A Writer’s Dilemma: Superman Syndrome and Almost Human

Mrs. Speculator and I have been enjoying the new Fox series, Almost Human. On the one hand, there is the really strong chemistry between the lead actors, Karl Urban and Michael Ealy. In addition, the writers have given some fairly serious thought to potential future technologies and their use (and abuse in the case of the criminals our heroes pursue every week). They have even managed some little things, like carrying minor plot points over into consecutive episodes, rather than make each episode act like a silo with only the macro story arc (the “mythology” in X-Files terms) connecting them. In fact, if there’s much of a weakness right now, it’s in Almost Human’s lack of a mythology. But the series is just starting out—it has to be given time to establish its rhythms and characters. Even massively mythology-driven shows, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, had to take a while to introduce and frame the characters and standardize their interactions. Mrs. Speculator and I generally give new shows that we are interested in three episodes to sell us. In most cases, when we have that third-episode discussion, rarely do we talk about the over-riding story arc at that point. (In fact, here’s a corollary—if a series is pounding on its mythology that early in its run, it often will not make it past the first season, if it in fact makes it that far.) Unfortunately, Almost Human seems to have written itself into an unfortunate plot loop with its latest episode, “Blood Brothers”, and I’m curious to see if they did it on purpose to delight the viewers or if they are aware of what they did.

You may be familiar with the popular phrase that has been long associated with Superman: “Faster than a bullet, stronger than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound…”. If you’re not familiar with the history of Superman, you may not be aware that this was originally a description of the upper limits of his powers. Superman could jump real high or real far, but flight was not one of his abilities. He could race a bullet and catch it in mid-flight, but he couldn’t travel at the speed of sound. So how did he get to the power levels he has in the popular imagination now? Think about it from a writer’s point of view: what kind of story can I tell about Superman that doesn’t seem exactly like every other Superman story? When Superman started out, he fought thugs and government corruption. But eventually, the readers are going to want something more, so the writers introduce villains that challenge Superman. What if Superman had to fight a villain who could also jump over buildings? There are two ways to overcome this—the hard way, which involves imaginative story-telling and creative use of the power set, or the easy way, by increasing Superman’s powers. Generally, the easy way wins out, so Superman strains a bit and then discovers that instead of being able to jump, say, a quarter mile, he can now jump a mile. And then a little while later, it’s five miles, then 20, and it grows and grows until eventually someone comes up with the idea of flight. During the late 50s and early 60s, the writers of the various Superman stories played with this idea by giving him ridiculous powers, like Super-ventriloquism. I’d like to believe that the writers were mocking themselves as they did this, and the stories are often a great deal of fun. But it may well be that this period was just a long detour down the easy path.

It’s this kind of power creep that I refer to as “Superman syndrome”, because eventually the problem circles back on itself—now that Superman can fly through space near the speed of light and can withstand having mountains dropped on his head, what kind of villain poses a challenge to him? The writer either has to keep amping up Superman’s powers or really buckle down and tell the story in a different kind of way or perhaps tell a different kind of story. It’s at this crux that the really good writing shines through, as the writers begin to move off into different kinds of story-telling. Alan Moore’s great “For the Man Who Has Everything” is a sly wink at the Superman syndrome—how do you challenge the man who has all those powers? Moore’s solution was ingenious, and the story-telling was well-conceived and implemented.

The point of all this? The writers of Almost Human, and especially the 9 December episode, “Blood Brothers” put themselves into a Superman syndrome loop, less than ten episodes into their first season. And, again, I’m curious to see if they attempt to resolve it. I want to believe that they have plans to address it—because again, that’s an impetus for really strong writing. But I’m also dubious.

