Torchwood: Children of Earth

I watched all episodes of this five part mini-series having keenly anticipated the kind of compelling drama brought to us by some of the most recent Dr Who episodes. Instead of being entranced and rapt I was increasingly disappointed by discontinuities and cheap narrative tricks. I don't think it was the production values, special effects or even the acting that made it so unconvincing. I believe the fault lay with the writing.

Each episode had something that was disconcertingly incredible.

I mean, it's interesting that Jack's head and arm survived an explosion in his stomach that, according to earlier estimates, would destroy everything within a mile radius. Was the power of the bomb overestimated or was the survival of the body parts just extraordinary good luck?

And then, in the initial negotiations with the 456 the options are to comply or be destroyed but why would the aliens destroy the planet when they wanted children. Surely they would just take what they wanted especially since they had such advanced technology that we couldn't possibly fight them.

When Gwen and Rhys where trying to free Jack, Ianto came from nowhere to rescue our concrete encased hero with some sort of construction site vehicle. That is, he managed to enter a militarily secure site, obtain and drive a digger, bash down the wall into the correct part of the building not knowing where Jack was and successfully remove Jack in his concrete block away from the well armed and highly trained special force squaddies. Gwen and Rhys didn't know where Jack was; they were opening cells at random. Perhaps Ianto had an ESP link with Jack that we weren't told about.

When the camera man was invited into the aliens' box everybody watching seemed immediately to recognize the human child plugged into the alien for what it was and were saddened by the sight yet, to me, it looked more like Gollum from Lord of the Rings.

Jack and Ianto's relationship seemed totally spurious, unlikely and gratuitous. Ianto doesn't seem particularly attractive either physically or personally, but perhaps that's just me. I was very surprised to see all the comments on the guardian blog site from fans who said Ianto was their main reason for watching.

But that bit of foolishness involving shooting at the 456's specially constructed box full of deadly gases, who thought that up then?

That the civil servant. Frobisher (Peter Capaldi), should kill his wife and children and then himself when told his children must be 'inoculated', seemed wholly unlikely when he could have telephoned his family to warn them and then killed the Prime Minister.

And, previously, he had been naive enough to be grateful to the Prime Minister for giving him responsibility for the Blank Page executions but why would the PM disavow him of this belief though, it would serve no purpose. It was simply a means to tell us, the audience, that the PM was shafting Frobisher to avoid blame himself.

The last minute conversion of Johnson, the woman leading the special forces, was also unlikely.

Why was the MI5 officer, Dekker, shot in the foot at the beginning of the scene where Jack eventually inverted the aliens' communications wavelength and fed it into his grandson? Dekker didn't do anything particularly bad; he just said he didn't know what to do, and shooting him was not part of an interrogation procedure or to get him to comply with anything.

Babyfaced John Borrowman just can't act from the dark side anything like as well as someone with the gravitas of, say, Christopher Ecclestone could have done. And, also, we didn't know anything about Stephen his grandson. We didn't really care about him particularly but using anyone as a weapon just seems like a particularly callous and inhumane thing to do.

Captain Jack's daughter Alice, Stephen's mother, may well be a really nice person but acting as a character in unpleasant circumstances should she smile politely quite so much? Maybe it's just the set of her face but it puzzled and distracted me.

How did the people in Swansea know that, several hundred miles away, Jack's human-radio attack on the 456 had been successful? And, anyway, why would inverting their communications signal have done the aliens any harm.

The ending, with Jack back in his swashbuckling mode, wanting to go gallivanting around the universe in his "coldfusion cruiser surfing the ion reefs just at the edge of the solar system", seemed completely at odds with the fact that he had sacrificed his grandson. It made him seem more racer-boy tool than torn, anguished hero.