Torchwood: Children of Earth

I think that giving Torchwood a shortened season might be the best thing that could have happened to this show.  Having a focused arc with one concentrated story resulted in huge improvements.  The story-telling was much stronger and more compelling.

I also liked the addition of families for Jack and Ianto.  There's an argument to be made that throwing in those characters now was an obvious ploy to get our emotional sides, but I don't care.  I say better late than never.  Seeing a character through the eyes of another character who has an emotional connection to them helps the audience make an emotional connection to them. Before now, we only got to make emotional connections to the characters based on their relationships with each other, and they didn't always have great emotional connections with each other.  The addition of families just made everything so real, and took us outside of the isolated little Torchwood-world and showed us the real consequences of the things that were happening.

I also think they made excellent use of secondary characters.  Usually these sorts of characters are only around for one episode, which makes sense in the format of the show, but I find they rarely have time for the secondary characters to get fleshed out properly.  In Children of Earth, though, they did this really well.  Lois Habiba was brilliant, and also John Frobisher's storyline was also incredible.

All of this introduction of families and good use of secondary characters really worked to give the whole series an emotional depth that it had previously lacked.  The show become richer and more complex, and I found it was so much easier to immerse myself in the story and make a real connection with the characters once their world was fleshed out a little bit more.

Overall, I quite enjoyed Children of Earth.  It was certainly a huge improvement over the first two seasons, and it was finally successful in making me really care about the characters and become invested in the story.

Torchwood: Season 2 Wrap-Up

The end of season 2 improved, I think.  I loved having the focus on Owen for so many episodes in the later part of it; he was such a great character, and the finally did something interesting to him... even if that something was kind of weird.  ALSO the episode where he couldn't save the old man because he didn't have breath for CPR was just ridiculous.  If he was taking, he was clearly breathing.  I mean.  Come on.

"Fragments" was a lovely episode.  I really enjoyed getting to see everyone's backstory (including the pterodactyl!), and I wish they hadn't waited until that late in the process to give us some of those nice details that helped make the characters feel more real.  It almost felt like they stuck that one in at the end just to heighten the emotional connections in time for the deaths in the next episode.

The finale was a bit of a let-down, I found.  Jack's backstory is not easy to connect to emotionally.  The only time we really ever heard about his brother was in "Adam," and then at the end he shows up and it's supposed to be a big deal.  I mean, as far as evil plots go, his was fine, but the fact that he was Jack's brother didn't add much to it, in my opinion.