Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

Torchwood: “Out of Time”

On the brighter side, the Brits appear to be doing their best to give us some dependable storytelling.

I must confess that up until this episode, I've generally had a lukewarm attitude toward Russell T. Davies's Doctor Who's spinoff, Torchwood. Yes, it was good for a Doctor Who fan like me to see Captain Jack Harkness again, and yes, it's good that he is very good at delivering snappy lines, and yes, his employee Gwen Cooper is a most excellent female character--for the most part. But all too often, this show seems so bound and determined to prove that it's an adult show and NOT DOCTOR WHO that it actually gets quite irritating.

I suppose if your idea of the ideal sci-fi show was a cross between Men in Black and The X-Files that was co-written by David E. Kelley, then this would be your perfect show. But for those of us who get our notions of adult science fiction from the Holy Trinity of Ellison, Heinlein and Farmer, it's... not quite as interesting as it could be. And this from someone who actually liked Men in Black and The X-Files.

This episode, however, was different. It starts off with a deceptively simple premise: three people depart from a newly landed plane and when Jack speaks to them, he discovers they departed from the year 1953. Which, of course, raises the question: what does Captain Jack and his Torchwood staff do with them now?

Since the trio first came to our present time via a time rift that may or may not re-appear in the same place, going back isn't really a realistic option for them. However, integrating the temporal refugees into present-day society isn't that easy an option either. Almost every one of the trio suffers from some form of culture shock. Sometimes in a good way. (The trio came from a time of rationing into a time of materialistic plenty.) Sometimes in a bad. (The trio were originally believed to have been lost at sea in the 1950s and almost all their kinfolk are dead or senile.)

It's not giving anything away to note that of the three refugees -- a middle-aged veteran, a thirtysomething female pilot and an eighteen-year-old girl -- each end up coming to terms with the present in a different fashion. And for a change, there is no big bad alien arbitrarily inserted into the episode to distract from the way things play out.

I guess I should find it ironic that the one episode out of Torchwood's first ten episodes that I really, really, liked was a show dealing with people from the 1950s. After all, Torchwood is a show that prides itself on being a twenty-first century show in its very intro. And yet I liked that the show managed to take a genuinely scientific premise -- time travel -- and deal with it in a very mature fashion without feeling the need to use the characters from the 1950s for cheap laughs. And when I think how few modern science fiction movies in the US would have resisted a similar temptation, I find that especially amazing.

Of course, the episode does make me wonder what would happen if the shoe was ever on the other foot and one of us here in the present was stranded in the Britain of the 1950s. But perhaps that premise will be explored on a future episode.