It’s February 13th, 2008. Still Basshunter at number one, with the same bunch of folks on the lower charts, along with Lupe Fiasco, David Jordan, and Wet Wet Wet. In news, Mitt Romney drops out of the GOP primaries, the Writers Guild of America strike resolves, and Obama keeps winning stuff, leading to a desperate shakeup in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which continues to be blatantly unable to win a majority of delegates. The military government of Myanmar agrees to a referendum on a new constitution that will begin devolving power from it, Anonymous bursts onto the scene of political protest with a series of actions against Scientology, and the US decides that maybe waterboarding isn’t nice and should be banned.
While on television, Torchwood’s second season plods miserably on. So much so that at this point I have to admit defeat. There are not 2000 words to be said about every episode of Torchwood this season. Where the first season was at least interesting, really regardless of its quality, this season is simply banal. And Adam serves as my breaking point. It is an episode that is spectacular in its complete lack of anything interesting. More than any other Torchwood episode to date, this one seems designed to mimic a specific episode of American television. Adam is a direct remake of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Superstar,” to the point of using the trick of redoing the opening credits to include the fake character who forms the premise of the episode.
There are, of course, huge differences. “Superstar” was about Jonathan, who was steadily built up over multiple seasons from a recurring background character to a significant character in his own right, until finally getting an episode in which he, for mysterious and unknown reasons, becomes not just a mainstay of the Scooby Gang, but one who has supposedly been there for ages. Jonathan is a problem in the episode and his rise to power is undone, but he remains a more or less sympathetic character and, though he remains problematic and is never quite a good guy, he’s also always carefully kept from being an outright villain.
Adam, on the other hand, is about a malevolent character. He rapes Tosh and revels in his cruelty to Ianto. He’s firmly a monster of the week; he’s killed off at the end of the episode, and he’s never to be spoken of again. Indeed, given that the entire episode is wiped from the minds of all of the main characters, future use of the character is pretty much salted earth. He’s not even going to be referenced again, little yet actually brought back. There’s, right off the bat, a very different sort of approach in play here.
But the broad strokes are all here. Adam, like Superstar, is an episode designed to let all of the main cast play slightly different versions of their characters. So we have Owen and Tosh’s roles in their relationship flipped, with Owen becoming the shy one and Tosh becoming the confident and sexually active one.
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