BBC Writer Explains How Torchwood Lost It With Miracle Day

It wasn’t going to California that ruined Torchwood, it was turning out a script that was dumber than a protozoa.

Right. I mean the first season of Torchwood was pretty damn awful too. Bad writing is bad writing no matter what side of the pond it comes from.

I do however agree about how it’s probably for the best to step away from the internet and not get overly involved. There’s a great quote from Bruce Timm where he points out that statistically, the message board posts are in the minority anyway, so you’re likely going to get a very negative, skewed view.

Much like Community, I do not know anything about a mythical fourth season.

More importantly, Tennant & Darvill are teaming up?

I disagree in the most negative skewed fashion!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111111

I maintain that there was a fairly decent 5-6 episode story in there somewhere. It started out strongly, dealing with the quasi-realistic fallout from no one dying. The corporate death camps had some potential for existential horror. But it just derailed because they had to pad it out to 10 episodes. “I know there’s a crisis that’s crushing the world, Jack, but we have to spend an episode or two to save my dad!” Bleagh.

Chris Chibnall is the last person who should talk about bad Who writing. Cold Blood, 42, The Power of Three, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship… He’s terrible.

Oh yes, I found the story really interesting, it was just the overall execution of it all.

I TOTALLY AGREE I thought Miracle Day was crap, especially after the brutal genius that was Children of Earth. Torchwood has never been the most sharply written show on earth, but with Miracle Day it reached new lows.
On the other hand, it was all worth it because GWEN COOPER.

Indeed! http://www.themarysue.com/bbc-america-broadchurch/

It would appear that the advice for show creators to not read anything on the internet is sound.

Thanks, Jill!

More accurate title: “BBC Writer Blames America for Terribly-Written Show Culminating in Terribly-Written Finale, Asserts That Writers Should Block Out All Criticism”.

Kind if think that second point goes a lot longer to explaining the decidedly-mediocre modern Who franchise as a whole than arbitrarily asserting that it’s all OUR fault.

I hated Torchwood because it failed miserably to deliver the goods. See how Chibnall says that it was supposed to be cheeky, mad, dark and sexy? That Was Never Torchwood. That was what I seriously hoped it would, especially with the ever Great John Barrowman as the magnificient Jack Harkness leading the show. Instead we got an awfully depressing (literally) season one with such hateful, wretched characters, and an average, but still depressing, season two (except James Masters; he was frickin awesome).
And then season 3 came along; it went from being disappointment to sheer hatred as it out right murdered my engagement with Captain Jack as a character with its cheap dark choices.
Miracle Day did not save it as it still had all the same abominable characteristics, only as 24 knock-off (seriously, out of all the TV dramas they could rip-off, they rip off that one).
In short, Children of Earth was the brutal murder of this show’s potential; Miracle Day was the burial.

Miracle Day made me so sad. The worst part about it is the central premise made absolutely no sense. There’s nothing special about Jack’s blood. What happened to Jack was SO UNIQUE that The Doctor had never seen it
before. What happened to him went way beyond the mere biological. He’s got something metaphysical going on that’s ‘stuck’ him and made him a fixed point. I can kinda get the bit about the big gash in the planet resetting based on his blood or life essence or whatever (and the whole no one dying thing did have promise) but the part at the end with Rex getting his immortality just made me toss my hands up in frustration. The one good thing about Rex as a character was that he was trying to fix this mess, despite knowing that it would probably mean he’d die.

A cardinal sin of a series is breaking with its own established universe mechanics. If it was as simple as a blood transfusion to gain Jack’s immortality, the Doctor would have found ways to prevent that from happening. Also, Jack has been kidnapped, tortured and experimented on before. If there was something special about his blood, someone else would have sorted that out ages ago.

Torchwood was definitely not perfect. There were some bad episodes (sex mist, for one) but as the article says,its essence was completely disrespected and rewritten in Miracle Day. What’s even sadder is that there were original showrunners involved. It felt like a slap in the face to the fans to change everything that we liked about it to begin with.

I don’t normally get upset by TV shows, but Miracle Day still makes me angry even after all this time. I hope it never comes back, as much as I’d love to see Jack and Gwen in action again. Having it back again means Immortal Rex would have to be there and it’d be in the US. There’d be no Hub and no Cardiff. What’s the point?

If you haven’t already, do yourself a favour and listen to the radio dramas. They take place between Season 2 and Children of Earth. True Torchwood in all the ways it was meant to be.

Cyberwoman.

