Torchwood - "Small Worlds"
Nov. 13th, 2006 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iainjclarkWell, blow me if that wasn't a decent episode of Torchwood. Maybe miracles do happen.
Okay, so there were still some over-sold moments, the music was awful and John Barrowman *really* can't do the range of emotions required for the role, but overall this successfully focused on mood and storytelling over cliched character-conflict for its own sake. The CGI was a bit on the cartoonish side but the design of the creatures worked well, and for once they took some darker plot decisions without it feeling overly forced.
The preceding episodes tried much harder than this one, without being anything like as effective. In fact the whole episode only served to highlight the vast gulf that separates making vaguely mature genre television from whatever the hell Torchwood has been doing over the past several weeks. (Largely standing around shouting "Look at me, aren't I Gritty, Sexy and Dark?")
Sadly next week's episode comes to you from the writer of "Cyberwoman" so I don't expect this to become a trend.
Okay, so there were still some over-sold moments, the music was awful and John Barrowman *really* can't do the range of emotions required for the role, but overall this successfully focused on mood and storytelling over cliched character-conflict for its own sake. The CGI was a bit on the cartoonish side but the design of the creatures worked well, and for once they took some darker plot decisions without it feeling overly forced.
The preceding episodes tried much harder than this one, without being anything like as effective. In fact the whole episode only served to highlight the vast gulf that separates making vaguely mature genre television from whatever the hell Torchwood has been doing over the past several weeks. (Largely standing around shouting "Look at me, aren't I Gritty, Sexy and Dark?")
Sadly next week's episode comes to you from the writer of "Cyberwoman" so I don't expect this to become a trend.
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Date: 2006-11-13 06:22 pm (UTC)I think these are the best monster of its type that The Mill have done so far in either show. They *are* getting better at the more naturalistic CGI monsters - these were better than the Krillitans who were in turn better than the monsters in 'Father's Day' - and they are no worse than any of the CGI monsters that Buffy produced (in fact Buffy, while excellent at the prosthetics was unformly terrible when it came to CGI monsters).
Did you see the Torchwood Declassified for 'Cyberwoman'? Everything that was wrong with that episode was down to the fact that they wanted to make her sexy when she should have been horrific *sigh*
Chiball's previous work for the BBC seem's to be 'Born & Bred' (dull Sunday night drama) and 'Life On Mars' (which I never really understood the popularity of and I wasn't very impressed with its creator's episode in last year's Who 'Fear Her'). Unfortunately he has written an episode of Who for next season...