==SPOILERS FOLLOW==

The show introduced a minor character who acted somewhat as a plot advancement tool in the episode. Maya Vaughn (Megan Ferguson) is a witness to a murder and is scheduled to appear in a trial. She also has had an operation that increases her use of her brain’s capacity, but it has had an interesting side effect—she can talk to dead people when she touches an object that they have touched. (You could do some really interesting story things with this—what happens when she goes to the store and grabs a shopping cart?) The other witness to the murder is herself murdered, and Maya touches her scarf and begins communing with her. The android, Dorian (Michael Ealy) appears to believe that she now possesses what is usually termed a supernatural power, while the human, John Kennex (Karl Urban) does not believe her (that’s heavy-handed irony…). But by the end of the episode, and because of a few other interactions with her that have no real bearing on solving the murder case(s), we are made to believe that Maya really can talk to the dead.

So what’s the problem?

Given that the show is really a police procedural set in the future and that the show’s stars are a police detective and his android assistant, the writers have now made it possible for the police to get substantial help for every murder they investigate and every crime in which someone is killed. The police have been handed a tool, and since part of the premise of the show is that the police are falling behind in the technology race with organized criminals, they should use it at every opportunity. If there’s ever an episode where they spend the whole time trying to figure out a murder without consulting Maya, then the writing is questionable.
While the introduction of Maya closes off some obvious storytelling paths, it also opens up some really cool ones. Consulting an actual medium is not exactly the kind of logical progression of evidence that most courts would allow in a trial, so if Kennex ever does go to Maya to discover the identity of a criminal, part of the plot has to be about coming up with sufficient evidence to convict outside of Maya. Such a plot could lead to some interesting turns and twists. Or what if a connected criminal finds out that Kennex consulted Maya and tries to use that conversation in court to throw out a trial—tainted evidence, hearsay evidence? And Maya’s witnesses are dead—exactly how reliable are they after time spent in whatever happens to people after they die?

So now, in addition to the things I already like about Almost Human, I’m also going to be watching to see what they do with this development. I’ll try to remember to update the blog if anything comes of it.

Pondering Fringe and Sharks

I'll warn you up front: there's going to be spoilers here for the latest episodes of Fringe, "Subject 13" and "Os." If you don't want to know, stop reading.

I've been fairly delighted with Fringe carrying the banner of speculative fiction on network TV. It's been edgy and thoughtful, and the cast has gelled tremendously such that there is a marked chemistry between them all. John Noble continues to amaze in his dual roles, and kudos to the writers for giving him a chance to shine by allowing the alternate Walter to show some signs of humanity in "Subject 13." It really is wonderful to have a speculative fiction show on the air that goes beyond the common perception of what the genre is all about: there's no spacecraft and no aliens. Instead, Fringe deals with the SF idea of an alternate universe and what happens when elements of that universe intersect with our own. This is familiar ground to readers of SF, but like Heroes for comic book tropes, Fringe offers up the ideas via media that makes it more acceptable to people who aren't familiar with the ideas.

But the last two episodes have been troubling, such that the Speculator household has been mentioning sharks and people that jump them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark). In "Subject 13," we are given some backstory on Olivia and Peter. On one level the story makes a lot of sense, portraying Olivia's time as a young test subject for Walter and Peter's initial refusal and then eventual acceptance of his new life in a universe not his own. And yet the episode ends with the two of them meeting as children and having a long meaningful conversation as the result of an explosion and fire at the research center (that Olivia's untamed powers appear to have caused). It all makes sense and seems appropriate given the general theme and direction of Fringe, but it appears to ignore details that have been established earlier in the series. For example, Olivia didn't know Walter when the Fringe cases started, but this episode makes it clear that Walter is a hugely important person in her young life, especially because he was the one who convinced her stepfather to stop abusing her. Similarly, Peter at first refuses to believe Walter's story that there are alternate universes, except that he originally believed that himself, knowing somehow that his current parents are different from the ones he had been living with. Most importantly, Olivia and Peter don't remember meeting each other and their important conversation. All of this feels odd, given how intelligent their characters are—how does one forget these important and traumatic experiences? But having been pleased with the writing thus far, I just assumed it was a detail that would be explained later.

