Rate and Discuss 4.5 Categories of Life

[Rob McCow]

Tonight's super nasty episode of Torchwood has just finished - but what do you think?

[SiHart]

Poor old Vera. I'm quite distressed. She was the best bloody character in the show.

[Dino]

Well... did not see that coming! Obvious once you think about it really.
And I knew Danes wouldn't help Jack... as there were 5 more episodes!

[Rob McCow]

Can we give up now?

[Dino]

Can we give up now?

Nooo! We need to see how it ends!

[Si Hunt]

It was watchable and better than two weeks ago, but on reflection this was by turns grim, silly or dull.

I don't get why every single member of Torchwood had to try and smuggle their way into one of the Category 1 places, very likely to be lethal and impossible to escape from and yet everyone was desperate to get into one. EVERY SINGLE MEMBER!

I didn't get the point of Oswald's speech at all. Why did he have to say "revelation"? And when approaching Oswald, why did Jack spend ten minutes positioning himself in a moody bit of shadow for a few moments and then running away again?

I hope they explore what happens when people are ashes, so they twitch and leap around as if still alive. It's all getting rather grim isn't it?

Si.

[SiHart]

To be honest I'm sitting here now wondering whether to bother with the rest of it. Tonight it just seemed nasty.

[Simon R]

It's always been a nasty programme. The cannibal one and the one with the person screaming for 24hours day (or whatever it was) both left me depressed not to mention the end of "Children of Earth".

Burning was actually quite mild to my theories...I thought it would be corrosive acid or grinding to a pulp. Or dumping in the sea.

[SiHart]

Ahh- it really could have been worse and nastier, couldn't it?

[Simon R]

It'll probably get worse before the end.

[Si Hunt]

To be fair, it's an interesting point of debate. Aside from Vera, who shouldn't have been there, the people all should have died. They were all categorised as beyond help, and none we saw were concious. Was it really that grim? Thats what we do to corpses.

Actually why were they all unconcious? Last week a woman got crushed to a pulp and she was still blinking.

Si.

[Simon R]

One flaw I spotted - wasn't it lucky the module things opened from the inside when Rex wanted to get out but not when Vera Wang was trapped inside? Or did they explain that?

[shada pavlova]

No, Mr Garrison locked the modules down when Vera was inside.

[Rob McCow]

Did you enjoy it, Harry?

I'm thinking there must have been a production meeting where they sat down and discussed how they could do 'Concentration camp style deaths' but actually make it worse.

[davethesailor]

Is there any news on how this is doing ratings wise? Are people actually watching it? Will there be more? What about in the states?

Oh and I'm really enjoying!

[Si Hunt]

No news on renewal yet.

From what I gather it's doing "as well as can be expected". Pretty well. Sort of 5.5m in the UK, Doctor Who gets about 6-8m.

Si.

[Zbigniev Hamson]

I didn't get the point of Oswald's speech at all. Why did he have to say "revelation"?

I think it was just a rather clumsy way to make it apparent that he was actually reading the woman's speech, and therefore siding with her/Ficor, and not just making up his own speech as he seemed to be doing. Just to inject a little bit more tension they put it as the last word. But I don't think it was done very well.

One thing I'm definitely sick of now.... news reader montages. Complete with zoomy in "TV screen" effects and little channel changey noises. You know, the sorts of channel changey noises that TVs haven't actually made for about 30 years. I was actually fed up with that by the second part of Aliens of London back in 2005, so it's really nice to see the tired old effect still being used 6 years later. I'm not sure if you can blame RTD or the director for that though.

[Zbigniev Hamson]

Actually why were they all unconcious? Last week a woman got crushed to a pulp and she was still blinking.

Not to mention the fact that Jack made such a big deal two episodes ago about how everyone was staying conscious all the time, and Rex said he'd stayed conscious throughout his car accident. Either things are changing now and the Miracle is becoming less strong somehow, or it's just another example of the kind of consistent writing we've come to expect

[Nyder]

I'm enjoying it and the storyline(s) are holding my attention... but.... to my mind it's like I'm watching "24". It's lost its British sense of quirkiness. And poor old Captain Jack does seem to be relegated to nearly an extra (that's how it feels like to me anyway )

[Alex]

No news on renewal yet.

