© 2008 William Ahearn
During an excursion backpacking through Europe in my misspent youth, I ended up for a day in Cardiff, Wales. A friend had an interview with a theatre company there and we took the train from Newcastle-Under-Lyme on an amazing autumn morning as the flat landscape of the midlands gave way to the dark and rolling hills of Wales. In those days, the Welsh were insistent on reviving their native language and groups of locals armed with wrenches were going around in cars and pulling up to street signs, piling out of the cars and switching the English language signs with Welsh ones before jumping back in the car and speeding off.
That must have been when the signs warning that Cardiff was situated on a rift in the space time continuum went missing.
If only I had known.
That is the basis for “Torchwood,” a Brit sci-fi show that plays a team of odd characters against the even odder alien life forms that slip through the rift creating all kinds of mayhem in the Welsh city. While it’s a spin-off of the cult phenomenon Dr. Who series — that I haven’t seen in years even though it’s the longest running science fiction TV show ever — it reminds me a lot of the film “Men In Black” but much better.
In an aside that I just can’t help, it should be pointed out that the Men In Black (or MIB) first appeared in stories from the dark back roads of conspiracy theory as a repressive force of the US government covering up UFO evidence and killing witnesses to the Kennedy assassination, among other things. MIB were not funny alien hunters in those stories. Hollywood takes its heroes where it can find them, I guess.
Torchwood is a team that is “outside the government [and] beyond the police” headquartered in a subterranean high-tech Bat Cave-type of setup complete with a pterodactyl and holding cells for aliens. The series begins with the classic device of bringing a newcomer into the fold. The innocent tyro, a Cardiff police officer named Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), stumbles upon Torchwood (although in later shows Torchwood appears to be well known to the locals) and joins Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) — and it’s not giving anything away to mention that Jack is dead and has been for years — Dr. Owen Harper (Burn Gorman), computer whiz Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori), and office manager Inato Jones (Gareth David-Lloyd) to keep Wales and the world safe from whatever drifts through the rift.
After watching the first two seasons of “Torchwood,” three things struck me and the first is it reminded me of how much I missed the early seasons of “The X-Files.” “The X-Files” were my Sunday night guilty pleasure and nothing on TV in the US has really replaced it. “Lost” lost me after the second season and not because of the writer’s strike but because cleverness and complication must have some resolution beyond itself. The show became the perpetual distraction machine and once the polar bears and Michelle Rodriguez were gone, so was I.
“Torchwood” also reminded me of everything that annoys me — and fascinates me — about science fiction.
(If it’s all right with all of you, I’ll dispense with the tedious conversation about the differences of sci-fi, science fiction, speculative fiction and all the other terms that the genre squad loses sleep over. We all know what we’re talking about here.)
“Torchwood” subscribes to that almost Biblical proposition of sci-fi that “the gadget giveth and the gadget taketh away.” During the hey day of science fiction during the 1950s, one could see how that would be a dominant trend with all of the household appliances and the budding space program taking off at the same time. Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (not be confused with “Blade Runner”) deals with these ideas. But to me, the drama of a given situation is transported into nowhere when the, say, Tzammian brain-boring space flea can be stopped with the Clothian deep-wave generator that was stored after the rift spit it out one rainy evening years ago. The drama and the story just get lost in a gadget for gadget’s sake parody of classic science fiction. It’s also interesting that all of the aliens are hostile, for the most part, and few seem to have any real brains or language. Granted, these are not aliens from a vastly advanced civilization that flew here in mystically powered saucers. They’re just creatures who have fallen in the rift.
There were two back-to-back episodes in the second season that summed up my feelings about science fiction. The first was about a traveling show that had been filmed years ago and when a theatre was going to show some vintage films, the film of the traveling performers was shown and they were somehow brought back to life, stepped out of the film and were now going around sucking the life out of people. The solution to the problem is as tedious and predictable as the problem itself and I almost stopped watching the series right there.
It’s a good thing I didn’t because what followed was one of the best stories I’ve seen in this genre in a long time. The show involves missing people — people who have disappeared from the streets of Cardiff for no apparent reason — and Gwen becomes involved with the search for a young teen. Working with Toshi, Gwen discovers that the rift is two-way. Not only do aliens and artifacts come through the rift, but that people from this side can end up in some far-flung destination somewhere out in space when they enter the rift. The disappearances line up with recorded rift activity and Gwen — after being warned by Jack to stop — continues her investigation.
What she finds is that some of the people who have slipped into the rift have been recovered and are being held at a secret installation on a small island near Cardiff. What follows is an incredibly good story about the consequences of a space time continuum rift on the lives of real people and how the truth does not set you free.
That is where the real power of sci-fi lives; when it becomes more than just some goofball in a blowfish mask running around until the team can find some gizmo to subdue it. So I’ll stick with “Torchwood” through the next season and hope for another gem to make it worthwhile.