The latest episode, "Os," is not so easily explained. As Walter becomes more and more aware of the consequences of his meddling between the two universes, he also has begun to despair that he is smart enough to fix them. As a result, he wishes he could talk to his deceased friend William Bell, with whom he invented so much of the fringe science that the show revolves around. In "Os," he finds Bell's old files and discovers that he had been working he termed a "soul magnet," a device that would cause the soul of a dead person to move into a container of a living soul, allowing the dead person to effectively possess the living person and then manifest its personality. The soul magnet has to be triggered, probably by a sound of some sort, and Walter remembers that Bell has bequeathed an actual bell with his name on it to an employee of the company that he founded. Walter strikes the bell, expecting Bell to manifest in the employee, Nina, but nothing happens. The scene jumps to a conversation between Peter and Olivia, and suddenly Olivia is talking with the cadence and rhythm of Leonard Nimoy, who played William Bell.

My first reaction was to slap my forehead and groan, thinking of sharks and water skis. But in days since, I've been able to step back some and examine why this was my response. Simply put, the show has been all about "fringe science": portals to different universes, shapeshifters, time travel, and so on. Why should this particular science bother me so much when the others didn't? To be honest, the scene was setup over a year ago when Olivia met William Bell, who for some inexplicable reason tolled a bell in her presence. Clearly, in hindsight, he was establishing her as the physical link for his soul when he died. And yet, it still annoys me.

One issue is that we've gone beyond science to metaphysics and belief. Alternate universes and time travel are technological feats and feel well within the purview of what Fringe has been about. But when it comes to the idea of a soul, even though it is explained away as a remnant of the electromagnetic forces involved with life and consciousness, we're talking about something that is qualitatively different. And beneath the mumbo jumbo used to explain it, it still feels hokey. One could make a strong argument that the show has been evolving into a conversation about the role that belief and emotion play in technology, especially given the reasons why Walter brought them together in the first place and his recent despair at what he has wrought. And there has also been an element of emotionality in the pseudoscience as well, since we have learned that the doomsday machine planted in our universe by our alternate foes is powered by a decision that Peter must make between Olivia of our universe and the Olivia of the universe he left behind (referred to in the show as Fauxlivia). But even that emotionality made my skin crawl a little as well—how could an emotional decision power a device that would destroy a universe? Even so, I am somewhat willing to accept the Fringe concept of a soul, and if so, that it can be gathered by technology. It feels a little dicey, but like the questions raised by "Subject 13" I'm willing to give the writers space to make it work.

What's more troubling to me is that it felt cheap, an explicit jerk on the emotional strings of the viewers. Until now, the show has been delicate about dealing with emotionality, causing the viewers to empathize with the characters and thus understand what drives them. The very best example of this was an episode from last year, "White Tulip" (which for some reason was unjustly overlooked by SF awards), wherein the pursuit and capture of a time traveller intertwines beautifully with the beginnings of Walter's guilt about kidnapping Peter to replace his own lost son. The viewer empathizes and the power of the story is realized. But in "Os", we finally have Peter and Olivia involved romantically after a season of intrauniversal problems keep them apart. They are being loving and open and honest about their feelings and what kept them apart, a solid portrayal of a real loving relationship would growing under the bizarre circumstances of Fringe. And just as Olivia was about to tell Peter something vitally important, she is suddenly no longer Olivia, but a vessel for the disembodied spirit of William Bell.

From a writing standpoint, as I say, it was set up beautifully. Not only does it have to be Olivia because she is the only person from our universe that Bell had any time to interact with, but the right foreshadowing cues were put in place. But it is jarring and unsatisfactory, as we have been made to empathize with Peter and Olivia through their trials and coming together—we're desperately rooting for them to succeed in the face of a danger probably greater than any ever shown on TV before. And all the subtlety and purposeful evolution is shattered with the equivalent of a carny trick, a stunt pulled in bad soap operas. It is that clash that made me slap my forehead and literally howl.

