Behind the Sofa: Torchwood: They Keep Killing Suzie

And behind door number 8 of Tachyon TV's Torchwood advent calendar we have a yule log.
A metaphor for Torchwood itself: something that has all the right ingredients, the recipe's spot on, the cooking time accurate and yet every single time it always comes out looking like a steaming great big brown turd.

Just like the hero in Partidge's proposed regional detective series.

If ever there was a look that summed up Torchwood it was what ever the script direction said when DC Swanson saw the ugly nose of the SUV plough round the corner. It's the look that screams, Oh fuck. It's Torchwood.

. It's as if they placed a mirror up to my face and captured the expression that appears regular as clockwork at 2200hrs every Sunday evening.
How this inept, incompetent, bunch of jerk circlists ever managed to solve anything is not only a ruddy mystery, but a ruddy mystery that they themselves couldn't even begin to fathom.

I was about to suggest that there's more than a whiff of Clouseau about them, but that would be far too charitable of me. One problem with these arrogant tosspieces is that they're reporting to no-one.

So there's no point in being a maverick and fighting against the system when, by definition of the goddamn show, there is no system in place to fight against. No stupid chief. No regulations.

No stuffy organisational restrictions that you're constantly battling against. It's like you're George W Bush. And twice as dense.

Jack even barks an order to the police that he's going to, and brace yourself here, to...

. brake the speed limit! Gosh darn it.

How maverick of him. Just like the hero in Partidge's proposed regional detective series Swallow. Perhaps, when pitching the series, RTD went tonto in the BBC canteen and forced the commissioning editor to smell his cheese?

If only Torchwood episodes only came in pairs. Instead of being stuck with 13 of the damn things.

But lurking some beneath all this flim are actually some very clever ideas that have been so badly executed they've been left with merely a series of heat burns from the last cigarette they were offered by the firing squad.

Suzie, remember her? No, nor do I. Well it appears that she planned for her resurrection before she died.

Surely we should have been able to go back and watch previous episodes and see all the knowing little actions that led to this event? No. And do you know why not?

Cos they pissed away her character inside of 45 minutes of the opening episode instead of, say, peppering half a dozen appearances with some meaningful character development and laying the seeds of resurrection. Now, if I can see that, I who has no experience of scripting a dramatic television series, then why can't they?

I've given up quoting from the text, I'm so tired of the whole thing.

..

I've seen better structure and dialogue from a Kerry Katona Iceland epic.

Like the one where she got her gargantuan boobs stuck fast in a mountain of dirt cheap tutti-fruti ice cream only to be eaten free by 7 lard buckets armed with shovels. So well plotted and scripted that they give Torchwood a, if not run, then a wheezing breathless jog for its money.
And if you want some satisfying freezer action, don't go to the Torchwood morgue.

That's why mums go to Iceland...

The Torchwood Bumper Book of Date Rape Techniques has this to say about They Keep Killing Suzie: Ianto's preoccupation with the button on the top of stopwatches was triggered by the fact that his half-Cyber converted girlfriend's nipples used to double up as timers for hard boiled (left nipple) and soft boiled (right nipple) eggs.
To quote Sean Alexander :'Complete tosh, obviously. But for once entertaining tosh.

' I fully agree with what Sean is saying here. I am not pretending that Torchwood is perfect (which it isn't. Nothing is, not even Doctor Who), but I do enjoy it, and this week I enjoyed it once again.

To me it is one of the best things on television at the moment, not that you have to agree with me of course. My girlfriend, who is half-and-half about Torchwood (and was a big fan of the first series of Doctor Who but not so much of the second series) said to me at the end of the first episode that she didn't think that was the last we would see of Suzie, and she was right. I had to admit at the time I wasn't as sure as she was about it, but then again I don't always notice the obvious.

It did seem a bit strange at the time to have her on the front cover of the Radio Times as a regular character if they were just going to kill her off in the first episode.
In my first review I said that I thought it was good that they were able to do that, to prove that not any character was safe from dying in any episode (well apart from Jack that is) and I still think it was a good thing that they did it, but bringing her back for an episode was also a good thing.