Torchwood 1.02 -- "Day One"
Long, long wibble about the episode "Day One" and its accompanying DVD commentary...
Day One
Imagine the "first day of a new job" from hell. Then ramp it up and add in a murder case where the murderer is an alien gas-based lifeform that feeds on orgasmic energy -- and you're the one who let it loose to take over an innocent girl...
Gwen's first day at Torchwood starts badly and gets worse. Owen's reminding her at every opportunity that she's the new girl, people don't take her seriously, and then she makes a mistake that leads to several deaths. Cue lots of sex and violence, though not quite as much sex as the trailers would have you believe. The episode's badly flawed (for reasons not entirely the fault of the production team, a lot of it's just second episode teething problems), but there's a potentially good story in there about the horror of possession.
They really were pushing boundaries with this one, and it damages the episode. I'm all for the sex scenes when they're doing something constructive in the episode, or even honest fanservice, but this really did feel like "what can we get away with now we're doing a post-watershed show?" -- for the very good reason that this is exactly what they were doing, as they talk about in the commentary track. Which I wouldn't have minded so much if it hadn't been nothing but the standard gratuitous porn-for-straight-men that you can find all over the other post-watershed shows. You weren't doing anything genuinely new and boundary-pushing here, guys.
Looking at it a second time through, much of the problem with the sex scenes was the same problem as everything else -- it's the second episode, it was the one that was shot first, and things haven't quite gelled yet. The writers, cast and crew are still feeling their way to what the show's about. The sex scenes actually are doing something for the story, but because they were in "tee hee, what can we get away with?" mode, you don't see that under all the "tits out for the lads" nonsense. I think the same basic script made later in the series would have been a lot less silly.
It leads to odd glitches; yes, Owen and Jack's reactions in enjoying the free lesbian show in the cells are very believable and very funny, save for the minor detail that they already know that sex with this alien-possessed woman is fatal. It broke suspension of disbelief for me that they spent so long leering in those circumstances.
On the other hand, I'm going to be a hypocrite and say, nekkid handcuffed Owen, yay! Though that's partly for the pleasure of seeing Owen humiliated after being such a pig to Gwen. Burn Gorman's portrayal of pissed-off Owen in that scene is a superb piece of acting.
Leading to... Um, yes, Owen's a bit of a tit in this episode, isn't he? There's unlikeable, and then there's this, which coming on top of the date rape scene in Everything Changes is egging the pudding a little too much. I didn't mind Owen too much first time through, but I rather think that this is only because I didn't see this episode first time through. It also unbalances the episode a bit, because While Gwen comes in for some snark from the others, you could see as that as the plausible reaction of a tightly-knit group to an intruder, while Owen is just so far over the top it's easy to miss that.
There are also plotholes galore. The one that really jarred on me is when they take Carys back to her father. What does her father know about the events of the last few hours, and why haven't they been retconned?
In spite of which, there are some nice bits that I really liked in this. They don't even all involve Ianto. The bits with Rhys at the start and end work really well, showing a loving relationship. The relationship between Gwen and Andy, and I'm so glad they've hung on to Andy as an occasional returning character. And the scene where Carys runs into Ianto's reception area with Jack in hot pursuit, and Ianto asks "Need any attacking done, sir?" -- Ianto looks scarily gleeful at the prospect of physical action.
And then there's the Chinese takeaway scene.
It's a nice scene in its own right, showing a bit more about the team and their lack of knowledge about Jack. But it's also interesting in light of later episodes. They must have had Cyberwoman already in mind at this point, i.e. Ianto's backstory of being from Torchwood 1. So it's likely here that Ianto would know *something* about Jack, simply from having had access to Torchwood 1 files and/or office gossip. That suggests to me that his speculation about Jack being a CIA agent is deliberate misdirection, perhaps part of his deliberately not drawing attention to himself or reminding people of where he came from and why. (Or could be just Chibnell not thinking things through, of course...)
As for the discussion of whether Jack is gay -- well, Tosh nails it, from the perspective of viewers who've seen Jack in action in Doctor Who, except that Jack is pretty broad minded about "gorgeous". And Ianto's "I don't care" is rather interesting even without the hindsight of Fragments, given the public flirting in the first episode. Not "I don't know" but "I don't care." It reads to me as closing off the discussion, whether because he genuinely *doesn't* care, because he doesn't want to care, or because he doesn't want the discussion to get into other people's love lives. And with Cyberwoman coming up, that last seems rather likely. Looking at it in the context of Fragments, whether or not you think Ianto ended up making good on that implied offer to Jack, he's very much dissembling in that scene, on more than one level.
Though this is the one scene that doesn't quite work in conjunction with Fragments. Fragments explains why the Cardiff group know so little about Jack, but the timescale given in Fragments for Tosh and Owen doesn't feel right for the way they talk about Jack in this scene. This feels more as if they've known him for a few months, when according to Fragments they've known him for three and two years. We discussed this a bit in the comments thread after my initial brief post about the episode.
Oh, and while the sex scenes in this episode didn't do anything for me, not being my taste in porn, I was unreasonably enchanted by the sight of Ianto eating Chinese with a napkin neatly tucked in under his chin, looking terribly, terribly young.
DVD commentary -- writer and co-producer Chris Chibnall, producer Richard Stokes, and actress Eve Myles (Gwen).
Another meaty discussion of the episode and how it was made, with some more general gossip tossed in. It's interesting partly because the episode is flawed and Chibnall freely admits it, discussing with the benefit of hindsight after completing series 1 the mistakes he made, how he fixed some of them at the time, and how he might change things if he was doing the episode again.
As such it's a lesson in how you construct an episode, and the adjustments you might make during rehearsal and filming, expecially when first feeling your way through creating a new show. For writers it's well worth worth listening to just for this discussion of craft.
This episode was mostly filmed first, so shows the flaws of first filmed episode. This is of course why it was filmed first, to give the cast and crew time to get used to things and put in a polished performance on the opening episode. Some of the material was re-shot later in the filming block for various reasons (including problems with the camera kit, mentioned in the commentary for Everything Changes), and they were also able to do some re-recording of dialogue after filming. Some filmed dialogue was cut during editing to tighten the pace, and other scenes were written at the last minute (sometimes during the filming block) to fill in rough spots as they noticed them. A few of the things mentioned:
1 and 2 both were lighter hearted in script, but had some of the banter cut or changed in editing and additional dialogue recording, so the tone of each episode isn't as clear as later episodes would be.
They dropped in the scene where Gwen asks the team what they do to switch off at a late stage during filming to give the team a human side to counterpoint Carys.
The scene where they work on tracking Carys and the first victim back form the club had a lot of banter about Ianto's coffee, which was cut because it took away the drama of the scene.
The Chinese takeaway scene was added after the first read through, but some banter lines about what dishes Ianto's brought for each person were cut, including Ianto and Jack bantering, "And you've got pork balls, sir," "You're never going to get tired of that joke, are you?"
The rat jam scene was added because they hadn't had a scene focusing on Owen.
Chibnall says that he made the team look a bit stupid in the scene where Carys steals the case with the Doctor's hand and is chased by the team, and would do it differently now.
And a story from Eve about the cast staying at Torchwood House filming Countrycide, and JB knocked on her door one night, wearing *ironed* TRansformer pyjamas.
So, flawed episode that's still worth watching at least once, with some good bits that tie in to the long term story arc; and an interesting DVD commentary that's a short course in how to construct an episode.
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julesjones) wrote,
