Month: November 2011

I made almost no use of the extra hour the return to Daylight Savings Time afforded me today. I certainly didn’t use it to sleep in, which is unfortunate. I worked on the Sunday crossword, which I didn’t like, and which I didn’t finish. And I did finally get around to watching the end of Torchwood: Miracle Day, when I noticed it was now available on Netflix streaming.

And I was reminded why I haven’t gone out of my way these past few months to finish it. The series started off okay, got rather bad, rallied for one genuinely very good episode, and then sunk back into awfulness, ending on a very weird note and all but screaming “there’s a sequel a’comin’!” It’s almost a master class in how not to write a television series…which is even more a shame considering that it comes from several people who up til now I thought were pretty good at that sort of thing. (Even Davies, who has some bad habits he can sometimes fall back on.) And I’m just talking at a basic level here: heavy exposition that explains everything and yet nothing, idiot characters we care nothing about, guest stars with half a scene of screen time, laughably terrible characters from other guest stars — seriously, Marc Vann has never been worse — and terrible, terrible dialogue. It rallied just a little near the end, rising with a few good ideas to a level of mediocrity, but ultimately the show was a huge disappointment, worse even than the often quite dire first season.

My thoughts line up pretty much with Zack Handlen’s review:

I had high hopes for Miracle Day, which quickly became hopes, before finally evaporating into long, aggravated sighs. I suppose the odds were against the series from the start; no matter how good Children Of Earth was, it didn’t suddenly mean that Davies had mastered the tics which are such a distinctive part of his style. Miracle Day was full of Big Moments, and attempts to yank on the heart strings, as well as attempts to shock us with sudden darkness. Sometimes these attempts were successful, but most weren’t, and without any strong sense of purpose, those failed moments led to a permanent impression of emptiness. Great shows—great art—can convince us there’s more than what we see; but all I got from this Torchwood was less, and less, and less.

I’m still quite fond of the second, and Children of Earth is terrific. So, try as they might, they can’t take that away.

And that was pretty much my Sunday. Oh, and I wrote this:

If truth be told, Father Gregory had not believed in ghosts, nor in witches or devils, but there was no use denying that what stood before him now was some mixture of all three. Faith in God is all-important, Father Aleph might have said, but His enemies depend on no such faith for their existence. What Gregory did or did not believe was beside the point. Demons and wraiths were deadly all the same.

“You forget your catechism,” Aleph did say now. “A novice such as yourself has no business conjuring up a quantum summoning. But I suppose in your pride — ”

“It wasn’t pride,” said Gregory. “I — they shouldn’t exist. The Church erradicated them all centuries ago. I thought — ”

“And I suppose you don’t believe in time travel either,” said Aleph. “When that’s clearly what the quantum summoning is. When without it our faith would be nothing.”

He stared at the machine, the dark host shimmering in its still open field. “It’s a useful tool,” Aleph said. “The machine. Useful for historians, hunters. You don’t think ALL the dread beast’s minions have been destroyed, do you?”

“I didn’t think — ” said Gregory.

“Unplug the machine,” said Aleph with a sigh. “And then run the standard exorcism rites. These…things will get put back where, and when they belong.”

Was it really that simple? wondered Gregory. Demons ripped from the distant past, the twenty-first century if the flashing read-outs on the machine could be believed, and all of it undone with a simple reboot?

“Just be glad you didn’t accidentally summon the Dark Lord himself,” said Aleph. “I’ve seen more than one novice, and even a few adepts, ripped apart by the horrors that can bring forth. If it was up to me, you certainly wouldn’t have access to the machine.”

Again he sighed. “But His Holiness wants all of you trained in the rudiments of time travel, for the war, and that’s what I’ll do. Just — don’t touch anything without asking me first, all right?”

Not quite sure what’s going on there, or what to do with it, but…well, there it is.