Just watched the opening two episodes of Torchwood. I must say after all the hype and build up, I feel somewhat disappointed. It was billed as Doctor Who for grown ups, but I expected so much more from Davies. As an opening to a science fiction series, it pushed all the right buttons, there was more than enough intrigue and mystery. Yet the ending was just far too easy. Come on, we know that Doctor Who could save the planet from annihilation with a twist of his sonic screwdriver and waving around psychic paper but from this mature drama we expect more depth to our characters and more importantly the storyline. The trailers would have you believe that we are in for an action packed adventure on the scale to some Stateside series. Instead we have our central character who is Gwen (and not Captain Jack Harkness as you would believe) making a discovery of this so called secret agency only to be drugged into forgetting everything. As if coming under the guise of delivering ‘Jubilee’ pizza was not enough. For a few minutes, I saw myself on the screen, tapping away late at night after a busy day trying to make some blog notes that would enable writing my blog entry in full the next day easier. However, Cooper was actually trying to note down as much as she could before the effects of the drug kicked in. Only for our special operatives to log into her machine and delete the passage of text, which you would think would clear the word processor page but no, they powered down the whole PC. Talk about taking farfetched to the extreme. If you can forgive this minor technology blooper, you cannot forgive the atrocious storyline. Well, actually the plot was not that bad up to the closing moments, they had built it up extremely well, all these unexplained deaths with a strange weapon, with three blades. Yet for them to undo all this good work by turning it back into a ‘bad apple’ within in the institute itself is a hanging offence. I considered to not watch the second episode, like Sippy but opted against, giving the series a chance to redeem itself. It did, a little. However at times it plays out like a tourist video for Cardiff, Wales rather than a gritty futuristic saga. No disrespect to the city, but there are far more glamourous locations in the world, but even so do we really need a overhead shot of the limited landmarks every few minutes? My only hope is that it gets better, particularly when they eventually find or rather bump into Doctor Who.

Looks like the trusted old bow and arrow is beating all the alien technology of the two latest serials from the Beeb. I suppose a good old fashioned battle of good verus evil was never a match for the science goobledeegook. Maybe with Torchwood we are setting the benchmark too high, afterall, it is a spin of from the longest running science fiction (non continuous) series of all time. (I am not the only one to suffer from an internet addiction.)