Torchwood Season One Ratings Guide!

Here's a fun post I've been working on here and there, over the past week.

I finished all of Torchwood, plus Captain Jack Harkness appearances in Doctor Who Seasons One, Three and Four. I'm now going back and watching Torchwood Season One over again. So here are my ratings for the various episodes of Season One. They have been rated according to the following categories:

Sexual Tension		This category is self-explanatory.
Action		Explosions, Chases, Fights, Stabbings, Chompings, Shootings, Decapitations, etc.
Drama		Character development and effective emotional-type stuff.
WTFery		Anything off the wall in an especially good or bad way. Includes plot holes and strange hommages/rip-offs.

Image-heavy, so click here for the full post if you're not already on the post page...



Episode 1: Everything Changes
We're introduced to Torchwood through Gwen Cooper, a policewoman in Cardiff, Wales, leading an ordinary Welsh policewoman life until she spies on the Torchwood team. She ends up joining when another team member dies.

	Sexual innuendo, sex-drug-induced bisexual triangle kissing, Captain Jack Harkness standing on the top of a building in a highly suggestive way.
	Post-death stabbing, alien throat-chomping, shooting.
	Effective introduction of characters and great performance by Indira Varma with a rather unexpected and shocking ending.
	It's obvious to any viewer that this is a unique show and quite difficult to categorize. But why would you tell someone all about your secret organization before giving them an amnesia pill? And why do the Torchwood computers have swirling animated desktops? Animated desktops are very distracting! They give me a headache just thinking about them. How are you supposed to get any sort of serious work done on a computer if you have an animated desktop?

Episode 2: Day One
An incorporeal alien lands in Cardiff, invades the body of a young woman and starts having sex with people in order to kill them and steal their orgasmic energy. Commonly referred to as the "sex gas" episode.

	Lesbian kissing, explicit hetero sex, lots of implied sex, although it isn't actually very sexy in context. Owen getting naked and handcuffed.
	A little bit of fighting and a lot of chasing.
	This episode established the Gwen Cooper is very empathetic, and a good policewoman, but otherwise falls flat.
	This is basically Welsh Species. Or if you're feeling extraordinarily generous, Welsh Liquid Sky. This episode takes a ridiculous, derivative premise and runs it into the ground and over the top. It's fun, though.

Episode 3: Ghost Machine
Torchwood discovers a piece of alien technology that calls up glimpses of the past and future.

	Not much sexual tension other than the suggestive shooting range scene, but that's enough for two peppers!
	Chasing, lots of stabbing
	Great minor characters and a "slice of life"feel. One of the characters is first introduced as a sadistic young murderer/rapist, and we meet them again many years later as a pathetic, old, dying, mentally ill man. A complicated portrayal. The first instance of a major Torchwood theme: being haunted by the past.
	Rather understated except for the shooting range scene. Apparently, teaching superb marksmanship to someone who's never held a gun is easy and takes only a single session; all you have to do is stand up tightly against them, gently stroke their arm and whisper in their ear. Yes, it's just that easy, if you're Captain Jack.

Episode 4: Cyberwoman
Ianto has been hiding his Cybergirlfriend in the basement, wearing Cyberfetishwear, strapped to a Cybertable. He tries to fix her up, but it doesn't work and she starts trying to kill everyone.

	Kissing under dangerous circumstances, sexually suggestive aggressiveness, Cyberfetishwear
	Chasing, electrocution, bashing, vivisection, shooting, chomping, debrainification.
	Ianto suddenly becomes an interesting character. Poor Ianto! He really loves his hot deadly Cybergirlfriend. There's a lot of intensity under that carefully controlled exterior. We also learn that Ianto is very loyal.
	This episode is Cyberbananas. I loved it.

Episode 5: Small World
Torchwood investigates killer fairies. That's not innuendo; this is probably the most heterosexual episode of Season One.

	Topless Captain Jack (brief)! Otherwise pretty tame.
	Chasing, multiple magical asphyxiations.
	We learn a lot about Jack in this episode. We learn he's capable of taking his relationships very seriously, despite previous indications of ruthless and callous behavior. He has a very caring, romantic, nostalgic streak. We also learn more about his willingness to make split-second moral trade-offs, a scary trait which becomes important much later on. I thought this episode was quite moving.
	Fairies? Science fiction? I guess so...

Episode 6: Countrycide
Torchwood goes camping.

