchwood, he's made to play a misery-guts who yearns for oblivion. This is like making The Sarah Jane Adventures into Kill Bill.

And the thing is that Captain Jack is hugely entertaining, when he's on Doctor Who. The unfortunate similarity in names makes comparison inevitable, but he's like Captain Jack Sparrow: someone flamboyant, energetic, fun, but a bit dodgy. Barrowman can be all these things, because he's a performer. But ask him to play Colin Firth's character in A Single Man and of course he's going to be wooden. The writers keep throwing huge, weighty emotional material at him, but it runs into Barrowman's limits and crashes with flying colours. In Miracle Day, Captain Jack fails at being dark, mysterious, sinister, and isn't especially fun either. He's a bit dull, in other words.

I also thought he was... well, too gay. He's pansexual, but you could come away from the series with the impression that he's exclusively homosexual. "You make everyone around you gay?" "That's the plan." There are plenty of gay characters on TV - indeed it's basically become a cheap and easy way to be progressive and diverse, and comedy writers evidently believe gay people to be inherently funny - but there are no bisexual characters that I can think of, apart from Jack. Jack is a role-model for everyone, not just gay or bi people, because he doesn't care about definitions. He treads all over our ideas of tolerance and to-each-his-own: he seeks out new sexual experiences for their own sake. Here, it felt as though the authors (yes, even the American authors - maybe ESPECIALLY them) believed that including sweaty man-on-man action would be shocking to repressed American audiences, but if so it's a "shock" that only works once; Captain Jack's traditional flexibility is a breath of fresh air that's missing from the series.

I'm not entirely sure about Miracle Day as an introduction for new viewers. If you'd never heard of Torchwood, Captain Jack or Doctor Who before, what would you think of this series? I think it assumes some knowledge of the set-up. Torchwood is sketched in as lightly as possible, in a way that makes you think further explanation will follow in later episodes, but it never does. A quick summary of the Institute is tossed off and that's it. Gwen is thrust into the picture without enough explanation. Unless you know already that Jack is immortal, the discussion he has with Gwen in Episode 1, The New World, is virtually incomprehensible. Jack's the only mortal man on Earth? Wait, what, he used to be immortal? What? And when we finally SEE his immortality in action, in Immortal Sins, the director squanders it on a slow, lugubrious shot that makes his resurrection seem mundane. This series should be aiming at people for whom that is the first time they've ever seen that. That seems to have escaped the writers. There's even a namecheck of the Doctor, without any explanation as to who he is. He's mentioned three times, which is three times more than he is - for contrast - in Series 1 (there are oblique references to "the right kind of doctor", however).

Something that is as weird for long-term viewers as it is for newbies is that Gwen, Rhys and their baby Anwen are in hiding. Since when? The implication is that they know too much about the events of Children of Earth, and are thus the targets of countless government assassination squads wanting to cover up their plan to sacrifice millions of children to alien drug-pushers, which isn't hinted at in any way in the original and makes Jack's decision to piss off to an intergalactic sex club and leave Gwen behind look positively evil. Gwen and Rhys have their isolated home stacked with weapons, seem to grow their own food and can only be contacted by PC Andy.

It's certainly plausible that the world's governments decided to go after them once Jack was out of the way, but frankly I take it as just one more sign that Gwen has gone completely over the edge and is so convinced of her own importance that she's forced her family to live a hermit existence in the back of beyond. I rather like the idea that Gwen's paranoid self-importance has finally got the better of her: "Oh shit, an old lady bumped into me in the supermarket queue. You know what this means, Rhys? The bloody CIA are after us, the bastards! I know too much! They've got my phone tapped! They disguise themselves as trees, did you know that?!" It only takes Esther the length of a transAtlantic flight to find out exactly where they are hiding, which suggests to me that the death-squads of the world can't be trying very hard to catch them. (And in Episode 4, Escape to LA, the world's shittest assassin takes a lazy afternoon to track the team down.) You'll note that this conceit is forgotten about completely when they go through all the shenanigans of hiding Papa Cooper from the powers of evil, a time when a safehouse which nobody knows about would have come in handy, I'd've thought. That probably wasn't even their house.

Gwen leads me to a problem I had with Children of Earth too: Torchwood's unique position to take the moral high ground. There, Torchwood could swagger in to condemn the politicians for haggling with the aliens. Here, they sneak in and investigate the overflow camps and discover their terrible secret. Gwen tells a doctor working there that she's effectively a Nazi working at a death-camp. But it's easy to criticise the system when you don't have any responsibilities of your own. Torchwood's out there in the wilderness, lecturing the world on how it mustn't lose its humanity, but it never offers any alternative solution. Not even amongst themselves. The implication is that the world should just blunder on with the broken system it's got. Torchwood doesn't need to decide, it's not their finger on the button, which is very cosy for them. For all that Children of Earth and Miracle Day seem to be radical and progressive, with their carefully tended cynicism of politicians and bureaucrats of all stripes, they are really very conservative shows that shirk the hard decisions. Jack sacrificed his grandson in Children of Earth to make the aliens go away. This makes him noble, haunted and tragic. But when the world decides to sacrifice some of its children to do the same thing, this makes it evil.

My problem with the "Category 1" subplot of Miracle Day is this: what is so wrong with incinerating those who are brain-dead? If no one will "die", brain-death is as close as you can get. There is no consciousness, no sensation. So what is wrong with destroying their virtually lifeless bodies? It's frequently mentioned that the people being burned are "living". No shit, Gwen, everyone's immortal, remember? That's the whole God-damned point. Of course, the series immediately includes "those who would be dead" in that category as well, just to demonstrate how evil the system is, but the fundamental point still stands: what would Torchwood do if they were in charge? They stand around declaiming that no one should have that kind of power, but unfortunately the government lives in the real world where they have to make those decisions. Torchwood is astonishingly middle-class, tutting from the sidelines and never getting its hands dirty. Its ultimate solution is to put things back the way they were. Undoubtedly the best option, but one not open to anyone else.

