Breaking News

Not seen You Have Been Watching yet? Why not, you idiot? All the cool kids have seen it. I've seen it (now, anyway). If you haven't seen it, God hates you.

Go on. Head over to 4oD and check it out. Now. Don't keep reading the rest of this post, you bastard. Go now.

Do not look back. GO NOW.

Day Two

(I'm a bit behind in my plan to blog on each episode as it happens, due to a combination of a red-hot social life and a computer apparently powered by asthmatic hamsters in rusty wheels. Bear with me.)

Forty percent of the way through, and Torchwood still shows no signs of sucking to the epic extent it once did. Sure, there are niggles, mainly that Davies is using a common tactic of lazy writers by setting up an adversary for the heroes that are totally BIG and BAD and WILL KILL YOU, but who are simultaneously outrageously incompetent whenever it's necessary to have the heroes escape, or to discover a new clue. I mean, who the Hell talks about matters vital to national security on their mobile in front of the office temp they hired yesterday. Capaldi might be an awesome actor, but his character is a chump. If only he could be more like his colleague (the one who looks like the love child of Richard Briers and Leo off The West Wing), who sashays around the corridors of power like a Sir Humphrey Appleby for the post 9/11 world.

That's a comparatively minor point, though, in part because the real action is promised for when the 456 finally show up [1]. Once again, then, there's a certain difficulty in judging the success of the episode, since so much is conditional upon the pay off.

Still. Unquestionable good bits:

• Very little Jack. This is good, because Jack is a terrible character, and has been since the Daleks killed him, and because Barrowman is a distinctly limited actor, and has been since at least Shark Attack 3. [2]
• On a related note, watching him screaming as his body forcibly rebuilt him was pretty damn cool, and seeing him encased in concrete better still.
• Gwen shooting an unarmed man in the foot. One of the biggest complaints about Torchwood in the past was that it couldn't include a scene one wouldn't find in Doctor Who without screaming "WE ARE ADULT" over the top, and spraying blood and fuck-tricks all over the place. You could argue it's a bit sad that something so simple impresses me, but I'll take all the improvements I can get.
• Kids. Still creepy.
• "We want a pony". Best line Davies has written for a long time.

Not so good bits.

• The aforementioned incompetence of the hostile government agencies.
• Apparently the BBC still doesn't have anyone that can direct action films for shit. Gwen in particular looks like a eight-year old with two water pistols whenever she engages in gun-play.
• Ianto's family. I should be careful here, they're not too bad yet, but one can't help the sneaking suspicion that despite their humble background and current status as (mercilessly unfunny) light relief, they will end up saving everyone, because Davies is convinced everyone in the world hates the working class, and he must re-educate us. Someone might want to tell him a) we get it, and b) if all of your working class characters are shouty arguing selfish bumblers, it might not be the audience who has a problem with undervaluing the working class, irrespective of how many times they implausibly save the Earth at the eleventh hour.
• This is fairly minor, but how does Ianto know how to drive a JCB, and how did he get himself inside the perimeter of a top secret base filled with anti-terrorist forces? See above about strategic incompetence, by the way, it doesn't fill me with confidence that the British Armed Forces apparently don't bother with identification checks for sexy undertakers.

In all, then, a mixed bag, but a mixed bag of sweets which includes the occasional Pink Shrimp, as opposed to a mixed bag of the faeces of two dozen different types of rodent. Definite, and significant, progress.

[1] One thing I forgot about Monday's episode that really pissed me off; apparently "half the world" are still refusing to accept the existence of extra-terrestrials. This despite the fact that the fucking world was stolen. I can't decide if RTD doesn't want to be bothered with following through with the fall-out of his ludicrously overblown finales, which would make him a cock, or if he's deliberately throwing this stuff in to irritate people who have complained about it before, in which case he's intentionally weakening the structure of the show to make a point, which would kind of confirm my impression of the man as BBC Centre's equivalent to George Bush. Sure, Davies hasn't started any pointless and bloody wars, but then Bush never wrote Love & Monsters, so who is the real criminal?

[2] I also find him a fairly grating person, too. Not just because he's everywhere these days, bellowing catchphrases into microphones so loud each drop of phlegm sounds like a napalm drop, but because he seems even more congenitally incapable of considering the possibility that Torchwood might just suck than its creator is. According to Cocklick, Barrowman has been complaining that being reduced to five episodes from thirteen is "like we're being punished." You are being punished, Barrowman. That's what happens when nobody watches your show, because despite having a huge potential audience, you decided to be shit on toast. Your problem is not being able to grasp the possibility that your punishment is deserved.

Saves Me Some Work

With the debate on healthcare heating up in the States and once again having to deal with Democratic senators threatening to filibuster their own President, I was allowing a post on the whole thing to congeal at the back of my mind, but Ed Kilgore beat me to it.

My personal feeling is that supporting a filibuster against your own party and your own party's president should be treated as a serious and rare measure on major issues of conscience where the sacrifice of some of the prerogatives of seniority are a small price to pay... at a minimum, the practice of thinking of cloture votes as identical to substantive votes, and tolerating defections on the former as just the same as the latter, needs to come to an end.

