‘The darkness and the stench of fear’

Lawrence Miles gives Torchwood season 2 the kicking it so richly deserves:

[The only…] remotely surprising thing about the second series of Torchwood is its pig-headed refusal to do anything remotely surprising. Everybody had problems with the first series, and even those sci-fi geek-scum who’ll watch anything with killer robots in it were left feeling vaguely dissatisfied, Mark sodding Braxton included. Which begs the question… why has nothing changed? Did the overall sense of gloom and disappointment really not make an impression on BBC Wales? A standard-issue TV critic would probably describe the programme as “slicker” these days, and it’s certainly more confident in its ability to make the same mistakes over and over again, but none of its problems have actually been fixed.

[…]

8. “A Day in the Death”. What baffles me is that anyone might consider “forty-five minutes of a corpse complaining about being dead” to be a workable basis for a drama programme. […]

Upon reflection, I think that my initial burst of enthusiasm for season 2 was based more upon relief that the show had improved since the first run of episodes. The “Owen is dead” mini-arc was pretty awful, and none of the episodes since had grabbed me. I wouldn’t be quite as hard on the show as Miles is, but I stopped watching after Adrift and I don’t see myself returning for season 3.

[Via feeling listless]