Item! Torchwood Season 1 Disc 2

Sort of losing steam a bit, but that’s okay, judging by my ranting about the episodes contained on the disk when I talked about it last night I should have enough juice to finish off here for the day. Right, also, letting you know, I just dumped a bunch of my mini post type things on you, so if you were visiting before (unlikely) and are visiting now (very likely, because you are reading this. You are visiting! The chances of you visiting are 100%!) then be aware of the one, two, three, yes, three PREVIOUS posts that I put up just now. The first one, I guess I mean the earliest of these four in total posts was actually NOT written today, but last Sunday I think, I just hadn’t had a chance to post it. So there, I’m not totally just dumping all this onto a screen at once. Well, yes, I mostly am, but whatever.

Got the second disc of this Torchwood business from the library- have I yet mentioned how disappointed I am that Torchwood isn’t a western? Maybe I confused it with Deadwood, which I also haven’t seen. I sure hope THAT one is a western. Is any one a western?!?!

Right, so this disc contains three episodes (no easy way to view this, memory then):

Ghost Machine
Cyberwoman
Fairies

They’re all fairly ridiculous and not a western at all.

Ghost machine has the Torchwood gain find HALF a machine (funny, whenever I break my machines in half they stop functioning) that picks up, they determine, strong emotional resonances that the machines handler then get to view and semi experience. When this is explained to Gwen she basically takes this as confirmation of her earlier theory. The machine shows you ghosts! Of course!

And no one corrects her. I hope they were just too embarrassed to say “no Gwen, not ghosts, we just told you what this thing does. Totally separate idea.”

And, I’m sorry, I know this makes me a horrible person, but I can’t take them seriously with their accents. “I joost sew a guh-oost.” <- that was a terrible articulation of what the one girl sounds like, further entrenching the idea that I’m horrible, but it’s the best representation I could figure. While also keeping my assertion of ridiculousness front and center. What a biased presentation!

And this Gwen girl goes to visit this blackmailer/pyro (his name is “Burny” because of the shack he burned down) and when she gets a call telling her maybe she isn’t entirely safe chilling out there she doesn’t calmly say “I have to leave” she instead says “YOU SAY BURNY IS DANGEROUS?” (Burny is standing right next to her, apparently oblivious)

For some reason the story played it like Burny didn’t hear that, but that is stupido. Yes, it turns out he was mostly harmless, so maybe he could’ve been insulted or something.

Cyberwoman is about this girl that only got partially transformed into a Cyberman during that big series finale over in the second series of Doctor Who with all the Cybermen running around and whatnot.

Just as a quick aside, are my sentences getting less comprehensible (took me WAY too long to remember the word comprehensible)? I’m getting tired and lazy. And I have to go do Christmas shopping nowish or never! Anyways.

So this girl is apparently in a relationship with Ianto (man, I do not even care if that’s how that name is supposed to be spelled) who is basically the Torchwood gang’s butler, making his the most useless position amongst the lot, which is really saying something, when that Owen guy is a scientist that doesn’t science, and Gwen is/was a police officer that doesn’t know how to shoot a gun (I think she just learned in Ghost Machine, but seriously, what? They have police officers over in Britain that don’t carry guns? Is that true?)… everyone pretty much relies on the Bat-computer to give diagrams and then Captain Jack Harkness (the leader) gives exposition about what the thing is.

Right, Ianto is a handsome guy, unless he’s shouting in despair, then he looks rather silly. This comes up a lot in this episode. Maybe the director could have, shot him from behind? The face anguish wasn’t really selling me on the scene. Or at least for SOME of the time shoot from the back. Don’t be afraid to get arty on us. So he’s secretly got this Cyberwoman in the basement and he’s trying to cure her because he loves her, so when the rest of the Torchwood group leave to get a drink (maybe if they invited Ianto out he’d be less inclined to keep horrible crimes against humanity a secret downstairs) he gets this leading cybernetic expert guy into the base to help out.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, the second Ianto turns his back to hide the evidence of his shenanigans from the returning Torchwood gang the Cyberwoman loses her human personality (for some reason…) and kills the cybernetics expert guy! Ianto freaks out about this and hides the body… and the body is never mentioned for the rest of the episode! Maybe it’s me, but if someone gets killed from a dubious secret experiment I’ve got going on, and I hide the body to cover my tracks, BOOM, pretty evil. Evil-ish anyways. Yes, the guy is under a lot of stress. Did you SEE that cybernetic expert guys face? It got mess-ed UP!

