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selenakContinuining on the okay, not great, not bad level: after the Gwen episode(s) and the Owen episode and the Ianto episode, we get the Jack episode. Which means poor Toshiko is the last one to get her own episode. Otoh, you know, Cordelia spent most of season 1 of BTVS with minimal characterisation until the invisible girl episode, so, who knows.
Anyway.
Of course, as soon as Estelle says fairies are nice creatures your avarage Shakespeare student with a working knowledge of Midsummer Night's Dream - oh, and every Sandman reader - says, no, they're not, and knows where this is going. You can make a connection between the way Jack describes the faeries and Jack himself - unstuck in time, echoes of themselves - but I wish the episode were better written and didn't feel so random. For example, there is no reason why Gwen's flat should be vandalized, or why they faeries should come after Estelle. Unless they have it in for Jack and his associates, because of the Lahore incident, and that still feels very stretched. In short, you get the impression a ghost/fairy story was taken with a none-too-successful attempt to integrate the Torchwood team in it. Mind you, one of the Old Who classics, Genesis of the Daleks, also has the feeling that the story would work just as well or better without the Doctor, but here, the result, with or without the Torchwood team, feels just okay-ish.
We did get more about Jack, enough to conclude he has a real thing for the military, if in addition to his WWII stint he also served during the Raj. The love story: well. Normally I'm a sucker for this particular type of story - but alas, I've seen the "Immortal meets aged mortal lover/friend again" both on Highlander and its spin-off, Raven, and found it more touching there. Perhaps because they tried a bit too hard in Torchwood - I mean, exchange of vows to stay always together? From Jack Harkness? If I were script editor, I'd have handled this more like Amanda's encounter with Charlie in Raven - someone she flirted with and had fun with in the 60s in Prague and whom in the present she has a gentle and melancholy friendship with. No grand passion and eternal vows, and yet the whole mortal/immortal poignancy is there.
Something I really liked: Gwen gets to be a competent police woman, spotting and taking out the flower petal, and in the end to discover Jasmine on the Conan Doyle fairie photo. I also like that there isn't a big deal made of it in either case; that's a way of show, not tell, that Gwen is clever and resourceful.
On the flip side: Is this the first episode not to include snogging?
Something else I watched over the weekend: a German sitcom called "Türkisch für Anfänger" (= "Turkish for Beginners"). Which was douibly rare because a) I usually don't watch sitcoms, though I tried Scrubs a couple of years ago when they started showing it until the broadcasting times became too weird, and b) our German tv productions are often pretty dire. With exceptions; we've grown good with docudramas in the last decade. But not with comedy. However, this one, consisting of one season with twelve episodes, turned out to be charming, engaging, and actually funny (as opposed to forced laughs). I wouldn't put it on a level with Joss Whedon productions, but it shares one particular quality with them: starting with archetypes/clichés the audience is pretty famliar with and then twisting them into three-dimensional characters. In this case, you have the premise of a German therapist Doris (female, very much product of 60s and 70s) and a Turkish cop, Metin, (male), two children each, deciding to share living space after having had a love affair for a year. The main pov is of Lena, the therapist's bratty teenage daughter, who isn't at all that keen on this; you also have Yagnur, Metin's daughter, who's a strict Muslim partly in protest against her Dad, and Cem, the son, who is your typical obnoxious male adolescent with macho attitudes and not so hidden insecurities beneath them. The headwriter of the show is Turkish-German himself, and the other writers also hail from both cultures, which makes for scripts that while poking fun at both sides never patronize them. In an episode where Lena persuades Yagnur to go clubbing, for example, the cliché would have been for strict Yagnur to lose her inhibitions, but instead it's Lena who goes overboard and Yagnur who takes care of her (showing among other things that hey, a companion who doesn't drink alcohol just because everyone else does is useful). With a very few exceptions, the dialogues all manage to come across naturally, and both the young actors and the ones playing the parents are good, managing to do comedy going over the top. It has just come out on DVD, and is well worth aquiring.
****
And a BSG fanfic rec, spoilers up to the latest episode: Children of the Gods, one of the best takes on Gaius Baltar I have ever read.
Anyway.
Of course, as soon as Estelle says fairies are nice creatures your avarage Shakespeare student with a working knowledge of Midsummer Night's Dream - oh, and every Sandman reader - says, no, they're not, and knows where this is going. You can make a connection between the way Jack describes the faeries and Jack himself - unstuck in time, echoes of themselves - but I wish the episode were better written and didn't feel so random. For example, there is no reason why Gwen's flat should be vandalized, or why they faeries should come after Estelle. Unless they have it in for Jack and his associates, because of the Lahore incident, and that still feels very stretched. In short, you get the impression a ghost/fairy story was taken with a none-too-successful attempt to integrate the Torchwood team in it. Mind you, one of the Old Who classics, Genesis of the Daleks, also has the feeling that the story would work just as well or better without the Doctor, but here, the result, with or without the Torchwood team, feels just okay-ish.