I am not a Doctor Who fan so I didn’t know it was a spin off I watched the 1st episode with an open mind then I watched the 2nd and was like WTF is this crap and stopped watching.

To be fair, the second episode is pretty much the worst that Torchwood gets (until Miracle Day, that is.) It gets better from there. I usually tell people I recommend the show to, to skip episode 2.

I had to stop watching Torchwood. There was too much sensationalism for me.

Miracle day was just like Children of Earth. A very good five episode miniseries. Then some idiot decided to stretch it to 13 episodes. Also the ending sucked.

Miracle Day was definitely awful. Key issues I had:

> WHERE WERE THE ALIENS? If the premise of your show is that you have this organization set up to fight alien weirdness when the Doctor isn’t around, there should probably be aliens involved at some point. That the whole ‘Miracle Day’ turned out to be generic corporate evil was not only disappointing but really hard for me to believe.

> Never break your own canon. What happened to Jack was totally unexpected and impossible to replicate. Jack’s blood as an explanation for anything in that series made no sense. Neither did Jack losing his immortality after the miracle.

I feel like the concept was good, but they stretched it out too far and took out a lot of what made the series Torchwood in an effort to make it more appealing to a broader/American audience. Although I also wonder if maybe the budget wasn’t TOO good– I’ve long held that RTD is a good writer only when you don’t give him money for explosions. Midnight is a brilliant episode of Doctor Who with some amazing writing. The S3, S4 finales and The End of Time? Not so much. (Obviously YMMV, but I found RTD’s insistence on ever-bigger ever-more-explodey finales increasingly tiresome.)

Miracle Day managed to be both highly disturbing and painfully boring. I didn’t think it was possible for both to be true at the same time. I never did finish watching that. I say this as a Torchwood fan that only recently got into Dr. Who.

honestly, I never finished Miracle Day. I got three or four episodes in and gave up. I’ve shunned it so hard that I’ve never actually discussed the mess with another Torchwood fan. I’m glad I’m not the only one who cringes at the thought of it.

Sadly, Miracle Day has turned me off to another Torchwood run. I’m not sure you can redeem it after that. I’d rather let Torchwood go with Children of Earth. It’s not worth beating the dying horse.

The plot of MD has so many plot holes a sieve could hold more water We were left with Miss Wheepy knickers who was so stupid her shoes had a higher IQ than she did. Rex who was the least likeable homophoic on screen character I have seen for a long time. Gwen miss shouty loud mouth who becase ever more annoying and redundant. Jack absent without leave for most of the first six episodes. Thrown away the only genuine cliff hanger. Continuity errors (why was Jack wearing his WW2 RAF coat in 1932 for example) It jumped all over the place, suddenly a character Oswald turns up in teh UK and is not recongised (how did he get there if there is no air travel did he swim the atlantic? Gwen who is supposed to be in hiding as she is a wanted woman not only travels across the atlantic twice, she stomps around shouting her mouth off all over Wales, then robs chemists armed and still no one gets its her. Then the gian womans thing in the ground. Apprently there is a imporable hole that runs between the centre of the earth and no scientist execpt the incompetent villians of this drama have figured out. And finally the most unforgivable sin, they made Rex Immortal. In what universe would you make HIM immortal. It suggested that hte makers did not care about what they were doing. I now fanfiction writers who could have done a better job. All this did was kill TW for good. RIP TW. Gone is the quirky fun camp show we loved.

Gwen Cooper the adulter reconning liar Gwen Cooper. Miss Shouty mouth me me me I’m important look at me Gwen Cooper!

We gathered as a group all 14 of us to have an MD marthon, By episode 5 only 6 of us remained. At episode 7 two. We only watched because we hoped the following Gwen Cooper would be killed Rex Matheson will die a horrible death and someone would put Esther out of her misery hopefully by throwing her off a building. It is 10 hours of my life I will never get back.

Did this guy write Cyberwoman? Wow, all comments are instantly void then.

Can’t speak for anyone else, but I didn’t see it because it was on Starz. Why would I add a premium channel I’m barely aware of to watch one show?

Anyone who puts earmuffs on her baby before blowing away a helicopter with a handgun wins for cool points alone. That and the “I’m Welsh” line were enough for me – beating the crap out of the annoying redhead at the end was sweet sweet bonus. :)

Gwen is hardly alone among her cohorts in making stupid choices; that just seems to go with Torchwood territory.