	A snatch of innuendo, plus some Owen and Gwen action. Otherwise tame.
	Chasing, dismemberment, shooting, bashing, shooting, chasing, bashing, dismemberment, chasing, field surgery, chomping.
	Some good insight into Gwen's motivations, her passion for what she does and the way her job is affecting her life and her relationship with Rhys. Otherwise, not much development.
	This episode is basically Welsh Chainsaw Massacre. If you like horror movies (and I do) you'll love it, otherwise you'll hate it. And I know this has to happen in every horror plot... but they shouldn't have split up the team! Bad things always happen when you split up the team. I know this from my own combat experience (I, umm, used to play D&D when I was a teenager, so I'll go ahead and call that "combat experience" for the sake of this review).

Episode 7: Greeks Bearing Gifts
Toshiko has a lesbian affair with a dangerous alien.

	Kissing, non-explicit sex, suggestive displaying of teeth.
	Shooting, bashing, organ removal
	Great development for Toshiko's character. We learn about her unrequited love and her frustration at being taken for granted. I also liked the part at the very end with her and Jack. It was subtle and well-done.
	Toshiko seems uncharacteristically naive and the character of the alien doesn't seem fully-fleshed. There's really nothing to the character beyond the broadest of outlines: Dangerous Sexy Alien!

Episode 8: They Keep Killing Suzie
Suzie returns from the dead.

	Nothing until the end, when there's brief blazing innuendo bombshell.
	Stabbing, stabbing, cheeky tasering, post-mortem stabbing, chasing, shooting, shooting.
	Suzie does a great job playing a complicated, mysterious mixture of victim and villain. Loved the dark humor in this episode. We see that there's always going to be a cloud of doom over the Torchwood team. The theme of facing/fleeing death is also developed.
	The plot is built on a complicated causal chain involving amnesia, drug-induced brainwashing, strategic suicide, Emily Dickinson poems and secret computer codes. If you think about it for more than half a second it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.

Episode 9: Random Shoes
A lonely, sensitive young man tries to solve the mystery of his death.

	No pepper! Just romantic yearning, which goes under the drama category.
	Traffic accident, half-hearted nerd-wrestling, light chasing.
	This episode is told from the point of view of an outsider obsessed with Torchwood. Like "Ghost Machine", it's more about the normal than the supernatural. Gwen Cooper shines in this episode. Funny, sad, moving.
	A very understated episode. The mechanics of the plot are left a mystery, but in a self-referential way.

Episode 10: Out of Time
Three people from 1953 fall out of a rift in time and find they can't go back. Torchwood tries to get them acclimated to the present. One adjusts, two don't.

	Owen has sex (in a classy way).
	No action.
	A beautiful story about how humans define themselves as a product of their time. Each of the travelers has a totally distinct, compelling and unique personality and you can understand why they make the choices they do. The end of Jack's new friendship was extraordinarily sad.
	No batboy. This episode is so tasteful it might as well have been introduced by Alistair Cooke.

Episode 11: Combat
Owen goes undercover to try and infiltrate an alien fight club.

	Considerable tension between Owen and the fight club dude, but it never goes anywhere.
	Chomping, barfighting, pitfighting, chomping.
	Owen is depressed. I get it. Did we need this episode to know that?
	This is Welsh Fight Club. I know that, even though I've never seen Fight Club. I have no desire to ever see Fight Club. Wait, I did accidentally see five minutes of Fight Club at one point, and the dialogue irritated me so much it made me want to punch the television set. So why is Torchwood making me watch Fight Club? Argh!

Episode 12: Captain Jack Harkness
Jack and Toshiko fall through a rift in time back to 1941, in the middle of a ballroom party for the troops about to head off to fight the Germans. Jack meets his namesake, the "real" Captain Jack Harkness.

	Light fighting, shooting, off-screen bombing.
	All the steps involved in passing the message forward to the present were totally unbelievable, but I was too busy crying to care.

Episode 13: End of Days

	Just kissing and hugging, but it hits the spot.
	Bubonic plague, shooting, stabbing, Welsh kaiju
	Every character gets a large roomful of furniture to chew.
	This is as over the top as it gets.

Other Torchwood Season One reviews:

• A more detached approach and rating system: Planetzogblog
• Like A Whisper: "Feminism, Critical Race Consciousness, Queer Politics, & Dr. Who Too?!?" A bit of season one critical analysis here.
• Hilarious Torchwood fake Facebook pages (Captain Jack and Season 1&2 recaps)