I can only really write about my own personal taste, partially because I’m far more entertaining when I’m talking about things I like and partially because… well, it’s my blog and I do what I want, and Torchwood is my most… not quite sacred (I try not to hold anything too sacred these days, my pessimism won’t let me), but one of the taste making shows. Much like Once it’s a show too entrenched in my soul to ever be untangled in a satisfying way for all parties involved. It came to me at a time in my life where it was capable of rewiring my brain chemistry for better and for worse, and as much as I know its flaws, I still hold onto it.

The Pitch: set in the same universe as British television icon Doctor Who, Torchwood is about a small team in Cardiff cleaning up alien messes when the Doctor’s not around. Usually with a lot more bullets and blood than explosions and diplomacy. The classic meme of “x villain would’ve been killed by hammers” was invented for them.

People complaining about any potential “Marvelization” of Doctor Who after its US distribution went to The Mouse’s ever growing list of properties clearly haven’t been paying attention considering its at least three spin off shows (this, The Sarah Jane Adventures, and the short lived Class just off the top of my head.) I mean, geez, they even had a big crossover team up episode in the form of my favorite season finale “Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End”.

 Torchwood was posited as the grungier, more mature older sibling to both middle child Doctor Who and “Sci-Fi for the Kids” Sarah Jane Adventures. More sexual, violent, and even less concerned with ending things happily or satisfyingly. 

Whether that latter sensation was intentional or not I suspect is up to heavy debate and audience opinions. For me, it mostly works. Sometimes the aliens do get little victories, sometimes the time portal does take the woman you’ve fallen in love with, sometimes you fuck around with alien tech and you do find out what it means to be brought back to life with MASSIVE consequences. 

But here’s the real question: Is the show any good? Well, I have to suppose that depends wildly on your mileage for unhappy endings, morally compromised protagonists, no win scenarios, and major character death. There is some genuinely good sci-fi buried in there, even if I will admit to layers of “edginess for edginess sake” and melodrama occasionally cover it. Never mind the episode where they reveal “surprise there’s no actual aliens, it’s just The True Evil: Man.” Plus, even in the short amount of time (two seasons of thirteen episodes in the main series, 5 episode special that breaks my goddamn soul in half, and a 10 episode coproduction), you get a grip on all the characters and their various quirks and damage thanks to engaging actors and a tight cast of characters, never really branching out more than the core five. This show is just short enough that I can recommend episodes but just tight enough that there’s enough context lost by recommending them out of order.

Torchwood asks the question “if aliens really are coming to Earth all the time, then who takes care of the little guy?” and “what sort of toll does working in a top secret organization take on a person?” and oh by the way, “how many times can we kill this fan favorite character for fun and profit.”

… I should probably talk about the elephant in the room. And by that I mean, I gotta talk about Captain Jack Harkness.

I will admit that a large attachment I have to this show has to do with my deep attachment to this specific character. Introduced in the first season of the 2005 reboot (not to be confused with the current soft reboot) of Doctor Who, Jack Harkness from his first scene is queer, no doubts about it. You can split hairs on the specific micro label, but whatever you settle on Captain Jack Harkness is queer. In 2005. While Torchwood got off the ground the following year that unabashed queerness carried over. From the opening lines of “Contraceptives in the rain […] Still, at least I won’t get pregnant. Never doing that again.” and so on. Fans have joked that the show is a queer trojan horse, presenting everyone as some form of heterosexual at first before smuggling in the fact that you can very easily read every main character as some form of queer. I really don’t want to wade into the potential discourse waters of what you could make out of “explicit queer characters being relegated to the “mature” program” but for what it’s worth, as a person who found the show in my parent’s unattended Apple TV library and then showed it to my friend on an unattended Netflix account, kids will find a way. They always have.

As a ninth grader starting to humor the idea of Not Being Straight, having an absolutely unashamed mess of a queer character meant something to me. Did Jack Harkness make me queer? No. Am I my specific brand of queer disaster without him and the rest of Torchwood Three? No, probably not. 

A friend of mine once told me that it was more fun to work with a flawed piece of media then one with more polish to it. Perhaps that’s why I like TV so much, even the best shows have episodes or whole seasons that die-hards try to pretend never happened. And depending on the popularity of said television show, opinions vary wildly on what that specific thing is.Torchwood can continue to be the odd duck child of the Doctor Who-niverse. But for better or worse, this is my garbage pile and the more I grow and change, it will grow around this garbage pile.