“Torchwood: Miracle Day” Review: “The Middle Men” (NOTHING TO SPOIL)

by KYLE ANDERSON on AUGUST 15, 2011

I miss the child rapist/murderer. That is a sentence I never hoped to utter (or type) in my life, and yet, Torchwood: Miracle Day’s sixth episode, “The Middle Men,” left me with little choice. For the first time in the series, an episode was completely devoid of Oswald Danes, the murderer-turned-messiah in Phicorp’s new ass-backward world order.  No Danes means we also have no Jilly Kitzinger, the plucky, overly ambitious PR person assigned to manage Danes. This, along with last week’s shocking incineration of Dr. Vera Juarez, means that episode 6 lost all of the characters who’d made the first five episodes in any way interesting.  My tolerance of Miracle Day and my willingness to give it the benefit of the doubt is slowly dwindling. The fact is nothing is happening to move the plot forward and everything seems like a space saver or a digression to stretch for time.  And when you need to stretch for time, nobody works better than a Ghostbuster.

That’s right, Ernie Hudson was in this episode playing Phicorp’s COO, Stuart Owens.  At the beginning of the episode, Owens is also concerned about what his company is doing and gets a trying-very-hard-to-seem-cool Chinese operative to check out a Phicorp installation in Shanghai. Whatever he finds out is so horrible that he throws himself off of a 45 story building, which, only moments earlier, the “news” told us was the only way to ensure brain death.  Convenient. The episode spent almost no time setting up Owens as a character or what he was doing with Phicorp. We’re just plopped right in the middle of him looking stuff up and for about five minutes I thought I’d missed a whole episode somewhere. Whatever the Chinese guy found will have to wait for another day, probably, because nothing else about it is mentioned here.

Back in Wales, Gwen and Rhys are still trying to get Mr. Cooper out of the camp, as he’s being transferred at 6:00am to the module of fire.  Gwen finds a doctor that can hopefully help her, but the doctor refuses on the grounds of policy and so Gwen yells at her, giving her a brow-beating of gargantuan proportions.  Apparently, all one has to do to not get kicked out of an Overflow Camp is to wear scrubs.  Seriously, if some strange lady yelled at me for five minutes about what a monster I am for not helping, I’d sure as hell ask, “Hey, who are you anyway? How did you get here? Why are you yelling at me? Oh! My mistake. I didn’t see those scrubs you are wearing. Please forgive me, you clearly belong here, since we love hiring people with very loud, boisterous opinions about how evil we are.” Gwen thinks of a plan which is essentially the same exact plan as the last time, but with no heart attack. Tension is ramped up by making Rhys get stopped by a guy at the gate. He has to check paper work. And call people. Riveting. Of course, eventually they get her dad out. Then Gwen blows up the modules with a crapton of C4. Using the video contact lenses (that usually can’t transmit audio but can now because it’s convenient), she broadcasts the explosion and a message about what the camps are really doing. And while people are outraged, nobody is apologizing.

Jack, not to be outdone, has decided to waste a bunch of time himself.  He finds Stuart Owens’ secretary/lover at a bar and displays that he knows all sorts of things about her and the fact that Owens is a dick and wanted to get her fired even though he’s boning her. She offers to help Jack get close to Owens by pretending to be held hostage. This is completely unnecessary, as Owens is probably the most forthcoming character we’ve ever seen on the show.  Owens tells Jack that he’s just a middle man and knows nothing, though he’s uncovered references to “the blessing,” which is what the mucky mucks called “miracle day” before it happened.

This scene is supposed to be really intriguing and mysterious, like in All the President’s Men when they talk to Deep Throat or in JFK when he talks to Donald Sutherland, but it’s actually more like when people talk and don’t say anything interesting. Ernie Hudson was completely wasted and did the best he could with just being an info-dump character. Who was this guy? He must not have been that important since we didn’t even know Jack was looking for him until he’d already gathered all the necessary intel on him. In storytelling, there’s a thing called “Suspense,” which involves the audience knowing what someone has to do and then watching and hoping they succeed. This was just what they call “Filler,” which is where the same information that could have been gathered on a computer screen was given to a well-known character actor in order to make an episode longer.