From what I gather it's doing "as well as can be expected". Pretty well. Sort of 5.5m in the UK, Doctor Who gets about 6-8m.

Si.

Last night it only got 4.1m, though that's only the overnights. Ratings might not come in to it however, according to this DS news piece:

Starz CEO Chris Albrecht has revealed that Torchwood may not be picked up for another season.

Albrecht told reporters at the TV Critics tour that the sci-fi drama's future is dependant on the schedule of series creator Russell T. Davies.

"Torchwood is not one of the shows we went into thinking about a yearly return," he explained. "It's about Russell T. Davies [because] he has a lot of things on his plate. If Torchwood is at the top of his list, that will effect the future of Torchwood."

Davies is currently developing a new drama series named Cucumber with Showtime, it was announced last month.

However, the showrunner previously told Digital Spy that he was having second thoughts about leaving Torchwood.

"I say [I'll quit] at the beginning of every year and then I get to the end [of the series] and I love it again," he explained. "So I don't know. It is time that I moved on and did something else, but we'll just see how well [Torchwood: Miracle Day] does."

I thought last night's was okay, maybe a 6/10, but it's still moving too slowly and I feel all of this could have been condensed in to three episodes.

[Andrew Curnow]

If it was a HUGE ratings hit, I'm sure they'd manage to make another series whether RTD was available or not - he wasn't actually much involved with either of the first two runs was he (especially not the second one).

I enjoyed this week's episode more than previous ones (just caught up with it this morning) although I sort of agree with Si about why they ALL decided to go undercover, as if that would be a good thing! Not to mention Jack then deciding to go walkabout, rather than 'manning the office' just in case anybody should call for help.

But moaning aside, it did definitely try to step up a gear this week, which is a good sign. I'm not sure we're really any closer to finding out why this is all happening (if the answer comes out as a glib 'so we could sell more medicine' then that would be a really naff anticlimax) but at least I sort of vaguely care a little bit now.

Jack did look a bit silly walking along the beach in his big thick coat though!

[Si Hunt]

Who remembers when the rule was that one of them had to always stay behind in the base with Tim?

Si.

[Andrew Curnow]

It's a bit like the whole Enterprise crew beaming down to the planet.

[Perry Vale]

Very grim, as others have said, but for some reason it didn't really hold my attention very well. Not sure how I'd vote it, really, and certain aspects did seem to be contradicting what had gone before.

I thought Rex could have possibly tried to look around for a solution to opening the door of the module with Vera in, rather than continually knocking on the window then filming it with his camera...

[Jason Thompson]

I'm starting to wish this story would move somewhere a bit quicker now, and this episode showed some serious departures for the characters.

Why bother with the charade of Rhys as 'Yvonne Pallister''s driver if she's going to kiss him in full view of anyone when she arrives? Why couldn't he just be her husband or boyfriend?

The whole 'category Jack' scene with Esther didn't seem to come from the same uncertain character we've seen for four full episodes up to that point.

Vera went from being the most intelligent person in the show to being so stupid she walks into parts of an overflow camp she already knows is part of some big dangerous cover-up that she's now been fully briefed on and thinks that threatening the guy who runs it (who is clearly a little unhinged and has an armed goon with him) with prosecution is a good idea. At the very least she was chancing being arrested and confined (though I didn't see her being killed coming). The whole point of an intelligence gathering mission is that you have to come out of it to report back you stupid woman!

One thing that's already been mentioned is that suddenly we have unconscious people and people with no brain function. The whole big deal of this 'miracle' was that there were no unconscious people or people with no brain function. The people are not just living they are 'so alive', and Rex was conscious throughout his 'death', so he was never a category 1.

And of course one of the most unbelievable things is hwo quickly the whole world adopted a new set of categories. It takes months for anything to get done in one government in one country, but here the whole world agrees in a few days?

The story is intriguing enough to follow, but not so much that I'd be wishing away the week between episodes.