This is exactly right. Much has been said (and I think some of it on this blog) about the dangers of over-valuing party loyalty, but when we talk about that we usually mean the degree of arm-twisting that goes on behind the scenes over forcing people to vote according to the will of their party's leader. Intentionally preventing the majority of your own party from even being able to vote on legislation tied to your platform, though, is just flat-out dickish, absent tremendously compelling exceptional circumstances. People need to understand the distinction.

Update: While we're on the subject, note the dickishness of Evan Bayh. "Most senators aren't sheep," he said. "They don't just go blindly along without thinking about things, and I don't think we want them to do that."

I don't even know what that means. Allowing a vote to be held makes someone a sheep? Is that really what he's saying here? It's sheepish behaviour, the herd mentality, to actually allow people to vote their consciences? That's the exact opposite of being a sheep, surely? Bayh's problem isn't that permitting a straight up-or-down vote is sheepish behaviour, it's that he clearly wants to be a sheep on the other side.

De-Piling

Monday's word was "ARRRRRGGGGHH!", an onomatopoetic term used to describe the frustration of being given two fairly large jobs to do and be told you have until the middle of the week.

Today's word is "YOOOUUUUFUUUUUUUUCK!", a strangled cry of anger used to expressed the fury that comes from finishing both jobs by 10am Wednesday morning only to be told you're a day late.

"Middle of the week" doesn't get you through Tuesday? What, if I may ask, the fuck?

Still, just the correcting of Chapter 2 left, and I can settle down to just having the one job (at which I suck, but that's another story).

Shake #13: 'Tis The Season

Today's shake: Strawberry

Taste: 7
Texture: 7
Synergy: 7
Scorn: 0
Total Score: 7.75

General Comments: At any other time, there would be little point in discussing this, the most vanilla of fruit-based shakes. Today, though, it's worth noting that it cost a mere thirty-five pence extra to have my strawberries blended with ice-cream and to not have to watch a Wimbledon match, which makes this treat significantly superior to the crap shovelled down by the Murray-obsessed masses of last week. Victory is mine!

Nuclear Missiles Twice As Cheap Under Communism

I don't want to get too worked up about this, international and internal politics being what they are, but this is best news I've read in quite a while.

Note that the main objection in the piece (must be fair and balanced, must be fair and balanced) is from John Bolton. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the ins and outs of nuclear deterrent theory to know whether or not to call bullshit from him this time. I do know that Bolton is a vicious, incompetent motherfucker and a rabid partisan hack, though, who has been wrong every single time he's spoken on a topic I do understand, most recently during his commentary on the Presidential Election, in which he deliberately misrepresented the comments of reporters in the field, accused them of not knowing what they were talking about, and ensured that he kept up his bullying arse-water spray until the program could cut back to the studio, thus preventing his unfortunate targets from defending themselves or explaining his obvious mistakes.

That's the sort of guy John Bolton is, and that's before we even get onto Iraq, Cuba, Iran, alleged perjury, and so on and so forth. If he's speaking, you either can't understand what he's saying, or you know he's lying.

Day One

D'oh! When I posted suggesting a slackening of material over this coming week, it didn't occur to me that Torchwood would be back on this week. I can get plenty of mileage out of kicking that around.

Except, it really isn't all that bad this time around. Losing Tosh and Owen has rid it of much of its irritating attempts at sexual tension and lovelorn glances, as has locking Jack and Ianto down as a couple (sure, they don't persuade in the least, but at least the constant ham-fisted stabs and flirting and bed-hopping are gone). More importantly, putting together a five-part serial allows Davies to play to his strengths. Well, maybe it would be better to say it helps to off-sets his weaknesses, hopefully we can get through to Episode 5 before the last-minute bullshit reversal kicks in and we all realise we've wasted our time.

Actually, that's not entirely fair. Davies does have strengths. Given sufficient time, he can definitely build up tension (and several hundred children screaming in unison will really give you the wiggins), a facet of his earlier work not really evident in Doctor Who, where everything has to be bright flashing lights and running right fucking now, and all the fucking time (unless we're taking time out for some pointless, cross-species mooning, natch). His character moments are also a bit more measured (watching Ianto come out to his family was probably the least shitty moment the character has ever had, which makes it even more grimly amusing that it occurred whilst he was attempting to obtain a child for experimentation). There's even time for actual mysteries, rather than buzzwords. Who is coming? Why did they leave a survivor all those years ago? And why would anyone want Jack dead?

Actually, that last one isn't really a mystery, so much as a list with an awful lot of names on it, but there's till enough to keep me interested, which makes for a pretty nice change. Still, it was all build-up, so there's not much point in considering it in isolation.

Before I sign off, though, bonus marks for hiring Peter Capaldi (who is already acting the regulars off-screen without even having met them) as one of a bunch of shadowy civil servants. You can't have too many shadowy civil servants. It's just not physically possible. Scientists have proved it with lasers.