Miracle Day started out well, in my opinion. What I liked about Children of Earth was the focus on the human and societal (and, largely, governmental) reaction to everything, and Miracle Day had that.
But then we get to the climax and the actual cause of everything, and there’s a big, bloody, cinnamon stick through the Earth. What.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think Children of Earth was some bizarre fluke that had no business being a Torchwood story at all. It was more like a Nigel Kneale Quatermass miniseries than Torchwood, in that it was relentlessly dark and stark, but treated with a gravity that warranted such a grim look. Torchwood in general was meant to be silly fun escapades with a cast of bisexuals, not hard-hitting social commentary.

Miracle Day was terrible because Russel T. Davies got his painfully unsubtle and unnuanced writer-on-board with the most leaden Holocaust “symbolism” I’ve ever seen. Americanisation had nothing to do with it; neither did the gay sex or button-pushing issues with the paedophile messiah. It was just horribly written and badly executed.

Wow, I didn’t think Miracle Day was that bad! It was pretty engaging and watchable. I’m not surprised to see it hated by TW fans, though, as I agree it was very different from TW-proper.

But then what I saw of the first couple of series of TW was frankly rubbish so as Miracle Day apparently abandonned everything that made TW what it was, it’s no wonder I preferred it. At least for the first half of the series – it kind of lost its way and didn’t seem to know what to do with its premise after a certain point.

I’m more surprised to see Children Of Earth hated here – I got the impression it was very well regarded? I thought it was excellent.

Looks like I get to have the unpopular opinion! I loved it. It wasn’t the sheer genius of CoE, no – but it still proved Gwen’s first words in CoE, that Jack’s Doctor must sometimes look down on us in shame and turn away.

The performances were fantastic. I’m not actually much of a Mekhi Phifer fan, but after an ep or two, he grew on me. (Although he should have gotten the asskicking of the century for pulling Gwen away from her child.) And how do we know that Jack’s blood ISN’T what has the secret of his immortality? We don’t know what Bad Wolf Rose did, exactly. All we know is that the Doctor FEELS that he is a fixed point in time. It could have been due to properties inherent in his blood now. Maybe part of the Heart of the Tardis is somehow in his bloodstream now.

The performances? Barrowman can do no wrong in my eyes. I’ve always loved Gwen. And Bill Pullman pulled out such a sick, wrong, horrifying performance that I don’t even know if I can watch him again without thinking about Dane.

I trust Chibnall. No, it wasn’t perfect, but I do believe it was well done. And I trust Jane Espenson more.

Read someone saying — Never let the Americans ‘do’ a British show — they just won’t get it right. (( think they may have been referring to the 1996 Doctor WHO Fox movie. )) But, think it still holds true. Hollyweird just does not ‘get’ why fans from a decades long show might LIKE to see some connection to the original material.

There have been several ‘his blood grants immortality’ type movies and made for television shows since the 60s as I recall. All of those failed for not making sense about the whole blood deal; or why one evil guy KNOWS all about the blood factor and spends his fortune to get it before he dies. I Know they say, there only a handful of stories… it’s how you dress it up that counts. Someone failed on their ‘what to wear’ duties here.

It was so frustrating to watch. While the show had individual moments that were great, so much was just awful. A geological anomaly that global geophysicists and geologists hadn’t noticed before? Blood being drained from one person and infused into another by a non-professional and just left sitting around to *rot*?

The basic premise of Jack’s blood being somehow special (immortal) when it was established by Doctor Who canon that it is not and he was brought back to life and is able to resurrect due to external forces (the time vortex). Subverting established canon was a massive failure.

Throughout I couldn’t help but to think of Dumbledore’s comment from the Harry Potter series that a blood payment is rather crude. I couldn’t agree more. This season was crude, unsophisticated and a disappointment.

Gwen’s Welsh joke got old real fast. I was hoping she and the redhead would punch each other out and then we wouldn’t have to listen to either one again.

Russell T. Davies was dropping anvils all over the place. Jane Espenson and her awful writing should be left on a desert island somewhere. (She ruined Battlestar Galactica too, and everything else she gets her grubby hands on.)

Not to mention mind rapist, when she erased her own boyfriend’s memories of her adultery confession, screaming “I NEED YOU TO FORGIVE ME!!!” over and over, as he passes out.

Well we must remember that RTD and his cohorts were really in charge of this, they had complete control, the script was not American, it was British. Even Julie was in charge also. It was not fantastic, but it was ok. There are for worse Torchwoods made in UK, one word, Cyberwoman ha!

Go back and watch Torchwood from the very first episode. You will see how wrong you are.