Torchwood goes west (big mistake)

Although other people have said some favourable things about the new Torchwood series that started last Thursday, I was less impressed.

First off, this was an 'establishing' episode that only really existed to take you to the next episode and explain how Captain Jack, Gwen et al end up in America. As that kind of episode it was done to an okay level. Quite why a black ops helicopter was trying to blow the crap out of a house on a beach in Wales where Gwen and Rhys were holed up was never adequately explained, but presumably it will be. Also the casting of Bill Pullman (who has aged significantly it seems) as a creepy child-murderer could well be inspired (and is a bold role for anyone to take on).

But - and it's a big but - nothing actually happened or got resolved in the episode. There was one exceptionally gross scene where they detached a head from a barely living charred corpse, and the head remained alive. But no answers. Only a very long teaser for the rest of the season.

I don't mind TV series having story arcs, although too-rigid story arcs killed The X-Files, Alias, even The West Wing in the end. The problem an episode that is all about the arc and nothing else really happens is boring in the extreme. Exhibit A: those X-Files episodes that just seemed to be mysterious characters sitting round tables smoking cigarettes talking about codenamed projects. Snore off! You want to see some kind of conclusion in an episode, even if the conclusion is open-ended so the bad guy can return to wreak havoc later.

For me, the emphasis on a story arc instead of having a story is a minus for the new Torchwood.

So is the relocation of the series to the USA. I recognise why they're doing this - the American TV audience. It's the same reason the news series of Doctor Who unnecessarily kicked off in Monument Valley in Utah instead of the Rhondda. But it misses the point of what made Torchwood interesting to start with.

If I wanted to watch overblown science fiction in an American setting I could tune in to repeats of the X-Files, or watch more of the new series of V. There are enough good programmes made in America already to satisfy my lust for all things American - Castle, Chuck, The Big Bang Theory, to name a few.

What made Torchwood fun was that it was set in Cardiff, and, okay, that might be because I live in Cardiff and location-spotting was amusing. But it also set it apart from just about anything else in the schedule. Turning it into an American-based drama removes the one thing that made it a must watch for me. It will be hard now to pick it out from a line-up of similar, high-end, slickly-produced, drama serials.

I think trading the dorkiness of being based in a little big city that few people have ever heard of for trans-Atlantic bright lights is a big mistake. So far no amount of aliens, government duplicity, mysterious time travellers, or poor TV scheduling have managed to kill Torchwood off.

But this decision might.

Check the entire box set next time

How annoying is this? We have reached season five in our entire-run box set of the West Wing and the first disc is so badly scratched that it wouldn't play the whole first episode.

It's a brand new DVD. Some packer somewhere must have scraped the disc in.

And frustratingly, Play.com only guarantee things for 28 days. How are you supposed to watch every West Wing episode in 28 days to check for scratches. I have hunted on their website and they have no contact email that I could see - I think because it's been more than 28 days since I bought it. So now I have to phone them.

Things like this frustrate me. I don't know why companies bury their contact details. I've gone from mildly irritated with the disc to very irritated with Play.

The phone call won't be a happy one.

It's not that there's not a lot happening

It's rather that there is too much going on. And trying to best Bowser in Super Mario Galaxy 2 has taken up a good proportion of my free time. That and the complete box set of the West Wing that I bought with my redundancy gift (and an extra tenner).

But I have bested Bowser and I'm aware I haven't blogged much recently so here's a little thought-form from a Tragically Hip song I listened to while walking to work recently, that has stuck with me.

"We live to survive our paradoxes."

I have a few paradoxes in my life at the moment. Doubt and survivor guilt and subliminal choices and plans and hopes and other abstractions, distractions and cognitive dissonances. We are complicated creatures. But by and large we live to survive our paradoxes.