I suppose the writers should be gratified that we have invested so much energy into these characters that the sudden break of the soul transfer is painful to watch. And they should be further happy that we'll continue to watch, because we have been shown for the majority of three seasons that these are gifted powerful writers. But where before there was certainty, there is now some doubt creeping in. And the fault for that also lies in the writing for the show. Rumor has it Fringe may not survive this season, so the writers only have a few episodes left to smooth over the awkwardness of these last two episodes. And even if the show is renewed, the writers need to move fast to explain the jarring events in a way that will not put off viewers next season. I think they can do it; I hope they will--they really need to carry on the pattern of strong effective storytelling this series has offered to its viewers.

The Three Ages of Star Trek (viewing)

From about the third grade on, I would walk home from school (which was only about three blocks away) and find some way to entertain myself until my mother got home from work. This would generally give me around two and a half hours of time to fill, and Mom didn't allow me to go outside until I got into junior high school. So I read and, more often than not, watched TV. I was probably about 9 or 10 years old when a local station picked up the syndicated repeats of the original Star Trek series (this would be about 1974-5). As a burgeoning fan of speculative fiction—by that time I had devoured E. E. Smith, Burroughs, and Heinlein, and probably more—this was a real treat for me. There was a profound lack of speculative fiction on TV at that time; in fact, as I recall, there was a pretty profound lack of science fiction on the big screen as well. It would be another two years before Star Wars would come out and almost singlehandedly revitalize interest in the genre. So it was in this setting that I stumbled upon Star Trek and was immediately enchanted. Here were starships, alien planets, and sometimes even big weapons firing at said starship and planets. E. E. Smith was (and still is) a favorite, so I had this image in my mind of science fiction being starships that got larger and larger over successive generations with amazing destructive powers, and alien races that just despised mankind so that those starships had to be deployed against them (I just had a vision of the Enterprise placed side-by-side with the Skylark IV and chuckled to myself at the panic that Kirk and Crew would probably feel). And only having the covers of those books and my mind's eye as tools to envision those images, finding Star Trek was like an epiphany. I was engrossed in it, and watched it over and over, fascinated by the things I had read about made at least visible.

Here were alien races that worked with and against mankind. Here were heroic captains—and Kirk really does personify the pulp captain exemplar to the last decimal point—and sneaky villains. Here were alien races barely understandable in their biology or motivation, and our feeble attempts to interact with them. It was like the quintessence of everything I loved about science fiction boiled down and then given out in daily doses. To my eternal gratitude, my mother also enjoyed (or at least pretended to enjoy) the shows, arriving home about fifteen minutes into them and sitting down to see what would happen next. I was delighted, and that delight buoyed me along until Star Wars did come out, and then the first Star Trek movie a couple of years later.

By the time I entered college, my appreciation for Star Trek had waned considerably. As I watched the episodes again and again, their flaws were magnified in my (perhaps overly critical teenaged) mind. Shatner's (and really DeForest Kelley's) acting is not very good. The writing can be somewhat overblown. The effects were sometimes laughable. And that music—oh my, couldn't they come with more than just two or three themes? And it really wasn't terribly science fiction at times. Some critic somewhere, or perhaps it was Roddenberry himself, described it as Wagon Train to the stars, and it was true. A lot of the episodes could have been written for different genres—it was only science fiction because the setting was a space ship. And I knew that science fiction could be so much more. And then there was the whole Trekkie phenomenon…it was such an embarrassment and distracted non-genre fans from what science fiction was really all about. This isn't to say that I didn't go to the movies as they came out; I just didn't talk about it with many folks.

(You'll notice that I am calling it science fiction up to here…the very idea of speculative fiction hadn't entered my mind yet. I knew there was something similar in science fiction and fantasy, but I hadn't really given it much thought or tried to quantify it.)

