I guess I should do the polite thing and give fair warning that this post may contain plot spoilers so if you don’t want to have any preconceptions or knowledge of the show prior to seeing it, you’d probably best ignore this post then.
Personally I have been eagerly awaiting this series since it was announced back during season one of Doctor Who. I had some pretty high hopes regarding it based on my prior enjoyment of both the new Who series as well as the character of Captain Jack Harkness. After doing a fair amount of intarweb research I came to the conclusion that I probably wouldn’t ever see the episodes here in North America due to the generally puritanical views of US TV networks when it comes to sex, violence and naughty language coupled with the fairly small targeted audience that the show was likely to have here. Nevertheless, I used all my l33t haxx0ring skillz (in other words I did a search for Torrent files) and tracked down the first three episodes of the series.
I just finished watching them today and I’m not quite sure how I feel about the show yet. There is a great amount of potential there, but I’m not sure if it’ll be tapped properly. I like what I see enough to see more but I was honestly dissapointed in some ways of how things were approached and dealt with. Admittedly though, I’m only 3 episodes in and things could change.
Compared to the first episode of Doctor Who, it’s a lot slower paced and a fair bit darker and more mature in both theme and subject matter but there are still enough throwbacks to the parent show to keep things interesting and while the Doctor is an established character (regardless of incarnation, there are certain things you have come to expect from him) the characters here are still developing and establishing themselves so in a sense it has to go slower and I’m okay with that, I just wish at times that it wouldn’t go quite as slow as it has.
Now beyond that, there are some fun bits and some odd bits, and some touching and down to earth bits and some throwaway bits and they’re all sort of tossed in there without much coherency. Okay, so no alien tech is supposed to leave Torchwood, and yet every single character to date other than Ianto and Jack have seemingly taken objects home with them. They apparently have the worst security imaginable. And what the hell is up with the pterodactyl? At least we got to see what happenned to Doc #10’s hand after it was cut off by the Sycorax leader.
By the 3rd episode things seemed to be coalescing somewhat and I’m definitely intrigued with next week’s Cyberwoman episode. I think the potential is there for it to be a good show but I have a feeling it won’t last too long. Overall I give it a 7 out of 10 with the strong possibility to score higher based on future episodes.