Elizabeth Sandifer

The real tragedy is, it’s a better logo.

It’s December 3rd, 2006. Take That are at number one with “Patience,” just ahead of “Smack That” by Akon and Eminem. Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake, Emma Bunton, and Muse are also charting. In news, Michael Grade, by now BBC Chairman, is poached by ITV. The British government declines to extend copyright protection from 50 years to 95, though the EU eventually took care of it for them in 2011. Clive Goodman pleads guilty of conspiring to hack the phones of Princes William and Harry, and Augusto Pinochet has the heart attack that kills him.

Speaking of death, with They Keep Killing Suzie Torchwood finally comes to what, in hindsight, was always its theme. All of the wondrous spaces we’ve been exploring over the preceding seven hours turn out to be metaphors for the big one: the realm of the dead. This is not, strictly speaking, surprising or complicated. The argument that the wondrous cultural spaces that Torchwood has been playing with – ones we’ve already seen are deeply entwined with the larger British culture – are metaphors for death. The spirit world is in many ways the archetypal wondrous space – the one that all other wondrous spaces are just echoes and reflections of.

Jacques Derrida, who I don’t think I’ve annoyed you all by discussing yet, suggests that one of the key aspects of writing is its battle against death. Writing preserves the idea of the speaker after the moment of death, albeit in an altered form that is not so much the speaker as a haunting ghost of them. Similar ideas abound in media studies – Friedrich Kittler has, in his landmark Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, the lovely declaration that “The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture.” The idea permeates so many different sorts of books and movies as to be inescapable; it’s also the underlying fantasy of detective fiction, which Torchwood owes a huge debt to. Solving the mystery is a way of communicating with the deceased – receiving one final message from them.

And Torchwood, in particular, was always going to be about death. It had to be. The basic conceit of its lead character necessitated it. You can’t do a show whose central mystery is “why can’t Jack die” without having death become something of a major theme. You certainly can’t after combining the premise with a first episode about a glove that brings people back from the dead. The show committed itself to being about death from its first episode, a fact that continues to have profound implications right up until the last episode.

Given all of this, Torchwood’s actual take on death has to be one of the most striking things about it. In a show where everything has a wondrous dimension, where the world is vast and full of mysteries, and where some notion of the soul is clearly bought into on a fundamental level, we have a depiction of death that is frighteningly simple: when you die, you’re dead.…

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Well that’s all a bit SHODAN.

It’s November 26th, 2006. “Smack That” has been unseated by Take That, with Emma Bunton, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, and Girls Aloud also charting. In news, Michael Richards has his racist meltdown at a comedy club, and Alexander Litvinenko died of polonium poisoning in London. Israel and Palestine declare a ceasefire over the Gaza Strip, and Augusto Pinochet accepts, in one of the greatest euphemistic hedges ever, “political” responsibility for everything that happened in Chile during his regime.

On television, meanwhile, we have Toby Whithouse’s second contribution to the world of Doctor Who, Greeks Bearing Gifts. Those who suspect Torchwood of largely being Joss Whedon’s Angel have their work cut out for them here. Technically the underlying plot here is actually nicked from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, specifically the third season episode “Earshot,” as Angel only ever did a demon who could read your thoughts if you were singing, but that’s largely beside the point: this is still the most Whedonesque episode of Torchwood to date.

The basic premise of either of Joss Whedon’s fantasy shows is that the horror is always a metaphor for something personal – in Buffy either for an aspect of high school, college, or early adulthood, in Angel, whatever puts it a few years ahead of Buffy at the time. In this model whatever supernatural goings-on there may be in an episode, the point is really for the supernatural to illustrate character development. Phrased this way, for all that the supernatural investigation team of five people, three male, two female, led by a mysterious immortal with a dark past is not actually the most original concept Russell T Davies has ever come up with, Torchwood can actually be seen as a reasonable advance of the Angel format, in that it moves from the comparatively narrow structure of the supernatural as a metaphor for individual experience and towards a story about the psychic relationships of various cultural spaces.

Greeks Bearing Gifts, on the other hand, is a perfectly competent episode of Angel with the Torchwood cast. Its central piece of supernatural technology, the mind-reading pendant, is strictly there to provide a metaphoric representation of Tosh’s isolation and awkwardness. Her ability to know what other people are thinking becomes a metaphoric contrast to her own social ineptitude and inability to express herself to her colleagues. This is not, prima facie, a bad approach – Buffy and Angel were great shows, and Tosh needed a focus episode, making this sort of approach a more tempting match than it might have been. We might also note that they hired Toby Whithouse for it, he having already written the Buffy homage School Reunion for Doctor Who this year.

But it feels slender for a Torchwood episode. Interestingly, it’s not slender in the way of Cyberwoman or Countrycide, which had reasonably nuanced premises that were then wedded to high-octane action episodes. No, Greeks Bearing Gifts is slender conceptually, offering very little to talk about in its themes.…

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Did you know that the New York Times Crossword Puzzle has something called the “breakfast test,” which declares that you can’t use any words in a crossword that would be upsetting to read over breakfast? This is one difference between the New York Times Crossword Puzzle and TARDIS Eruditorum.