In my late 20s and early 30s, I had been to graduate school and begun my interest in genres—what makes them and especially what happens along the borders of the different genres. I had spent a great deal of time critically examining works of literature and, despite being mocked openly by faculty in some cases, began to perceive that those tools could be used for genre studies as well. It turns out that I was dancing on the fringe of pop culture studies, but I didn't know that as my scholarly interest was in Renaissance poetry, and pop culture people were…well…weird. My training, and the preferences of those who had trained me, had made it clear that those things weren't literature and not worth the effort to use the toolset I had been given to use. But fortunately, I also took some post-modern classes, which blew the door off when it came to bias in literature. Anything was fair game. (Not to mention I had taken a science fiction class from an award-winning author as an elective, and he allowed us to use those same tools as well.)

My reading had also grown more expansive—my mentor wasn't really interested in much after the early 1960s, but I had gone on to read wonderful works up to the present. And as a result, I was able to see how much more could be included in speculative fantasy, that there was room beside galaxy-spanning space operas for stories about computers or advanced biology. Sometimes the aliens were more interesting than the ships. And with this more refined and yet more expansive vision, I looked back at Star Trek and rejoiced again at the powerful elements of speculative fiction that lay buried beneath the dross. While I could still recognize that the acting was not so good and sometimes the effects were pretty shabby, I could also recognize that there was some powerful stories and ideas being used. Going beyond "The City on the Edge of Forever" which is rightfully recognized for the powerful piece it is, Star Trek often had episodes that dealt with the limits of being human. One of the first episodes, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," examines the effect absolute power has on individual humanity, and at what point humanity ceases to be human. "Devil in the Dark" deals with the nature of alienness, as miners are attacked by what they perceive to be a monster, but it is only a monster because it is so very different in appearance and make-up than humanoid life forms, and once the crew of the Enterprise begin to understand it, they recognize in it some of the emotions that make humans so wonderful.

And there are more. Of course, there are real clunkers in there as well. The show does veer off into other genres. Sometimes the reach exceeded the grasp. Everyone recognizes the silliness of "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" dealing with two different races on the same planet, alternately striped black and white. And gosh, it was sure heavy-handed in its attempt to deliver its message, so much so that it has become something of a joke. But the idea behind it, especially coming out of its time period still gives it something of a relevancy, because nothing else on TV at the time was trying to make similar statements.

Star Trek hurts to watch sometimes exactly because it is on the small screen. It attempted to do things that needed more time to evolve, more effects to explore. But if you can get past that smallness, it's not so difficult to see just how groundbreaking the series was, and how important to both television and to speculative fiction. It made these ideas mainstream, so much so that what it attempted to do has been lost in the generic idea of cinematic science fiction. And now, I long to find TV shows and movies that cared as much about the genre as the creators of Star Trek obviously did, and regret those times when I wasn't so proud to say that I am a fan of the show.

Small Fringe Rant

I've been meaning to write about this show for a while, especially since the recent revelation that the Earth is being invaded by human-like creatures from an alternate universe. What an incredibly speculative fiction thing to do, and how daring to try to bring it to network television. I was enjoying the show before this disclosure, especially because of the character of Walter Bishop (played by John Noble), but this turn of plot really hits me in the SF bone. I may do a longer blog, perhaps at the end of the season.

But for now, I have to give a small rant about the repeated writing flaw that haunts this show, in almost every episode. The episode from 14 April is a great example. Agent Olivia Dunham (played by Anna Torv) is on the trail of "transgenic" creature, one that appears to have been put together from many different animals. Bodies are piling up around her, one with what appears to be a stinger in one of the many wounds on the victim's body. There is a report of a sighting of the creature and she races to meet her best friend and fellow agent Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) at the location. She gets there to find that Francis has been attacked, but has survived with relatively minor wounds. Bishop pulls a stinger from one of Francis's wounds. Bishop and Dunham go back to their lab and are working on figuring out what's going on with the aid of the other members of the team, when one of the dead bodies starts to move. They open the bodybag to find larvae pouring out of the chest of the corpse, and Bishop realizes the larvae are the young of the creature they are hunting. Then he makes the intuitive leap that this was also the only body from which a stinger was retrieved and that the creature uses the stinger to lay its eggs. Dunham realizes that Francis has had eggs laid in him as well.

