What do you mean I have to take the battery out to swap games?

It’s October 29th, 2006. McFly are at number one with “Star Girl,” with Beyonce, Razorlight, and Amy Winehouse also charting. In news, George W. Bush signs into law a bill ordering the construction of a fence on the US/Mexico border, and severe wildfires caused by arson rage in California. On television, meanwhile, Torchwood airs its third episode, Ghost Machine.

With Ghost Machine we see Torchwood finally starting to show off its range, moving beyond the straightforward focus on alien presence and into other genres. This is not a surprise as such – Doctor Who, after all, has long used science fiction to do more than traditional sci-fi stories. Nevertheless, it’s another step in the process of Torchwood mirroring the 2005 season of Doctor Who and using each of its early episodes to stake an entirely new claim for what the series can be. Having established itself as the sexy X-Files, Torchwood calmly (and thoroughly in line with how The X-Files actually worked, as distinct from the usual memory of The X-Files in which the day-to-day is completely overshadowed by the godforsaken mytharc) moves on to doing a ghost story in which the eponymous piece of alien technology is little more than a MacGuffin to set up the real plot, a fairly classic ghost story of long forgotten crimes.

Ghost Machine is, however, a thorough oddity. Structurally speaking, it’s bizarre – the first twelve minutes focus entirely on investigating the alien artifact, not on what turns out to be the story’s real plot, the unsolved murder of Lizzie Lewis. Even after that Lizzie Lewis’s plot, if you’ll pardon the choice of a word that tips my hand a bit, haunts the narrative, slowly exerting its influence. This is interesting, because in most regards this is bog standard “and now for the supporting cast” material – having done two episodes setting up Gwen, we now expect that we’ll see focus episodes on Ianto, Tosh, and Owen. (This actually gets quietly subverted with the fifth and sixth episodes, which hold off from focusing on Tosh. If this weren’t delaying the other female character, it would be easier to be happy about that.) And sure enough, Ghost Machine expands Owen’s character considerably.

On one level this is necessary, as Owen is by miles the least sympathetic character on the team at first. This isn’t just because of the fact that the first episode sets him up as a rapist – that is bad, but it’s fairly obvious by this point that Russell T Davies was not actually trying to make Owen that unsympathetic and evil. At this point the “obviously not what the writer’s intent was” defense used for Mark Gatiss in The Unquiet Dead applies, though in this case the blindness involved in missing the fact that you’re having one of your male leads become a rapist really does deserve serious condemnation. It really is the single worst thing Russell T Davies has ever written.…

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I’m somebody’s fetish.

It’s still October 22nd. Stupid double bills. In any case, Day One.

Thing one about Day One is all the sex. Torchwood gets a fair amount of stick for being an “adult” show in a childish and superficial way – that is, to be obsessed with sex and violence. On the one hand, Day One rather supports that claim by having the first thing Torchwood does once it sets up its premise by fighting the sex alien. On the other hand, the episode manages to have its cake and eat it too with that absolutely marvelous sequence of Carys walking through the streets assailed by all the images of sex around her. Which is to say, yes, Torchwood is flagrantly about sex on a regular basis, but this isn’t entirely unreasonable given the apparent centrality of sex to our day-to-day lives. And while sex may be frustratingly inescapable, it’s also, if we’re being honest, a topic that is poorly served by the bulk of television, which handles sex very badly if at all.

Torchwood is a mixed bag on this – as I noted, the sci-fi rape in Everything Changes is absolutely appalling. But this episode does quite well with a number of small but deft touches – having Carys’s phone conversation as she’s infected by the alien eventually play into the plot, for instance, or the quiet establishment of her home life. The scene where she confronts Eddie is a marvelous depiction of the real sorts of tangles of contemporary relationships, which don’t follow television’s usual unwavering lines of clear-cut boyfriends and girlfriends. It’s a step more complex than just having her go after an ex-boyfriend, and considerably more honest.

Equally, however, there is something willfully provocative about having your second episode feature the sex alien. Even though it is, all things being equal, a pretty good sex alien, it’s still visibly and tangibly a stunt. Then again, this is in many ways the same structure that Doctor Who used in 2005 – take the second episode and go as far in a given direction as it is possible to go. So, yes, Day One has the sex alien, but it has it for the simple reason that putting the sex alien in at the start means that you effectively settle the “how far will this show go” debate in one handy shot. You really can’t get away with calling Torchwood “shocking” in terms of content after this episode, which is a useful bit of armor for the series. It’s a technique akin to Paul Abbott’s decision to work both an assassination and a nude shot of Chloe Sevigny with a prosthetic penis into the first two minutes of his actually very good 2012 Hit & Miss – by getting all the prurient bits of its premise on the table immediately it prevents the show, in the long term, from being defined by those bits.

I could go on in this tone for a while yet, beginning a defense of Chris Chibnall as a writer, but there’s an underlying issue here I want to address, which is that Torchwood seems to require a level of defensiveness.…

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David, you have to try this. I call it standing in the rain looking dramatic. xoxo, John

It’s October 22nd, 2006. My Chemical Romance are at number one with “Welcome to the Black Parade,” with Scissor Sisters, Girls Aloud, P. Diddy, and Meat Loaf also charting. Since the Battle of Canary Wharf, Twitter launched, a war broke out between Israel and Lebanon, and North Korea claimed to have conducted a nuclear test. While in the week before this story, the US actually gets around to confirming that North Korea had a nuclear weapons test, and the Iraq war keeps going badly.

On television, meanwhile, Torchwood debuts with Everything Changes. That Everything Changes tacks fairly straightforwardly to the approved Joseph Campbell playbook for origin stories is perhaps unsurprising. It is, after all, how you do these things, and no matter how popular Doctor Who is as a program, it would have been borderline suicidal to launch Torchwood with an episode that relied on the assumption that everybody knew who Jack was and what Torchwood did. And so we get an episode that, for most of its runtime, is a structural mirror of Rose: girl is witness to strange goings-on, investigates, and after a couple of tries is finally initiated into the mysteries of an already familiar series premise.

Like Rose, then, the premise of Torchwood lurks in the background of the episode. Much of the audience spends much of the episode knowing more than Gwen does about the show’s premise, and being introduced to it anyway. Captain Jack and Torchwood are both known quantities. Except that they’re not. Torchwood Three seems miles away from the slick corporate excess of Torchwood One, and, perhaps more importantly, Torchwood are clearly meant to be the heroes of this show, whereas just a few months earlier they were solidly villainous.

In this regard the outsider perspective is an odd barrier, in that Gwen asks what are, for the audience, mainly the wrong questions. The audience doesn’t need Torchwood explained so much as they need the relationship between this Torchwood and the Canary Warf operation from Army of Ghosts explained, but Gwen, as a genuine neophyte, doesn’t know to ask that question. Similarly, the question really isn’t who Jack is and where he came from, nor even why he’s immortal (the answer clearly being “some bit of technobabble involving Rose’s resurrection of him), it’s “how did he get to Earth in the present day and what’s he doing running Torchwood,” both questions that Gwen, not having seen The Parting of the Ways, fails to ask.

Which is perhaps the most interesting thing about Everything Changes. Structurally, at least, it hums along at a brisk and followable pace. The Campbell-style call to adventure narrative is so shopworn that it manages to obscure the questions the audience comes to the program asking. We know so much about how this episode works and enough about Jack and Torchwood that we think we have all of its twists figured out ahead of time.…

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