The bulk of the episode dealt with Rex and Esther still in the San Pedro Overflow Camp and site coordinator Colin Maloney trying to cover up his murder of Vera Juarez and military feeb Ralph Coltrane freaking out and whining.  Maloney puts the camp on a lockdown so that people will stop wondering about Dr. Juarez, but really it was a means of keeping all the characters from getting out and furthering the plot. Can’t have that, now.

Rex has taped everything and wants to get out to show everybody the footage of Vera burning in the module.  While trying to escape, he gets captured and chained to a pipe for Maloney to deal with. Maloney does a pretty good job of pretending he’s not at fault for anything and Rex calls him a middle man also before beseeching Maloney to watch the “Juarez En Fuego” footage which makes the murderer break down and cry. Maybe he’s seen the error of his ways… nah, he decides to stab Rex’s open, gaping chest wound with a pen. Then Esther shows up and is a bad liar, causing her to have to fight Maloney and suffocate him. But she didn’t get the chain keys so she has to go back and get them, which gives Maloney ample time to be not-dead and try to kill her again. Good thing Ralph The Useless grew a pair and showed up just in time to shoot Maloney and save Esther. THEN THEY JUST LET REX AND ESTHER GO! Seriously? They’re witnesses to multiple murders AND they’re wanted by the CIA, yet somehow they just get to leave and end up back at Torchwood HQ. “Episode’s over, everybody’s okay, no need to bring logic in to anything involved.” Son of a bitch.

Then at the end, Gwen comes back to LA and gets a phone call on LAX’s white courtesy phone. This is the biggest bit of sci-fi in the whole episode because I’m damn skippy no one has EVER heard their name on the intercom at an airport about using the white courtesy phone because usually people aren’t expecting to hear it. But Gwen has amazing hearing and just happens to be right next to a clearly-marked white courtesy phone. A voice on the line tells her to put in her lenses. She goes into the bathroom and the message on the lenses, presumably from the bad guys in charge, tell her that they’ve kidnapped her husband, mother, and child. But not her dad. Is he fine? If she wants her loved ones released, she has to deliver Jack. DUN DUN DUMB.

It’s six episodes of ten, and right now the closest thing to a main villain we’ve seen is Colin friggin’ Maloney. There is no way he should have been that big a threat. He kills one main character and nearly kills two other ones. Even Oswald Danes only killed one person, though he’s still way ahead of Maloney on the rape.

I’m gonna watch the rest of the series because I said I would and I’m a man of my word, but holy crap, you guys, this show is sloooooooow mooooooving.  I’ve also decided this isn’t actually Torchwood; it’s a show with characters from Torchwood, but it bears almost no resemblance to either the first two seasons or Children of Earth.  Hopefully, by time the series ends, it’ll turn into something approaching what a Torchwood is.

-Kanderson needs excitement… and TWITTER followers

“Torchwood: Miracle Day,” “The Categories of Life” Review (SPOILERS)

by KYLE ANDERSON on AUGUST 8, 2011

All right, Torchwood, we get it; things are bad all over. We’re all on board with you now, thank you. Miracle Day’s fifth episode, “The Categories of Life,” shows that the lowest depth humanity could possibly sink has a subbasement where they cut bunnies in half with butter knives. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

After five episodes, which I’ve more or less enjoyed, mind you, I’ve decided that the series’ creators must have operated under four basic tenets: 1) Raise as many interesting hypothetical points as possible per episode, 2) Every character must have overwhelming naivety and behave as though they never thought anything bad could ever happen and are surprised when it does, 3) Be so cynical and bleak that even Friedrich Nietzsche would say, “All right, you’ve gone too far,” and 4) In the rare moments when nothing fucked-up is happening, fill it with unnecessary silliness. That, my friends, is Torchwood: Miracle Day in a nutshell. But, like I said, I am more or less enjoying the series as a whole, which I guess must mean something is off about me. I’m fine with it.