What would you do in Dunham's situation?

Dunham (did I mention best friend and fellow agent of Francis?) DRIVES TO HIS HOUSE. Apparently all phone traffic in the area was completely disrupted because lord knows you wouldn't call someone who has hundreds of transgenic eggs in their body and tell them to get to the lab immediately. You DRIVE TO THEIR HOUSE and tell them in person. Come on. Really? This show is based on cutting edge technology, and the protagonist doesn't bother to use a phone?

And this is just the latest example of how poorly this character is sometimes written. In nearly episode, despite being a member of the FBI and part of high-end task force, Dunham races off to crime scenes and begins poking around all by herself, usually with no indication that the antagonists have left the scene. And sometimes, she goes off on a hunch without telling anyone where she is going. This just drives me nuts, and Mrs. Speculator watches me rant at the TV: making smart characters do things that are incredibly stupid in order to advance the plot. And almost without fail, when she is by herself at a scene, something happens, and she is running for her life or getting kidnapped.

This is such a smart, witty show, and yet this happens over and over. It's not going to make me stop watching Fringe but I'm clearly going to have to learn the art of Zen television viewing if I keep watching. It remains better than a lot of SF on TV right now, and I wholeheartedly recommend it, especially for the upcoming guest appearance on the season finale….

Torchwood

…or why the Speculator household will not be watching season three.

Last July, Mrs. Speculator and I stumbled into a panel for Torchwood at Comic-con, actually more interested in the panel that was to follow. Inside we found a milling throng of fans, most of whom had seen the show from downloads or borrowed DVD copies of episodes. They were enthusiastic and loud, and since the wife and I enjoy the new Doctor Who, we sat back and learned what we could about the new show. The results were good and we determined to watch it when it came on BBC America.

Now, nearly a year later, we've seen seasons 1 and 2 and are a little puzzled about why the show has such a huge following. Our dismay at the show grew with every episode, but we decided we would give it a full run on its season before deciding what we would do. This past weekend, the season two finale aired, and we found it to be a major disappointment, introducing new problems that force us to question what the show is about and continuing the issues that made us doubt in the first place.

Before the season finale, our issues were fairly straightforward. The first, which may be viewed as a peccadillo on our part, was that Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) of Torchwood is not written the same way he is when he is on Doctor Who. Who's Harkness is a rogue, a picaresque hero. He is funny and charming and someone you can depend on when you need to. While he is secretive about his own past, he is open about his plans and priorities. On Torchwood, he is almost the reverse of this personality: he is dour, only funny when it gets him out of a jam, more open about his past, and less open about his plans and priorities. While it is clear he sees the members of Torchwood as a family, his love for them is oppressive, as Gwen (Eve Myles) often points out to him. He expects devotion and trust, but he does not generally offer it in return, instead almost always making demands of those he "cares" for. I'm minded of the Peter Principle, that incompetence rises to its own level. Clearly Harkness is great as a number two, as a right-hand man, but he is a woeful leader and manager. If his team members were not so inexplicably devoted to him, they would revolt. And again, we have seen glimpses of Gwen calling him out on this very topic. The last two episodes of season two have made it clear as he works with other members of Torchwood in the past, he works much better as an agent than as the leader. So, the upshot of this is that Harkness is not the man we got to know in Doctor Who, and while his portrayal is consistent in Torchwood, I don't like the character in Torchwood. I honestly do not believe this to be a flaw with the actor, but how he is written and directed.

