2.2 Sleeper

[SiHart]

This week, it's Joe Lidster's episode- Sleeper, and it's one I'm really looking forward to seeing as I've really enjoyed his BF work...

Si xx

[Joseph Lidster]

Awh, thanks Si! Really good of you to say but... erm... it's not mine! It's by a writer called James Moran who's written the film Severance and one of the next series of Doctor Who. And he's a lovely bloke and his episode is fantastic!!

Mine is Episode 8 which is aaaaages away!!

[SiHart]

Bugger.

Just ignore me.

I'm still really looking forward to Joe's episode!

Si xx

[Milky Tears]

'Sleeper' is "the best Torchwood episode to date", according to the Digital Spy preview.*





* just so everyone can rate it 2/10 now!

[Simon R]

The Radio Times seems a little uncertain...

[P-Bal]

I've got to be, got to be certain, I've got to be so sure.

But I might be a little sketchy around verse two.

[Alex]

Hmmm, I've got to say that I struggled to keep interested in this one, it took far too long to get going and I wasn't emotionally invested in the storyline as I didn't think that the actress who played the undercover alien was that good.

It caught my interest when suddenly it seemed that the country was going to be blown up by nuclear bombs, but that revelation came a little bit too late in the proceedings to feel like a real threat.

There were a few nice snippets of dialogue (I liked Owen's suggestion that they should all have sex), but Ianto still seems horribly out of place, and I'm bored of Gwen being distraught at the end of each episode. I thought the gore was a bit OTT too, and this comes from someone who normally likes that kind of stuff.

5/10, not bad, but not that good either.

[Rob McCow]

A very strong episode, loads of action, but not without a few niggles.

It would have worked a lot better if it hadn't followed Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, which on reflection is the most adolescent load of old w*nk that's ever been put on the f*cking telly. (Hello Asburdity Thread!) It took me a while to get used to the tone of Sleeper, which was a lot more sensible.

It was a bit like Terminator 2 - Blyth Drwg Day.

In a way it's dissappointing that after the first series made it clear that not all aliens want to invade, here we get a straightforward Doctor-Who-In-The-70's style invasion. Blah blah, why did earings woman blow herself up just to cut off the phone network when she could have helped with setting off the nukes, blah blah.

Although what the episode was actually about, which was what it could be like to find that you're not who you think you are, was handled fairly well.

[Wayne]

Well that was much better! Far more my cup of tea than last week's ep. I prefer the more serious tone of most of the S1 eps, & this definitely fitted the bill.
More comments later, but 8/10 for now.

[Si Hunt]

Surely the biggest flaw was - given it's history of foiling alien invasions, why wasn't the first item on the agenda to kill the members of Torchwood?

Si.

[Rob McCow]

given it's history of foiling alien invasions

Name one!

[Milky Tears]

The Whatsitsname Invasion Of Thingy

[SiHart]

I thought it was great, very enjoyable and tense with some great explosions. Much better than last week.

Si xx

[Paul Monk]

I really dunno. Once it got going it was pretty good and a lot of the false memory stuff was well handled but like Alex I got distracted from it by other things and I sort of lost interest. I'm not really sure why. I thought Owen was quite amusing though and I really quite liked Ianto despite what everyone else thinks of him.

[Si Hunt]

I always enjoy Torchwood and this was no different. Initially I wondered if it had the legs for its duration, but things picked up when the other 'Sleepers' began to wake up. At times it was comically funny, and I'm reminded of my thought last year of the Doctor Who make-up boys suddenly being let 'out the traps' - bits of this were like a spoof horror film, most notably the scene where the screaming woman had blood splattered over her face. Some of it was also gloriously nasty, and I wondered if we really needed the 'crunch' of the abandoned pram as it careered into a car off-screen!

The ending was pure Terminator and all the better for it, and praise to that brilliant stagey performance of the final Sleeper bloke as he relentlessly tried to reach the nukes. Aside from the big flaw I already mentioned (if they have so much intelligence, specifically on Torchwood, why don't they try to take that out first, knowing it's their biggest threat) and how exactly the sleepers have managed to assimilate all this data (I wouldn't imagine that people disguised as housewifes and office workers would have access to nuclear disarmenant codes, unless they somehow went walkies unnoticed during the night) it was great mindless fun.

It's a shame that, one way or the other, such deliberate attention has to be given to the level of gore or violence though. In Doctor Who, you don't get a scrap of blood where perhaps it might be effective, in Torchwood they coat everything in guts for the sake of it. Why not just show what seems appropriate for the story/tone of scene in question in all cases?

Si.

[duncan]

Sleeper managed to retain a huge chunk of its audience from the massively hyped first episode. This week it scored 3.4 million viewers – down only very slightly from last week‘s 3.7 million.

Over on ITV, Honest only managed 3.7 million. On BBC1 Crimewatch had 4.5 million viewers and Grand Designs on Channel 4 had 4 million viewers, so there wasn’t really much between them.

[Milky Tears]

Five stars from Digital Spy

[Larry]

not quite as good as episode 1 but still very enjoyable stuff.

[Simon R]

I thought it was much better than last week with a lot less "trying too hard" and more plot. Alas I fell asleep about halfway through and missed the end and most of the good bits.

I still think Ianto is very wooden.

[Wayne]

I thought it was much better than last week

Alas I fell asleep about halfway through

You must've been really impressed with last week's then!

[FlyingBeastie]

I'm gonna sound really thick just now but...

We have a writer on the board???

[Wayne]

It's no big deal. My Mum had talked me to write before my first day at school.


(and it hasn't improved much since)

[cyberchris35]

I liked this episode and I liked the idea of aliens being sleeper agents and hiding as normal humans until the time is right to attack. I think that there should be more better stuff for the rest of the cast instead of being pushed aside for most of the episode in favour of Jack and Gwen. I would really like more stuff for Ianto as I think his character is great.
In summing up I would say this episode is slightly better than the first and I hope the rest get's better.

[terrycooper]

I agree - much better than episode 1. Darker in tone, little homages to Terminator, Predator , War Of The Worlds, with no gratuitous sex references or forced expletives. Plus my friend Claire was in it (the woman who got her neck broken!) I find Torchwood works better when they're NOT trying to be sexy or funny. This was more X-Files meets Terminator. Jolly good.
By the way, where did Ianto's joke about "Hello? See? ALL the phones are dead!" come from..it reminds me of something I've seen before.....?

[Dirk Gently]

I liked tis much more than last weeks. The tone was better & the story worked well.