Never too young to learn
There are many things on television I have a hard time taking seriously. Science fiction is one of them. British shows are another. And original series from Starz, for sure. So there’s almost a zero percent chance that I could like a British science fiction show on Starz, and yet the trailer for “Torchwood: Miracle Day” (embedded below) still managed to win me over.
The concept is cool: people all over the world stop dying, and the Torchwood team is called up to investigate the phenomenon. Admittedly, a lot of the dialogue in this video is atrocious, and Bill Pullman as a hardened criminal is laughable, but there’s a lot of cool stuff, too: explosions; impalings; burned and dismembered bodies; and a woman holding a baby in one hand while firing a pistol with the other. You just don’t see that every day. Unless you live in Alabama.
“Torchwood” premieres July 8th.
[via EW]
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You had me at “Bill Pullman is a hardened criminal.” That’s so ridiculous it borders on genius.
“No time for the old in-out love, I’ve just come to read the meter.”
You can’t tell from the commercial, but the lead is John Barrowman (Capt Jack Harkness) who can’t be killed and hits on both men and women throughout the show.
It’s weird being a sci-fi nerd who’s also addicted to this site…
For a person that runs a TV website, you sure do seem to hate most TV shows. And if you’re telling me that you’re not a fan of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, or Gods of the Arena, I don’t know how to take your opinion seriously any more.
Well, Bob, I hate most TV shows because most TV shows suck. And I never asked you to take my opinion seriously.
How dare you, a blogger, not share every opinion that I, your reader, holds.
/Reads WarmingGlow for the Corgis and .gifs. *Thinks* in order to find out whether to like something or not.
//Watches Doctor Who religiously.
@Matt- Don’t get excited. Torchwood is a spotty, poorly plotted crap fest that tries to get you to believe that everybody is secretly bi-sexual.
Basically it’s a show in dire need of a Ron Swanson pep talk.
I bet the Simpsons will end up having done it better.
Torchwood is to Doctor Who as US Weekly is to Time Magazine. Or something. I don’t know, but Torchwood kind of sucks and I can’t get over the gap in her teeth. I tried, mainly because of Barrowman and the fact that Jack is the best character of the new run of Doctor Who. But man, it’s just bad.
I think it’s about the cutest thing in the world that the baby in the banner picture is smiling.
Torchwood killed off all of its good characters, besides Jack, of course, and it was never a particularly strong show to begin with. Oh, and I hate gap-tooth Gwen.
Oh so she’s Welsh. Wait what’s the difference again?
I don’t expect it to be as good as Children of Earth, but even this American-style trailer looks very exciting. It’s weird how the show has never stayed static enough to exhaust a format before it goes on to the next one.
Also, that baby (Anwen) is sporting the strangest get-up – earmuffs over a nun-style blanket hat thing? And it doesn’t look like it has an arms.
Torchwood is a very strange show. Its first two series were great car-crash television. It looked horribly cheap, none of the stories had been thought out properly, and the character continuity was all over the place. To give you just one example. Jack Harkness is not Jack’s real name. It is an identity he adopted in 1941 after the death of the real Jack Harkness. However, when Captain John Hart, a former lover of the fake Jack, turns up in a later episode, he refers to the fake Jack as “Jack” throughout. Also, at the end of the second season, the fake Jack gets to meet his long lost brother, Gray. He hasn’t seen this guy since he was a kid, but guess what? Gray also calls the fake Jack “Jack”. The series is full of this sort of stuff.
Series three, cut from 13 episodes to five episodes and subtitles “The Children of Earth,” was meant to be the end of the road for Torchwood, but against all expectations, it actually proved to be a tense and well structured set of episodes, very well received by the general public, although not by all the fans who objected to the killing of one of their favourite characters, the ludicrous Ianto.
This surprising success has now lead to Torchwood: Miracle Day. It’s hard to judge a 10 part serial on i’s first episode, but what I will say is that it’s got more in common with the excellent “Children of Earth,” than it has with it’s first two dreadful seasons. So, hard core fans of Torchwood will probably hate it.
Didn’t it bother anyone that Rex was impaled by pieces of metal that flew backward off a truck which had its forward momentum stopped in a crash? I don’t mean to get all physics-y, but if the show’s creators can’t get one of the first scenes in the show to make sense, how are they going to tackle something so big as immortality?
Kevin said:
“Didn’t it bother anyone that Rex was impaled by pieces of metal that flew backward off a truck which had its forward momentum stopped in a crash?”
Not me. A few years ago I was driving behind this truck when it suddenly breaked hard and two iron ramps flew straight off the back and onto the road. Also, a similar thing happened to a friend who was following a log lorry. Again,the sudden breaking caused the log to fly off the back of the trailer and smash into his car. He wasn’t killed, but he did receive some nasty head injuries.