Sitting down to watch episode one (or Day One) of the new all-week third series of Torchwood, 'Children of Earth' is a bit like, Stuff imagines, sending your child off to school for the very first time. You're proud of him, obviously, he looks smart in his nice school uniform and polished shoes and you really hope he gets on well, fits in, doesn't make a fool of himself and is as bright and clever as you think he is. So it is with 'Torchwood', playing with the big boys now. Hidden away in the shadows of first BBC3 and then BBC2, and despite scoring good viewing figures at both its previous homes, the show seemed a bit more exposed now, in the cold harsh light of BBC1 with all the expectations a spotlight slot on the Corporation's most popular channel brings. Screened across 5 consecutive nights at 5pm this is proper adult TV now and where fans/viewers could make allowances for the wild swings in narrative tone of the first two series, the adolescent schoolboy nudge-nudge stuff which rolled so many eyebrows, the sci-fi trappings which marked the show out as "cult TV sci-fi", a prime time BBC1 audience is unlikely to be so forgiving. In short, 'Children of Earth' was where Torchwood had to really grow up, to put away its childish things and tell an imaginative story for mature adults who long ago stopped sniggering at the 'f' word. Yes, that one... Could Torchwood do it? Was its inherent cheesiness always going to be a bar to it crossing over into the mainstream, something few science-ficiton shows are really ever able to do? It's now or never...
On the evidence of 'Day One', screened on Monday 6th July 2009, this is the best shot the show has of reaching out beyond the geeks and the anoraks (sorry, geeks and anoraks). And if it doesn't and this mini-series turns out to be, as rumoured, the show's last hurrah, then it's going out in some style. This is the Torchwood I wanted to see four years ago when the show was first announced. This is Torchwood with proper long trousers on, telling a fascinating and thrilling story with wit and dynamism, its characters finally fully-developed and not just cliche-spouting cyphers. This, as I'd hoped, is Torchwood cloned with Quatermass cloned with State of Play, albeit with a heightened sense of (melo)drama and a genuine and palpable sense of scale.
Russell T Davies (you may have heard of him) scripted this first episode and his agenda is clear. Introduce the show and its core characters and raison d'etre to an audience who may have heard of it but never seen it, dump the camp sci-fi trappings (the Torchwood SUV, the underground Batcave - the "great big sci-fi superbase"), give Jack Harkness, Gwen and Ianto some depth as characters and give them, and the world, an extra-terrestrial threat which isn't (yet) some mass of wobbling rubber or vaguely-unconvincing CGI. Throw in a dash of Government cover-up and conspiracy, stir in a dash of paranoia, Village of the Damned style weird kids and lots and lots of soldiers with guns. Then rip Torchwood itself out of its comfort zone and see what happens next...
It all starts off in Scotland in 1965 when a bunch of kids on a coach outing are lured into the open by a shining white light. Flash-forward to the modern day and kids all over the world are rooted to the spot, stock still. Torchwood's interest is piqued, the Government are concerned - something like this, it seems, has happened before. A few hours later the kids all stop again, this time letting out a worldwide unearthly scream before intoning in modulated voices "We Are Coming." Brrr... It's an intriguing mystery and if Day One has any fault it's that the mystery itself is sidelined for a while as Davies sets about layering some meat onto the bones of his three remaining Torchwood personnel. So we see Jack making contact with his daughter - now approaching middle-aged as Jack, immortal, never ages - and we see Ianto travel home to visit his sister on her grubby council estate and face a comical grilling about his 'secret' relationship with his boss. All this, and a bit of fluff between Gwen and her chunky husband Rhys, is good stuff, beautifully written by Davies displaying once again his razor-sharp ear for the nuances of human relaitonships and naturalistic dialogue but, dumped as it is twenty minutes into the episode, does tend to perilously slow down the pace of the drama and distract from the story most of the audience had tuned in for. It's not hard to imagine some zapper-happy viewers getting bored with all the chit-chat and flicking over to watch 'The Hotel Inspectors' on 5...or something. Whilst appreciating that it's necessary to flesh out your characters a bit, particularly when there's a chance a large part of your audience may never have met them before, it seems a bit risky to pile on the domestic stuff when the real drama of your plot is still only being hinted at.
But when the episode really kicks into gear it kicks in big style. Government minister Frobiser (the brilliant Peter Capaldi) is given no support by the Prime Minister and left to make his own decisions/mistakes...which leads to the issuing of a 'blank page' elimination order when the decree comes down that maybe it's time to rewrite history and erase the people who might be a threat to British security in the emerging situation. As we canter towards the end of the first episode, a potential new Torchwood member turns out to be the very worst sort of traitor, Jack is turned into a human bomb and, with Gwen and Ianto running for their lives, the Torchwood Hub is blown to smithereens and Jack Harkness is torn apart.
I can't imagine that anyone who sat through this entire first episode won't feel compelled to come back for more. With genuine big screen production values, stunning direction (from Who regular Euros Lyn who's really given Torchwood a slick new look here), some trademark Davies laugh-out-loud moments, powerful performances all around (but why does John Barrowman run like such a girl??) this is as big and flashy a TV production as we've seen on UK television for some time. I may have my misgivings about the wisdom of skewing this first episode towards the kitchen-sink stuff but I'm so happy to report that Torchwood, on the evidence of this episode, has finally - finally! - fulfilled the potential it always had back when it was first mooted. I think this is going to be one Hell of a week of must-see drama.
The kid's doing fine. I think he's going to be okay now he's playing with the bigger boys...
Torchwood: Children of Earth continues at 9pm on BBC1 in the UK all week. Further reviews will appear later in the week.
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