It’s November 19th, 2006. Akon and Eminem are at number one with “Smack That,” a subtle and nuanced look at contemporary sexual relations in much the way Day One isn’t. Justin Timberlake, Take That, Robbie Williams, and Westlife also chart. In news, around 98% of the population of South Ossetia votes for independence from Georgia. Nobody cares. Java is released under the GPL. Mitch McConnell becomes Republican leader in Congress, succeeding Bill Frist. Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, becomes Speaker of the House. The Playstation 3 comes out, Tony Blair describes Iraq as “pretty much a disaster,” and, the day this story airs, the Nintendo Wii comes out.

The story, of course, is Countrycide, which is widely beloved and popular and which nobody has anything bad to say about. Ah, no, you’re not going to buy that? Fine. Countrycide is Torchwood’s second effort at a big spectacle of a story. Much like Chris Chibnall’s previous contribution, Cyberwoman, it’s a straight action story, designed primarily to be thrilling. It’s not what you’d call an enormously complex concept. That said, it’s still at least somewhat clever in its approach – this is the first televised Doctor Who thing to feature no alien or supernatural intervention since Black Orchid nearly a quarter-century earlier.

No, “it’s not aliens, it’s humans, who are far worse than any aliens” is not exactly the most innovative twist in the history of Doctor Who. But it’s a solid one worth dusting off every once in a while, and the fact that Torchwood can take the “rational explanation behind seemingly irrational events” motif from Scooby Doo and make it into a piece of sickening horror is a fair justification for doing it. The ingredients of this are all familiar, but that’s writing for you. There’s a perfectly serviceable nexus of ideas underlying this story.

The problem is that the execution is a bit… well, but even here there’s a defense to be mustered. The story amounts to doing The Wicker Man for the modern day. We should pause and contextualize that. For all that The Wicker Man is treated as being primarily about pagan rites, mostly by geeky pagan types who are understandably eager to lay cultural claim to one of the best movies ever made, it is in fact not about the supernatural at all, but rather about the fear of the rural. The closest cousin to The Wicker Man is probably Deliverance or The Hills Have Eyes, the latter remade in 2006 as part of a general and unfortunate trend in . It’s a story about the remote parts of the country and the bizarre things they get up to there.

So basically we have Torchwood trying to do horror in a particularly bad era of horror.…

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Dance Magic Dance, O Human Child…

It’s November 12th, 2006. Westlife are at number one with “The Rose,” with U2 & Green Day, Beyonce, Girls Aloud, and Madonna also charting. In news, Democrats regain control of the House and Senate for the first time since 1994, and three men are convicted of racially motivated murder in the 2004 death of Kriss Donald in Glasgow, a case notable because Donald was white and his killers were of Pakistani descent.

A reminder, then, that the question of alien worlds and wondrous others contains an at times brutal dimension. This is always the unsettling possibility of the “other world.” What if it simply does not want us? What if we are wholly extraneous to its wonders, the relationship completely one-sided? What if we are just raw matter, like trees or meat, granted no value save what we can be transformed into? This is the horror at the heart of Sapphire and Steel, a show whose cosmology was deliberately incomprehensible so that all that could be interpreted was the basic fact of something scary and the outline of its narrative rules.

It’s difficult to think of any decision taken in setting up the first season of Torchwood quite as sound as getting Peter J. Hammond to contribute an episode. Still an active television writer, but mostly better known for his crime and mystery output (he contributed two episodes of Midsomer Murders the same year as this), Torchwood was the perfect fit for him – the shell of a cop show wrapped around the supernatural horror he used to write to such effect. True to form, he strips the underlying metaphor of Torchwood down to one of its most basic forms – the cultural original of the “wondrous space alongside the mundane one,” namely the Land of Fairy.

The value of using the basic form is that much of the narrative is pre-existing. As long as nothing is inconsistent with the basic high concept tagline of “evil fairies” the story can hang together without much explanation – which is basically the trick Sapphire and Steel used. This means that the fairies do not have to be evil fairies in any sort of conscious or motivated sense. It’s sufficient that they look like they belong to the broad category of evil fairies. In practice what we have is something far more unnerving – indifferent fairies. Fairies who simply do not care about us or our world, and who are best understood as features of nature, not as an “other civilization.”

So the fairies are presented as creatures from the dawn of time – as an unfathomable order of things that only Jack can truly understand, and that only because of the weird span of his life. Even given this his understanding is choppy – it consists mainly of having been alive enough to have had his world intersect the Land of Fairy before. Jack’s description of them is at once evocative and vague: “something you can only half see like a glimpse, like something out of the corner of your eye with a touch of myth, a touch of the spirit world, a touch of reality, all jumbled together.…

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