Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

Torchwood: “Everything Changes”

It's the episode that started it all. The one that introduced us to Welsh police officer Gwen Cooper and the whole Torchwood crew. The episode that first introduced us to the idea that Captain Jack Harkness could be a lead character in his own right instead of just a supporting one in various Doctor Who episodes.

I'm not quite satisfied with every element of this episode. Indeed, I found the scene in which one character uses an alien substance to change another character's mind about sex to be especially disturbing. (And yet the show's writers try to depict that incident as just another wacky sex stunt and not a thinly veiled form of date rape.)

However, I can see why the show has so many fans. And thus far I managed to make it to the second season without getting so impatient with the series that I stopped watching altogether.

If only the show didn't try so hard to convince us all how different it was from the Doctor Who series it spun off from. After all, the harder -- no pun intended -- the show tried to convince me that it was more adult, the more adolescent it seemed. Almost as if it aspired to be the type of science fiction show that Boston Legal creator David E. Kelly would write if he ever decided to write a science fiction show.

And that's not a good thing.