Unreview: Children of Earth
One of my simple yardsticks for whether or not I like a TV show is the question, “Do I like the main character(s)?” This is not a hard and fast rule. I hated most of the characters in Battlestar Galactica – and most of the stories, especially that ridiculous lame ending! – yet kept watching the show. It’s an important factor, though. If I’m rooting for the characters to get killed or maimed, I’m probably not enjoying the action, either. Especially when they win.
This at least partially explains why Torchwood has never been one of my favorite shows. I just don’t much like the main character, Captain Jack Harkness. He’s too full of himself, too smarmy, and the way every story has to relate to his personal narrative strikes me as hackneyed and unnecessarily limiting.
How many shows have you seen where a mysterious female (not a given in Torchwood but never mind that) appears who turns out to be the hero’s long lost love and she has a child who may or may not be the hero’s? This sort of fake character development is a TV staple that gets exercised far too much in shows that take themselves too seriously (like Torchwood, or the execrable Sanctuary). Rather than revealing anything about the character it just provides contrived and manipulative melodrama that got old back when Gunsmoke still had smoking guns and Little Joe was still alive (I know he was on a different show. That’s how staples work. They bind multiple things).
Still, it’s science fiction and I’ll usually give science fiction a try, even after all the times I’ve been disappointed (such as EVERY Star Trek series made after the original). Besides. It’s summer and there’s even less on worth watching than usual.
So I was looking forward to the 5-part miniseries Torchwood: Children of Earth with mixed feelings. Five nights of an epic story told in the context of an intensely mediocre show. Hmmmm. Maybe, for the sake of the epic, they would pull out all the stops and make an effort to surpass their usual limitations. Why not? Weirder things have happened.
Unfortunately, in this instance that wasn’t what happened. By the fifth night I was bored with the story and the people, except for 2 bright spots (Gwen and Lois) who exceeded my low expectations for supporting characters on this show (and everyone who’s not Cap’n Jack is a minor supporting player. Torchwood was never a true ensemble show). There was even one point where Lois (a new character) stood up to the Prime Minister, in spite of her obvious fear, and I felt truly proud of her. She was kicked out of the story shortly after that, though, leaving behind a sea of less interesting and much less admirable people.
Interestingly, one of the least admirable people in the show was also among the most interesting. I forget the character’s name (apparently “interesting” and “memorable” are not synonyms!) but “Dr. Strangelove” conveys enough of the description to make him fairly recognizable. He was a brilliant and very nasty old man, right up to the end. Come to think of it, it wasn’t so much the character as the actor’s brilliant portrayal that attracted my attention. The cast of this piece was much better than the material they had to work with, by the way.
One of the things that writers have historically found makes science fiction stories interesting to tell is that people can be shown reacting to situations and stressors that simply don’t exist in the real world. Alien contact. Annihilation of the entire race. Children acting really weird.
Okay, that last one is a bit of a red herring. In Torchwood, it was children acting weird simultaneously all over the world. On the last night of the show, a sort of kind of half way explanation was offered for this. Actually, it wasn’t so much an explanation as a hint that they had tried to think of one … and failed miserably. Science fiction often deviates from actual science, of course, but this deviated to the point of not making the slightest sense. I wonder – do aspiring TV writers learn about logic or cause and effect? That’s a red herring too. Obviously, the answer is no, which explains a lot of what happens on TV.
This leads to my biggest complaint about the mini-series. It violated the same basic rule many times throughout: Important events (children all talking simulataneously, important characters being killed, etc), happened solely so there could be a dramatic scene, not because they had anything whatever to do with the story. The logic (there’s that nasty word again) of the story was bent, twisted and mangled in order to fit these scenes. Consequently, rather than being truly dramatic, they were just too much.
Crude melodrama at its “finest.”
It is probably true that science fiction needs a coherent, logical narrative even more than other types of stories. They all need it but science fiction is making a greater demand on the “suspension of disbelief” than other types, so it needs to compensate by not abusing that any farther than necessary. Plus, it attracts people like me, with some science education and a mind that is always trying to fit the pieces together into some kind of reasonable order. It can be annoying when that order just isn’t there.
None of this means that Children of Earth wasn’t worth watching. It was still way better than the soap opera about monsters (I mean, vampires and werewolves and stuff) that started on the same network tonight. Sometimes you wonder how the people who develop TV shows manage to stay employed. Then you wonder if it’s their very inability to tell a coherent story that does it. Maybe that’s what I’m doing wrong. At least I hope so.
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