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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.)

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.

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.