So the Torchwood guys have to stop this Cyberwoman (I have got to stop capitalizing the ‘C’) from leaving and taking over the planet, even though she’s got an awful lot of fleshy parts that aren’t particularly invulnerable at all- but they needed to shut off the power to stop Gwen from getting cybernized, so now, until the system reboots, the weapons are locked down. Oh no!

This eventually leads to a gratuitous bit of resuscitation between Jack and Ianto (CPR doesn’t work that way) especially jarring because if Jack wants to kiss a guy, fine, but he’s totally mad at Ianto for keeping the secret cyberwoman around to threaten earth. Maybe he could’ve kissed Owen or something?

But this ALSO eventually leads to Jack getting some sauce/attractant on the cyberwoman so that she has to fight off the pterodactyl that hangs out in the Torchwood base. THAT was legitimately awesome. Cyberwoman versus Pterodactyl? Bravo, sirs. Then she got knocked over and the fight wasn’t nearly as cool. Hard to make defensive moves when you’re a robot on your back. Apparently it’s very much like being a turtle. That’s how it looked to me anyways.

So blah bede blah everyone escapes, the system reboots so the doors open, and the pizza girl wanders downstairs to a) her death, but also b) her body becoming host to the cyberwoman’s brain because now, all of a sudden, she sounds human again, remembering all the great times with Ianto and whatnot. What exactly brought this on? I have no clue. But then she says now her and Ianto can get upgraded properly together, so she’s clearly more machine now than man, and gets gunned down by a firing squad of the Torchwood dudes after Ianto refused to kill his girlfriend.

Why did I give a run down of the entire episode? Well, I’m crazy, first of all but also to illustrate how crazy it is that after all this goes down Ianto isn’t kicked off the Torchwood job. What? Man, I wouldn’t keep him around after this. Did you find the cybernetics expert’s body yet? Well it’s down there! And you sure didn’t do that pizza girl any favours! And he punched out Jack, even after that kiss of life they had back there.

If it was MY secret organization, I’d have flashy thinged him and sent him on his way. Give him a job at the post office or something.

In case that’s too old of a reference for you, by “flashy thinged him” I’m referring to the memory erasing device used in the coolness incarnate movie Men In Black.

Ah, I’ve gone on way to long. So yeah, the episode Fairies.

It deals more with a supernatural threat which I’ve never seen on a Doctor Who type show before; they always go “magic? Oh you silly human, no, that was SCIENCE!” but this time, yeah, sort of magic. And the fairies are depicted as unstoppable killing machines that do whatever this chosen girl wants. We’re supposed to feel bad for the girl/mother when they get separate so the girl can go become a fairy, but dude, the fairies did you a favour getting rid of her! That girl sucked! She wasn’t just a creepy little girl; she killed people with her fairy friends!

But at the very end, because Jack has to look like a hero, she holds back the little girl for a second and says “NO YOU CAN’T HAVE HER!” or something very much like that, and the fairies are like “listen, hold onto her if you want to, but then we’ll kill everyone on the planet, so there” forgetting the fact that there was nothing really stopping the fairies from killing Jack and Gwen and then TAKING the little girl (yes yes, Jack can’t be killed, but he can be death like before he pops back up on his feat. Way more than enough time to take a little girl to some fairy realm.).

So then Jack is all “You promise she’ll be okay?” <- referring to the little girl, as though, again, he could stop these guys if he wanted to

And the fairies respond that she’ll live forever (what with her being a new fairy and whatnot)

So Jack lets her go, and everyone gets mad at him for letting her go, even though there was no reason to hold onto her anyways. The girl WANTED to go, and more importantly, those unstoppable fairies wanted her to go.

Funny thing though, those unstoppable fairies, well, when they finally showed up at the end of the episode instead of killing dudes semi-off-screen, well, they looked pretty shoot-able. Like, get some silver or whatever works on fairies, and shoot ‘em up. But they didn’t even try that! What kinda western IS this??

To be ABSOLUTELY fair, there was a bit of exposition that skipped over while I was watching it (this IS a library DVD after all) so maybe there was a line in there that would’ve totally convinced me of the brilliance of everything that happened later. I actually pretty much missed the part where they even connected the killings and figured out where to look for this chosen girl. But… yeah, yes, I’m definitely fine. I think I’ll be okay without having seen that bit. I’ll soldier on, anyways.

And that’s it; I’m done, and quite a bit closer to getting all my blog stuff done for the month. Also, I called these mini posts, but for the most part they’re quite a bit longer I think than a lot of entries of mine, so there you go.

Probably no more posts until after Christmas, so Merry Christmas.