And while Jack is larger than life, his status merely exacerbates the weakness of the other characters. Owen (Burn Gorman), Tosh (Naoko Mori), and Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd) are pale caricatures and rather flat as well. They each seem to have a single emotion that they are asked to portray over and over again: Owen is the irascible rebel, who just mainly appears angry and put out. Tosh is the devoted sycophant, building unhealthy attachments to whomever she is enamoured with this week. And Ianto…well, honestly, I don't know what role Ianto plays other than to be Jack's main squeeze. He serves coffee a lot and looks terrified or surprised sometimes. The attempts to give these supporting characters more life have generally failed or, worse, produced bizarre continuity issues. For example, we've seen Owen in love (or lust, a whole lot of lust…there's a lot of sex and fondling, and clearly we are supposed to think it is love, but there is nothing onscreen that really looks like love) with a woman lost in time. We see him being gentle and loving with her, and melancholy when she is lost, but as soon as the next episode, he's just mean and surly again. Tosh apparently falls in love with anything that moves, including an alien, a man lost in time (hmm, there's a pattern), and inexplicably, Owen. When she is not simpering or pining for her current love, Tosh is a brilliant…well, apparently she can do anything with machines and computers that she wants. Her skills are poorly defined, so she ends up being like Wesley from Star Trek: The Next Generation, doing whatever is needed that falls outside the skill sets of everyone else. You need someone to rest your servers after an alien attack, go to Tosh. How about shutting down a nuclear reactor? She's the one.

The issue is, again, not that these characters aren't played well. The actors are quite fine at their work; the problem is that I find the characters almost completely unlikable. Owen is mean, but Tosh loves him anyway, and that just makes him more mean. And what's worse, when we finally see some flashbacks about the characters in the next-to-last episode of season two, we find that Owen wasn't mean to his fiancée. He was devoted and charismatic, and then he fell into the TV cliché of having his heart turn to stone upon her death. Except when he is not stony, which only makes him seem to suffer from multiple personalities. And Ianto…well, he truly is just a cipher.

The bright spot of the entire series is Gwen. Although she started out as the everyday character that offers us mundane folks a view and a voice in the world of Torchwood, she has become far more than that. She is the conscience of Torchwood, regularly reminding the team to be more human or take into account that there is a bigger picture. She is efficient, she is a real leader, and she is a complete character. She insists on having a life outside of Torchwood, giving us insight into the niches of her personality, which the spotlight episodes for Tosh and Owen failed to achieve for them. And Eve Myles plays her incredibly well, chewing the scenery when it is required but generally remaining understated in her portrayal and thus far more effective. She has her lapses, which again I blame more on the writing than the actor (Why have a dalliance with mean old Owen? Why is she so attracted to Jack?), but generally her character is dependable, both in its actions and in its portrayal.

[there will be spoilers from here on…read at your own peril]

So I'm describing a series with five main characters, three of whom I don't like, one of whom is a complete mystery, and one of which is just brilliant. This seems a deficit that would be difficult to overcome, but if the storytelling is good beyond the personal bits, with interesting plots and engrossing stories, then the show might be watchable, though only teeth-gratingly so. Alas, the stories are not enough to save my interest.

Generally they start with what could be an interesting premise, but only rarely are those premises fulfilled. Often the resolutions are trite and cliché, predictable from the start of the episode. A few rare episodes show what could really be done, such as season two's "Meat" which was tremendously written and agonizingly played out. What happens when greedy, self-absorbed, normal people discover a way to make money from the alien artifacts that emerge from the rift? In this episode, little attention was paid to the personal lives of the team, perhaps so that the full emotional impact of the story would not be diluted. Butchers are selling alien meat that is making its consumers ill, so Torchwood puts together a sting to find the source. Their expectation is to find a herd of alien cattle, but instead they find a single giant whale-like alien with amazing recuperative powers kept sedated in a warehouse. The butchers carve their product from the side of the still-living creature which then heals from its injury. Torchwood is disgusted at such abuse, and probably would be if it were a terrestrial animal with similar capabilities. But then they discover that the creature is actually sentient, and the horror strikes hard and fast. It was a wrenching episode to watch and a risky thing to try, and a real throw-back to the edgier science fiction of the late 60s and early 70s. That they pulled it off with grace without condescension is a real tribute to the cast and crew of the show. Unfortunately, "Meat" was the exception that proves the rule—that the premises often fall short.

