Torchwood #10 (spoilers)
Dec. 17th, 2006 11:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ewx1953 was the year of QE2's coronation; i.e. the same year as the Dr Who Episode The Idiot's Lantern, of which more below.
The basic storyline is a nice inversion of a standard SF story: rather than have adventures of great significance after being unwilling transported in time or space, the characters attempt (or not) to fit into the basically mundane world they find themselves in.
The time travellers' reactions to the supermarket reminds me of Boris Yeltsin's famous 1989 epiphany in a Houston supermarket, which brought home to him the failure of the communist system in the USSR. Here it is half a century of growth we see the advantages of, draining the comparison of its political sting, but still, the resonance is there.
John is poorly done by. This series sets a lot of store by looking at the effects of sfnal situations on ordinary people, but John is no such thing: he is a hodgepodge. He's perceptive, but only about Jack, because the scriptwriters need to bring a bit more of Jack's background out. He's deeply conservative, in a kind of Eddie Connolly (from The Idiot's Lantern) sort of way, but only about Emma. He's obsessed with finding out about what became of his family, but only, it's hard to avoid thinking, to give us a quick spiel on how horrible Alzheimers is.
I don't think I'd have taken an 18-year-old suddenly transported from the 1950s to a nightclub (recalling that all nightclubs in Torchwood are cattle markets) without clueing them in about current mores; the likely results are so obviously predictable that this can only be seen as deeply lazy scripting. Yes, it wouldn't be Torchwood if they hadn't passed some kind of comment on the liberalization of attitudes to sex over the last half century, but surely we can do better than that.
Emma seems like more of a rounded character than John, for all that she gets pressed into service as a contrast to and target for his conservatism and as a wedge into Gwen and Rhys's disintegrating relationship.
Diane would be a far better foil for John if they ever managed to spend any time in front of the same camera. From all that I've read a near-modern sensibility transported into the 1950s is not totally unrealistic: the war in particular saw a tremendous amount of experimentation, AIUI, and reading Jeremy Scott's entertaining autobiography a while back left me thinking that one can easily see the germ of the 1960s before Suez. The less said about Owen's chat-up lines the better, though...
Before Diane headed off to find the temporal rift again - obviously the sane thing to do if you've just fallen in love with someone - I was kind of hoping that Rhys could find out about Gwen and Owen and horribly murder the former in a fit of jealous rage, leaving a vacancy which Diane might fill quite well.
I liked the lighting in Jack/John's confrontation in the garage. John's stark choice is mirrored in the sharp contrast between the sides of his face while one can interpret Jack's softer lighting as reflecting the (limited) peace he's made with his bizarre situation.
Don't forget - next week's Sunday Torchwood is earlier (2130 IIRC).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-18 01:07 pm (UTC)Cate Haste - 'RUles of Desire (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rules-Desire-Britain-World-Present/dp/0099437953/sr=8-3/qid=1166447178/ref=sr_1_3/202-3579609-9175816?ie=UTF8&s=books)'. Fantastic book in general and contains a lot about what changed for women during the war.
Frankly, though, I think the Generally Pretty Cool Pilot Bird crapping hugely on Owen was only poetic justice. You can't say he doesn't deserve it :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-20 10:14 pm (UTC)