Okay, what I really wanted to say here is that I was absolutely blown away by the writing during the whole Five Days of Torchwood. It was superb, you can't fault John Fay, Russell T. Davies and James Moran and they need to be applauded for producing riveting TV! Truly magnificent. The performances, well EVERYONE was great, but special kudos goes to Gareth David-Lloyd as "Ianto", Paul Copley as "Clem", Peter Capaldi as "Frobisher", Susan Brown as "Bridget Spears" and, of course, Cush Jumbo as "Lois Habiba". Can't say much about the performances of the Torchwood team in the final episode, they were hardly in it! We know where Gareth David-Lloyd was, but JB very nearly didn't make the episode at all (well, he was there, but didn't say much, just looked teary-eyed occasionally) and even the ubiquitous Eve Myles had huge amounts of screen time stolen from her by the Cabinet Room, the 456's gaseous chamber, the army deploying etc. Oh, well.
So if everything was that brilliant, what exactly went wrong? Why are we all sitting with such a nasty taste in our mouths? Well, having started out as an intense, emotional drama, Torchwood ended it's third season being dark, heartless and ultimately very, very sad. An ending which very many people hated. This has resulted in a huge outpouring of hate and disgust for RTD.
The problem really is that we didn't get the uplifting ending everyone not only wanted, but was expecting. It didn't need to be the sugar-coated 'happily every after' kind of ending, but what we really, really needed and what RTD didn't leave us with was hope. Hope for the future.
Well, I gotta tell you that ten years ago I and many others were in the same position with another of RTD's creations.
Seemingly out of the blue in 1999 a lot of people had been sucked (excuse the pun) into the world of Manchester's Canal Street and a group of characters we did not necessarily love, but felt great affection for. We became totally hooked on these characters RTD had so beautifully written, so much so that a show, which a lot of media people had written off as soft porn before it was even shown, actually became a huge success. That show was, of course, Queer as Folk.
The success of the show's first eight episodes when they were shown on Channel 4, stirred the Channel to beg, plead and scream for more from RTD. Finally he gave in and went off somewhere quiet to pen Queer as Folk's second season. However, before accepting the commission and going off to write it, something he didn't say and really, really should have was "Be careful what you wish for!"
When season 2 aired - just two hours of it, including ads - I think the whole audience, whether they had been fans before or were just tuning in to give themselves a bit more ammunition for their hate, sat stunned, mouths agape wondering what the hell just happened!
Russell T. Davies had fucked us. He admitted in an interview that he was trying out ideas for the second season and suddenly tossed everything he already had down on paper in the bin and wrote the weird and ultimately, for a lot of us, very unsatisfactory second season. RTD has since admitted that he felt there was nothing further to tell about the lives and loves of these characters and that he was very happy with the ending. Yep, he'd definitely fucked us and on purpose, too, but that is his prerogative. His characters, his story, he can do what he likes and we either like it or not, that's our ONLY choice. We don't get to tell him how to write his stories.
It now appears with this news that Russell's heading off to America, and given the fact that he's no longer writing for Doctor Who, I think the chances of another Torchwood are rather remote, don't you? Anyway, what would be the point? At the moment the only member of the team left standing, at least on this planet, is Gwen (funnily enough there is a rather telling little phrase used in the above article which goes something like... 'Torchwood, starring Eve Myles...').
Okay, so if another season seems out of the question, another idea would be for the Americans to buy the format and recreate Torchwood USA style as they did, very, very successfully, with Queer as Folk. So, all we need to find are a couple of American producers/writers to take it on, hmm...
Okay, so where's Cowlip* when you need them? :DDDD
*Cowlip was the production company run by Dan Lipman and Ron Cowen who took on Queer as Folk, writing and producing it for a successful five years in the US.
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