We did get more about Jack, enough to conclude he has a real thing for the military, if in addition to his WWII stint he also served during the Raj. The love story: well. Normally I'm a sucker for this particular type of story - but alas, I've seen the "Immortal meets aged mortal lover/friend again" both on Highlander and its spin-off, Raven, and found it more touching there. Perhaps because they tried a bit too hard in Torchwood - I mean, exchange of vows to stay always together? From Jack Harkness? If I were script editor, I'd have handled this more like Amanda's encounter with Charlie in Raven - someone she flirted with and had fun with in the 60s in Prague and whom in the present she has a gentle and melancholy friendship with. No grand passion and eternal vows, and yet the whole mortal/immortal poignancy is there.
Something I really liked: Gwen gets to be a competent police woman, spotting and taking out the flower petal, and in the end to discover Jasmine on the Conan Doyle fairie photo. I also like that there isn't a big deal made of it in either case; that's a way of show, not tell, that Gwen is clever and resourceful.
On the flip side: Is this the first episode not to include snogging?
Something else I watched over the weekend: a German sitcom called "Türkisch für Anfänger" (= "Turkish for Beginners"). Which was douibly rare because a) I usually don't watch sitcoms, though I tried Scrubs a couple of years ago when they started showing it until the broadcasting times became too weird, and b) our German tv productions are often pretty dire. With exceptions; we've grown good with docudramas in the last decade. But not with comedy. However, this one, consisting of one season with twelve episodes, turned out to be charming, engaging, and actually funny (as opposed to forced laughs). I wouldn't put it on a level with Joss Whedon productions, but it shares one particular quality with them: starting with archetypes/clichés the audience is pretty famliar with and then twisting them into three-dimensional characters. In this case, you have the premise of a German therapist Doris (female, very much product of 60s and 70s) and a Turkish cop, Metin, (male), two children each, deciding to share living space after having had a love affair for a year. The main pov is of Lena, the therapist's bratty teenage daughter, who isn't at all that keen on this; you also have Yagnur, Metin's daughter, who's a strict Muslim partly in protest against her Dad, and Cem, the son, who is your typical obnoxious male adolescent with macho attitudes and not so hidden insecurities beneath them. The headwriter of the show is Turkish-German himself, and the other writers also hail from both cultures, which makes for scripts that while poking fun at both sides never patronize them. In an episode where Lena persuades Yagnur to go clubbing, for example, the cliché would have been for strict Yagnur to lose her inhibitions, but instead it's Lena who goes overboard and Yagnur who takes care of her (showing among other things that hey, a companion who doesn't drink alcohol just because everyone else does is useful). With a very few exceptions, the dialogues all manage to come across naturally, and both the young actors and the ones playing the parents are good, managing to do comedy going over the top. It has just come out on DVD, and is well worth aquiring.
****
And a BSG fanfic rec, spoilers up to the latest episode: Children of the Gods, one of the best takes on Gaius Baltar I have ever read.
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no subject
Date: 2006-11-13 05:30 pm (UTC)*sighs*
One of my all time favourite medical dramas Chicago Hope (slightly cheesy, but redeemed by its countless moments of utter brilliance) changed time slots and even networks so often that I accidentally missed about fifteen episodes. And I was a fan...
German networks surely know how to drive away potential viewers with completely bizarre broadcasting schedules, don't they?
no subject
Date: 2006-11-13 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-13 05:43 pm (UTC)I think that asking an RTD production to deal in melancholy and poignancy rather than grand passion and eternity is asking a little too much. It shouldn't be, but I fear it is.
(The vows to stay together, that line was awkward, I agree, but I think the context that "promises were broken all the time" softens that a bit. Not as much as I'd like, but something about the setup does imply to me that he chose to stay away and break that promise for some time. Because he had to, probably, but he'd have known that from the start, even when he made that promise.)
I agree with Gwen and the flower petals, but I wasn't so keen on the close-up of Jasmine at the end; it seemed like a very random "oh, this would be cute closure" moment, with nothing to actually trigger it. She didn't even intentionally turn on the screen to, say, re-investigate this picture she'd thought was a fraud, which made it feel really gratuitous to me. I can understand Estelle's death; I think she was marked for taking pictures and disturbing them. You could see them getting ready to get nasty with her in the intro scene. But you're quite right about Gwen's flat, there's no logical point where she's targeted.
I'm not surprised about Jack's military fetish, given that he's a military man in his own time. :)
no subject
Date: 2006-11-14 06:55 am (UTC)True, and yes, he must have known.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-13 09:00 pm (UTC)Yeah, exactly. Where is DW!Jack?
no subject
Date: 2006-11-14 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-16 06:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-16 07:35 pm (UTC)Addendum ;-)
Date: 2006-11-15 05:19 am (UTC)Waking up way too early, at five in the morning, gets far less annoying when you can read ficlets like this... ;-)
Re: Addendum ;-)
Date: 2006-11-15 05:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-15 10:27 am (UTC)I've seen the "Immortal meets aged mortal lover/friend again" both on Highlander and its spin-off, Raven, and found it more touching there.
Yup, I couldn't help thinking Highlander did this so much better.
I thought the story itself was a fairly creepy little tale and would have made quite a good one off Christmas ghost story kind of thing, but using traditional fairy lore didn't seem a particularly good fit for the Torchwood's more sci-fi based universe. I also agree that I could see no reason for Gwen being attacked though in Estelle's case I thought it was payment for the photographs.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-15 12:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-15 08:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-15 09:03 pm (UTC)Here's looking forward to season 2!