The episode opens with Gwen arriving back in Wales. Now, I feel the makers of the show missed a golden opportunity to show us, nearly minute-by-minute, what happened to her aboard her very long overseas flight. Episodes one and two show us that there is nothing about traveling places that need be left out. I’ll forever be left wondering if they offered everyone a complimentary full meal or if it was snacks only. And what was the in-flight movie?! Regardless, Gwen arrives back in Wales to attempt to break her father out of one of Phicorp’s mysterious “overflow camps,” for people who are sick, nearly dead, or should-be dead. Rhys meets her at the airport and goes to the trouble of wearing a chauffeur’s uniform only for the twenty seconds before the entire ruse is spoiled by the two of them kissing. Couldn’t he have just been a guy picking up his wife and not a driver behaving incredibly unprofessionally? Upon returning to Gwen’s mom’s house to spend less than a minute with Anwen (who looks like she couldn’t give a shit about anything), Mum shares the intelligence she’s gathered about the camps, culled from the years of MI6 training we didn’t realized she’d received, and we learn that humans have now been broken up into three categories.

The bloody news reports (where, let’s face it, the people they hired to be anchors sound like they’ve never even read the newspaper let alone spent years in broadcasting school) tell us that the category system has been immediately enacted in the UK, would very shortly be implemented in the US, and other countries had begun to follow suit. Though China’s holding off, it seems. Wow, China? They have overpopulation as it is, you’d think they’d be busting a gut to get rid of their sick people, or at the very least their unwanted female children. Too far? I apologize. The three categories are as follows: Category 1 means you’re “alive” because of the miracle but you have no higher brain function, Category 3 means you’re perfectly fine and healthy and haven’t died once, and Category 2 means EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE WHOLE WORLD. If you’re sick at all, you’re Category 2. Surely there needed to be a few more categories. Delineate a little bit. For instance, Category 9 would be when you’re walking funny because you stubbed your toe really hard on the coffee table leg and it hurts to put your shoe on right now.

While Gwen’s doing that bollocks, Dr. Vera Juarez has decided to fly out to Los Angeles (another long flight we didn’t see one second of. Ugh!) to aid Torchwood in their whatever-it-is-they’re-actually-doing. Esther’s convoluted intelligence tells us that there are things called “modules” where they take the Category 1 patients and while they show up on the official map, they’ve been removed from photos, except that Esther found a photo where they do exist. Shouldn’t this have been t’other way around? Shouldn’t they not have been on the map but shown up in photographs? Wouldn’t that have cut out a whole step of Esther having to find a photo where they do actually exist? I don’t presume to tell Jane Espenson how to write, because clearly she’s friggin’ great at it, but all that bit of thing added to the story was an extra 30 seconds of explanation. Just saying. At any rate, they decide they need to break in to one of these facilities and see exactly what’s going on. Rex forces himself to be the obvious choice because he’s an oughta-be-dead with a big, gaping chest wound. Jack calls the ambulance and pretends to be Rex’s very distraught boyfriend, which was funny, and they take Rex off to the overflow camp.

When Jack goes back upstairs, he finds that Vera and Esther have decided to go in as well. Vera says she’s “pulled some strings” and that she’s been granted access to the camp as an inspector and Esther’s going to pretend to be a new office worker. Jack doesn’t get to go because he’s very valuable and people will recognize him on sight. He’s his own category, Esther says. Category Jack. I’m really appalled at Esther. Doesn’t she know this is serious? There’s a global crisis happening which may or may not have been started by a nefarious, money-hungry corporation; this is no time to make horribly un-funny not-jokes and smile about them like she’s George Carlin at Carnegie Hall. So what’s Jack supposed to do while everyone else is off going to camps and what not? He’s going to Generic Arena to watch Oswald Danes, who’s set to give a big speech to thousands of people in attendance and millions watching worldwide. And to say the ol’ murderer is nervous is putting it mildly.

