Torchwood

[Deleted]

The end of the Palin clone was horrifying, wasn't it? Insanity would have to set it at some stage, not to mention the pain...I just..it's horrific.

I'm generally in agreement about Esther, but it bothers me that the two main female characters have family problems, and Rex doesn't, although his father seems not quite right. He's not as distracted by his problematic father as Gwen and Esther are by their families.

I have to agree that I think the story stemmed from politics and not vice versa, it seems a bit forced.

And bstewart, you need to show your 'who wants to watch the Dr Who kids' stuff' friends episode 2 of season 1

[Laira]

Sweet Jebus, the end of Mare Winningham's Palin knockoff (right on the money, only a billion times more articulate, sheesh) is going to give me nightmares tonight.

I thought she was more of a Michelle Bachman knockoff, given that she could speak in complete sentences. Man o man, that was brutal!

[Deleted]

I've been defending this season largely thanks to how chilling and grave last season was but... I can't much defend it now. There's such wild improbability in how passively the general public accepted the seismic shift in world order and, frankly, the revelation of what's happening to the Category 1 patients, after last season's jaw-dropping children-as-alien-crack reveal, was... What's a nice way of putting it? It was Adam-era Buffy stupid.

And I watched "The Core" today, too.

[Deleted]

I thought it was just me. Did we really need a whole hour to reveal that governments were going to try and 'get rid of' some the worst cases? As my mother would say, Blind Freddy could see that coming.

I hope they're going to give us more of a reveal about what the miracle is in the next episode, because now I'm just bored.

[Deleted]

I have to admit, I thought they'd go all Soylent Green with the Cat1s. At least it would match the abject horror of last season and would deal with the food shortage issues, at least for the Cat2s. But Espenson and Davies sailed under even that trite and tidy solution. Ugh.

Pullman is some kinda awesome, though. I'm afraid that if this season continues to unravel this badly, he'll escape recognition for his fine, horrifying work.

[Deleted]

Pullman is so good. I generally like him, but here he's just so repulsive and completely unsympathetic - I mean the writers definitely aren't wimping out by trying to give him any likeability.

[LurkerNan]

It's hard for me to reconcile Pullman here to Pullman as the white knight president in Independance Day... I guess that's why he's a good actor.

[Sunnyhorse]

Mr. S. and I were more affected by the last ep than you guys, it seems -- we were both sitting there at the end like someone had smacked us with a 2-by-4. (It didn't help that I really, really like Vera, and that scene was fucking horrifying.) After the ep ended, there was a "Tune in for the next episode of Torchwood" intro to the preview, and I was, like, whimpering, "Do I have to?" We agreed that it was interesting that the people writing the new series have managed to touch in some way on everyone's fears -- Tea Baggers and flaming liberals alike.

ETA: I just saw on a Torchwood discussion board somewhere that Arlene Tur, who plays Vera, was to appear in 10 episodes. I don't even want to know what form that might involve in the second half of the series.

[Deleted]

I'd never seen Arlene Tur before "Torchwood" and her seeming demise in the last episode made me grumpy. She's talented and gorgeous and her character had an intelligent charisma entirely appropriate to what the Torchwood team needs, moreso than Rex or Esther. Hoping she somehow survives. Intact.

And, really. Was her killer not bad enough for his utter inhumanity towards the Cat1s and Cat2s that he had to be a cartoonishly sexist prick, too?

[Sunnyhorse]

Poor Marc Vann is doomed to play weasels, it would seem, although his CSI character does get moments of redemption and the Eckley character has been much more human in the past couple of seasons. The weird part, for Mr. S. and me, about his portrayal of the evil camp bureaucrat was that he veered wildly between cartoonishly sexist prick and cartoonisly evil gay -- it was like whoever wrote the character couldn't decide what to make the guy.