Torchwood 1x05

[alixtii]

Last night's ep was a decent episode of The X-Files. But it wasn't Torchwood.

The members of Torchwood are not nice people who help children and little old ladies out of the kindness of their hearts. They are not nice people and potential rapists and thieves and voyeurs and disobedient to their superior (i.e. Jack) and people who lock up their girlfriends in the basement so she can re-assimilate the world after being groped by a random doctor. And arguably murderers. They help the world because they think they're better than us and that we aren't good enough to help ourselves, that we the people can't be trusted with what they know.

They operate outside the law which makes them, by definition, criminals. (Well, arguably it triggers a constistutional issue about the Queen's power to work outside Parliament, I suppose.) Up to this point the show has been remarkably consistent in portraying them in this light.

In this ep, the worse thing they did was break into the CCTV network which they do every ep and isn't (I don't think) suppose to even so much as register on our "they are acting like monsters" meter--although it certainly does on mine. I mean, Jack did give up the girl to the fairies, but what else was he supposed to do? It might make a decent moral dilemma for Dana Scully. Not so much for Jack Harkness.

Please to be giving me my show back, kthxbye?

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/__marcelo/]

*nods a lot* They are the guys who bring murder victims back to life for a while just to test the device. They aren't just all not good people - they aren't even good Torchwood members, unless self-destruction is part of the group's mandate.

I've come to enjoy that, in a very WTF sort of way.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I don't know if self-destruction is part of the group's mandate per se, but I do think it's a more or less inevitable result of it. Being a Torchwood member is, as Suzie pointed out in the premiere, a dream job, but it is an adolescent's wet dream: no rules, no oversight, being free to do whatever one deems necessary by virtue of the simple fact that one is better than everybody else. It's a type of power which is inexorably corrupting, I think, and the show has done a fairly good job of showing that so far.

[netgirl-y2k.livejournal.com]

Couldn't agree more. And who is this strange man who falls in love with women during the second world war and stalks them into little old ladydom in order to be emo that they can't be together for ever and ever. What happened to my Jack Harkness who hit on anyone that stood still long enough to let him!?

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I have to say I wondered that myself--and the fact that the timeline is obscured enough that we don't know which events occurred pre- or post-"Bad Wolf" makes trying to make sense of it all a very daunting proposition.