The ever-persistent Jilly Kitzinger is having cats about the speech. She demands Oswald say the word “Revelation.” For the love of God, if he doesn’t say “Revelation,” there will be all kinds of irritated looks. Oswald is put off because Jilly keeps handing him a speech to say full of Phicorp rhetoric and he thought he’d just be saying whatever came to him, like some kind of crazy religious zealot. Oh wait! Oswald gets distracted while waiting to go on by Jack who has decided to play everybody’s favorite game, “How Quickly Can You Get To The Other End of A Ridiculously Long Hallway?” Oswald tries to follow him, not realizing Jack is the HQCYGTTOEOARLH champion of the world.

In Wales, Gwen, dressed as a nurse, and Rhys, dressed like Rhys, get into the camp where Father Cooper is being held. Gwen goes in and searches for her Category 2 father. There’s no way I believe that Gwen wouldn’t immediately have been spotted by somebody who said “Hang on, that woman is practically marching around doing nothing.” Hasn’t anybody ever tricked their boss? You always have to look like you’re doing something. People can spot wandering, even forceful wandering, a mile away. But of course, she finds her father who seems to be in good spirits if not good health. Rhys and Gwen covertly move an old man who can barely walk to Rhys’s lorry, or “truck” as we call them here in ‘Merica, but the poor man has another heart attack and Gwen calls for help. Bad move, of course, as her dad is now reclassified as Category 1.

In the American camp, Vera is being shown around by the man in charge, Maloney, the skeeviest human being who isn’t Oswald Danes I’ve ever seen. This guy makes several lewd remarks about her and acts like he could not give less of a shit about all the sick and disfigured people around him. While this is happening, Esther finds a way to forge the paperwork to make Rex a Category 1 so he can see what it’s all about. He gets taken to a module, which is really just a ceramic storage area where people are put on racks, and waits til everyone is gone, then gets up and starts filming it. Vera, meanwhile, uncovers the horrible mistreatment of people under Maloney’s care. He quotes Vera’s own triage method of treating the less sick first and says he’s under budget. She tells Maloney that he’s going to get prosecuted to which Maloney promptly takes the pistol off of Ralph, his completely ineffectual military escort, and shoots Vera in the leg and then the hand. He then forces Ralph to help him take her to the modules and they load her in.

Back at the thing, Jack confronts Oswald and offers him a chance to be a “hero,” and to finally be able to die, if he reads THIS (Jack pulls out another speech) instead of the Phicorp one. Jack’s speech, which I can’t imagine would be very well written, lays out all of Phicorp’s wrongs and all the evidence that Torchwood has uncovered. Oswald seems very unsure of what he will do, even upon going up to the podium. He starts talking and saying how humans have evolved thousands of years ago from animals and now they’ve evolved again to…Angels. Luckily, he’s talking to the most easily-led crowd of all time, because they start cheering and applauding like they have any idea what the fuck he’s talking about. In the end, though, Oswald says “Revelation” and Phicorp saves the day, much to Jack’s chagrin and Jilly’s the opposite of chagrin.

The modules are furnaces and Vera gets cooked alive. Phicorp’s the Nazis. Get it? The world has become Nazi sympathizers, GET IT?!

This show is enjoyable and entertaining but also really dumb and makes me hate human beings. Perhaps I shall become a bird. Next week there’s another episode and in three weeks there’ll be both Torchwood: Miracle Day ANDDoctor Who to watch and review. Oh me oh my-oh.

-Kanderson may have lost faith in humanity, but he still has faith that you should follow him on TWITTER

    
  

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The House of 1000 Corpses

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