Torchwood is the new spin-off of the new Doctor Who, and the fact that it’s aired three episodes already makes it three times as successful as the last Doctor Who spin-off, K9 and Company. The central characters in Torchwood are the members of the Cardiff branch of the titular organization. They include Capt. Jack Harkness (from the first season of Doctor Who, played by John Barrowman), Toshiko Sato (Naoki Mori), Owen Harper (Burn Gorman), and Suzie Costello (Indira Varma). They’re tasked with investigating alien technology and keeping it out of the hands of the general populace, but it’s not really clear by who.
The first episode, “Everything Changes,” focuses on Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), a police officer, who sees the Torchwood gang bring a recently murdered man back to life, at least for a minute. She tries to track down the organization and Capt. Jack, and after a particularly disturbing encounter with a homicidal alien, she finds their secret headquarters. The episode is a pretty standard introduction to the team, with some added intrigue of a serial killer that stalking the city with an unusual blade.
The second episode, “Day One,” has Gwen join Torchwood, just in time to investigate a recently crashed meteorite that contains a gaseous life form. The alien escapes and possesses a young woman, and anyone the woman has sex with is disintegrated because the alien wants “orgasmic energy.” The plot is a baldfaced rip-off of the new wave cult classic Liquid Sky (1982), except that was sort of a comedy and Torchwood plays it straight. Playing such a stupid concept straight isn’t really a good thing.In the third episode, “The Ghost Machine,” Torchwood retrieves an alien artifact that allows the user to experience events from the past. The problem is that the visions are so compelling that the user needs to act on them. And then there’s a the device’s other half…
The best part of the series, predictably, is John Barrowman as the omnisexual Harkness. He’s still got charisma to spare. The rest of the cast is pretty good, especially Myles.
So far the connections to Doctor Who are being kept subtle. The other members of Torchwood don’t really know who Capt. Jack is, and we still haven’t found out how he got from the future to Cardiff in the present. His resurrection by Rose has left him with a very interesting condition. Harkness also covets a dismembered hand that, if the music is to be believed, is the one the Doctor lost back in the “The Christmas Invasion.” Toshiko Sato is probably the Dr. Sato from “Aliens of London” (it’s the same actress), or it may be her sister. Gwen Cooper is played by Eve Myles, who played Gwenyth in “The Unquiet Dead,” so there may be some sort of family relationship there. No monsters from Doctor Who yet, though it looks like the fourth episode is flirting with Cybermen.
