Out of curiosity, since, (as some of you might have observed in the earlier pages of the thread) I burned through every one of the currently available Doctor Who episodes at an absurdly fast pace, would this Torchwood show that I just became aware of after reading the last few posts be the next thing for me to absorb? I am aware that there are numerous spin-offs of the show and I was curious as to whether or not it would be the next best place for me to get my Doctor Who fix when I've run through the real thing itself in its entirety. I was considering the earlier Doctor Who episodes, but after sampling a bit of them here and there I decided that either my growing up in the 21st century has rendered me with less of an appreciation for a "retro" sci-fy feel or they are a hell of a lot lower in quality than the reboot.
Yeah, I don't get on with classic Doctor Who much either. I kinda liked Carnival of Monsters, but I watched The Caves of Androzani, which is considered by the proper fans to be
the best story in any Doctor Who ever, and I just couldn't get to grips with it. Not much more luck with The Masque of Mandragora, nor Earthshock... The Web Planet was lovely, in the way that watching the Clangers is lovely, but yeah. Not my thing.
Torchwood's a baby of the modern house style, but it's a sort of "darker and edgier" spin-off. Centres around a policewoman called Gwen Cooper, recruited to the Torchwood team, who investigate alien activity in Cardiff. Captain Jack Harkness, Suzie Costello, Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato, and Ianto Jones, drifting around the city in search of suburban alien technology.
Series 1 was perfectly good fun in places, but really quite embarrassing in others. There are fantastic episodes in there (Everything Changes, They Keep Killing Suzie, Greeks Bearing Gifts, etc.), but also some really poor ones. Series 2 was a lot better, and had a real sense of identity. Left out the OTT gore and sex, which all looked
very teenage in series 1, and was a silly, classy monster-of-the-week scifi that trod the ground that Doctor Who couldn't. Really nifty show, but thoroughly disposable.
Series
3, however, is where it properly picks up. It evolves from a fun romp into intelligent, psychological, piercing contemporary drama, with a chillingly realistic backdrop - and plenty of fun bits to boot. A five-part story that scrutinises the foundations our societies are built on.
With aliens.
You can start from S3, S2 or S1, depending on what you reckon you can stomach. I think S3 is the best by
miles, so I'm tempted to tell you to skip straight ahead to it, but it does kind of hint at how S2 ends. On the other hand, you've already seen an episode of Doctor Who that hints at how S2 ends, so screw it! S3 is a perfectly good place to start.
Incidentally, if you wanted to try a sort of S1 sampler, rather than wade all the way through the admittedly-kinda-patchy series, you could do worse than, say...
1. Everything Changes (E1)
2. Ghost Machine (E3)
3. Greeks Bearing Gifts (E7)
4. They Keep Killing Suzie (E8)
...and then straight onto series 2. (I'm sure there were a couple of other cool episodes, I just can't remember for the life of me which they were!) In fact, I'd say that even if you do choose to begin with S2, it's worth watching S1E1 anyway.
There's good stuff in all of the series, but S1 is patchy with shades of genius, S2 is all-out comic book fun, and S3 is an absolute rollercoaster of the kind of impeccably plotted drama that the world needs more of.
Topic: Doctor Who (Read 216498 times)