The woman who shows all the doctors around the abandoned hospital? I liked her. She was honest. When Vera Juarez sarcastically asked whether the new "golden age" needed the sick and the old out of the way, she said: "Exactly." She wasn't agreeing with it, she was stating a fact.

And if I liked a stereotypical "soulless bureaucrat", you can imagine I liked Oswald Danes and Jilly Kitzinger. They're scum, but they know they're scum and don't hide from it. "This is disgusting." "I know!" Oswald Danes is deliberately set up to be the nastiest man on Earth (a child-murderer AND a paedophile), but we're left feeling more loathing and contempt for the self-righteous vigilantes who pursue him. That chat-show host, for example, who asks Oswald whether he has anything to say to the family of the eight-year-old girl he raped and murdered, and then virtually vomits with contempt when Oswald breaks down in tears and wails that he's sorry. ("That's it?") This series captures very well the repulsive self-regard with which the media treats those who are outside society's protection. Bill Pullman's performance is weird, but usually in a good way.

The problem is that both he and Jilly are, ultimately, totally superfluous to the story. Jack speaks as though the entire story hinges on Danes, but it doesn't. Appropriate to the George Elliot quote Jack drops, he only LOOKS like he's "blazing away" at the centre of things. Jack intends to follow Danes back to the Big Bad behind it all, but ultimately he doesn't. We follow Oswald and Jilly in their dull exploits with Phicorp as though they're significant in some way, but they drop out of the story around Episode 8 and become nothing more than a waste of space. By Episode 10, The Blood Line, Phicorp and its ambitions are forgotten.

This is probably the result of ten hours of story time. Five hours, a la Children of Earth, can be taut (though even that series has a lot of room to breathe), but ten hours is a whole different order of things. Plot lines are introduced, run their course and then vanish. Danes, Phicorp, Esther's crazy sister, Dead Is Dead, Angelo Colasanto... Each unfolds gracefully and then withers. There's something hugely civilised about the pacing. We spend hour after dreary hour following stately plot lines that resolve themselves without fuss or simply cease. It might be intriguing at the time, as we gather tiny clue after tiny clue, but since the ending picks up two-thirds of those clues and flushes them down the toilet, we're left with the feeling that they've been wasting our time for most of the series.

And despite this colossal running-time, the story is rushed to an inconclusive resolution. The Miracle is reversed, but the Families have been dealt only a minor set-back, their global influence remains undiminished. There's nothing to stop them trying again the very next week (though the blue-eyed man at the end hints at a completely different scheme for immortality), which makes Torchwood look like complete morons for debating whether Jack is going to stick around or not. It isn't over, not by a long shot, not until they take out the Families root and branch, and yet it's treated as if it's over. It doesn't even count as "it's the end... or is it?!!!", because the idea that it's the end has never entered the viewer's mind.

Like Children of Earth, Miracle Day focusses on the human reactions to a big, exciting concept ("What if everyone stopped dying?", "What if our children started exploding?", and so on). The nature of humanity's immortality isn't explained thoroughly; I have no idea what the "rules" are. Vera mentions the "process of life" - the transport of oxygen, etc - continuing even without Rex's heart pumping, but a would-be suicide-bomber is reduced to a charred wreck and still remains conscious. This doesn't feel like a well-thought-out concept, and the political and economic ramifications also felt like what under-informed authors whose eyes glaze over at the word "finance" think would happen. A trade-dependent country like China closes its borders to everyone and everything? And the way that Angelo prolongs his life wouldn't work. All the things he would need should slow his metabolism and so slow his aging, but cooling your body down, even a bit, drastically weakens your immune system. Angelo would have to live in a totally sterile environment if he wanted to avoid pneumonia.

Russell T Davies isn't much interested in SF ideas at the best of times, but when he is he doesn't play with them enough. Think what another science-fiction author would have done with Miracle Day's sales pitch: humanity becomes immortal! Someone like John Wyndham or J. G. Ballard, or even Steven Moffat, would have loved this. They would have played with it more, explored the consequences. That's a major strand in the first few episodes, but then it's dropped to make way for the dreary conspiracy storyline, and its epitaph is a short mention by Jack that there are a lot of funerals happening at the moment. Like Children of Earth, Miracle Day seems to be incredibly angry at something, to the point that it's inarticulate. Angry at what, I have no idea.

Miracle Day doesn't have enough plot for ten hours of screen-time, and doesn't even have enough action, which might have enlivened things. Its direction is competent but uninvolving, and its two main stars are either unpleasant or wooden. It manages to leave both its Unique Selling Point and its nuts-and-bolts conspiracy storyline under-developed and it is stuffed with subplots that would be really interesting if they went anywhere. The series asks us to involve ourselves in its long, twisting and turning plot, but ultimately the rug is pulled out from under us and nothing is revealed. I feel cheated.

Like Torchwood Series 1 and Children of Earth, Miracle Day is trying to be too serious. Admittedly, that's how the series was intended from the beginning, but based on the evidence I don't think Russell can write either serious adult SF or 24-style thrillers. I still think that the best Torchwood is to be found in Series 2, which maintains its Chibnallisms but has learnt to liven up and crack a smile every now and then. Miracle Day, frankly, is a bit dreary.