Over analyzing light entertainment rather misses the point, IMO.
Whereas I would consider the inability to distinguish between, say,
Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon and
The Avengers because you don't spend any time thinking critically about your entertainment to be rather missing the point.
I enjoy adventure stories and exciting romps and all that sort of thing. But none of that requires me to check my brain at the door.
Torchwood was more adolescent than adult. It tried to be adult, but did so simply by having swearing and lots of bed-hopping. It seemed to be as if it didn't know what adult really meant. Also, the show did not really have a focus.
Conceptually,
Torchwood was really interesting in S1: It was the story of what happens to normal people who have to routinely cope with the stuff the Doctor faces without the Doctor's resources. It was a story of people who had been broken and broken badly. The execution was incredibly inconsistent and often inadequate, but there was a solid thematic concept in there.
S2 of
Torchwood should have been about a Captain Jack who had been reinvigorated and "fixed" by the Doctor working to similarly reinvigorate and fix the people around him. And it was occasionally about that... but usually it just ended up being about crude soap opera or nothing at all.
Yeah. That's terrible. I'm glad I'm not seeing it.
The audio clip they're using for it is from the season 5 preview.
I thought last night's episode, "Cold War," did a good job of bringing back an old villain, the Ice Warriors, and retconning their admittedly somewhat silly-looking costumes from the 1960s in such a way as not to "undo" the fact that they've always looked that way in past appearances. All in all, a rather clever way to have your cake and eat it too.
Fantastic production design across the board.
Pity about the script, which once again starts strong and then fizzles out into nonsense and irrelevancy and mediocre writing.
You've got the Captain vs. First Officer stuff, which consists entirely of catchphrase debate ("War is great! War is bad! War is great! War is bad!") and then doesn't go anywhere. You've got the script repeating the thesis of the episode ("just one missile!") at least four times in case the audience had dozed off and missed it the last three times. You've got a conclusion that's almost carbon-pasted from last week in which the Doctor yells more empty catchphrases at the alien, the entire audience gets the points, and then we irrelevantly
repeat the exact same conclusion 5 seconds later but in a less effective way (featuring Clara meaningfully doing something which, upon any reflection, is actually completely meaningless).
You're only producing 14 episodes per year: Surely there's enough time for someone to look at these scripts and product a second draft, right?