The real clincher was the last episode. In the episode before, "Fragments", someone attempts to kill all the members of Torchwood, giving the show an opportunity to do flashbacks to get some back story on the characters we have been following for two years. At the end of that episode, we discover the villain is Captain John Hart, another member of Jack's time agency (about which we know absolutely nothing still) and somehow he has Jack's long lost brother Gray from the 51st century as a hostage (bearing in mind we barely know about Gray, except that Jack has long suffered guilt for losing him). But as the final episode, "Exit Wounds", goes on, we discover the real villain is Gray himself, who Jack lost track of during an alien invasion when he was nine or ten years old. Apparently Gray was captured by the aliens and tortured for years, all for which he blames Jack. In other words, Jack must pay for something he couldn't control as a child. It stretches believability, but it is easier to decide Gray is insane and go from there (although he's really lucid). Ultimately, Gray causes bombs to go off all over the city of Cardiff and somehow lets lose denizens of the rift to terrorize the city, all in an effort to get Jack away from his team and thus fairly defenseless. We discover that while John Hart is a part of these plans, it is because he has somehow allowed Gray to "molecularly bond" a bomb to him and thus he is being blackmailed with his life.

Hart takes Jack to 27 AD, where Gray directs Jack to be buried alive beneath what will eventually become the city of Cardiff. And since Jack cannot remain dead, he will go through a cycle of awakening and dying, all because he failed to take care of his brother when he was ten years old. Gray's revenge extends to destroying Cardiff as well, and so his distraction becomes far more evil as he releases evil aliens across the city. Along the way, Tosh gets shot and Owen is trapped inside a nuclear power plant that must vent its gases before it melts down (Ianto just sort of stumbles around doing nothing important). And Gwen has her moment; in Jack's absence, she commands the powers of the city of Cardiff, dealing with each emergency as it comes up. Everyone recognizes her strength of character and her leadership.

Meanwhile, Jack is found by Torchwood in 1901 because of the signal emitted from a ring John Hart left with him. Somehow, after 1900 years being buried alive, Jack remains completely sane and still feels guilty about his brother's torture. But he also knows that he cannot meet himself, so Torchwood puts him into cryogenic stasis for another 107 years, until he awakens the very day his brother starts terrorizing the city.

Of course, the day is saved, except that Owen (who is actually an animated dead man because of an earlier misadventure in the second season) is roasted by radioactive waste gas and …well, I guess he doesn't die again, but he has no remains to animate and so is gone. Tosh dies of her gunshot wound. Jack is reunited with his brother and hugs him really hard before putting him into cryogenic stasis, knowing full well if he ever escapes, Gray will do everything to destroy him and the things he loves.

I purposely drew out that description of the episode to emphasize how tedious it was to watch. It was pretty predictable within the possibilities portrayed by the show, and the main villain came completely out of left field. And up to now, Jack has been pretty much able to do whatever needs to be done, except that he can't put away his brother (who tortured him for close to 2000 years!). Even Scott Evil knows you don't leave someone like this with an out to come back and hurt you some more. Owen had to die; he was pretty much ineffective after his first death--not only mean, but mopey too. And Tosh was just too pathetic to let live. Why Ianto gets to continue to make coffee, I have no idea.

The door is open for major changes with nearly half the team being replaced. But it wasn't the actors who made the characters unbearable, and so it doesn't really matter what comes along if they are as poorly written as these were. Here is the perfect opportunity for Gwen to assume leadership of Torchwood and use Jack for what he does best, as an agent, but I doubt the show will go in that direction. Ultimately, there was so much potential, from the actors to the pre-existing character, to the premise of the show. And other than Gwen and the rare strong episode, all of that potential was just wasted. And ultimately that's why I won't watch any more of this show until people I trust tell me I need to see a certain episode: I've got better things to do with my hour spent watching this show than be constantly disappointed at the creative decisions it makes.