And another thing…

Not seen it. Don’t watch telly any more. Sounds like the Midwich Cuckoos though. John Wyndham, Read all his stuff as a kid. Hasn’t dated.

Don’t get ideas above your station. You politicians are all the same. I’ve no doubt that you would certainly sell our children in return for your own survival.

I can’t see any difference between Tory, Labour and 456, you’re all out for yourselves.

No trust in you, or your kind.

For me, the most chilling part was the suggestion by the woman politician that the children should be chosen, not by ballot, but by looking at school league tables, an apparently easy way to identify the “lowest” 10% of children in society. They would obviously be the most expendable.

Her children would be okay, of course, coming as they did from a nice middle class area.

And academic ability being, naturally, the most important and valid criteria for judging people. As measured by tests.

Scary.

@Jim Baxter: Wyndham? Arguably. But there was more of a Nigel Kneale/Quatermass feel to it.

@789 – your Twitter name isn’t River or Ribblesider, by any chance? Oh, and don’t be so stupid.

@Rapunzel: I agree, that was very chilling, although I’m sure RTD also intended it to be mischievously humorous as well (which it was).

@Jim Baxter

not realy the midwitch cookous where aliens – though if i had been building the cell for the 456 id have put a dead man switch and a big bomb under it.

Ah Quatermass. Doomwatch maybe? John Paul. Played Marcus Agrippa in ‘I Claudius’.

Quinctillius Varus. Give me back my legions!

[...] can find his review of the series over at his blog. I’ll post mine later. In the meantime I should probably get some [...]

I started to watch the first episode. Less than 5 mins. then switched it off.

What a load of rubbish, just right for Labour viewers.

The whole thing was just silly and chilish. Grow up you people.

Sorry chilish = childish

While the plot was quite good, like too much of the Dr Who franchise, I find the directing absolutely appalling.

Too much mawkish music and slow-mo action scenes when minor characters die, and lords help us when a major character dies.

There is a formulaic concept to try and make it “more real” by desperate use of fake BBC news snippets that actually comes across as more comedic than threatening.

I gave up on Torchwood after the first series, and I am sorry to say that it hasn’t improved.

At least they toned down the amount of sex in the show. That was starting to get embarrassing!

I felt completely shaken up by it afterwards, particularly the last 2 episodes so that, I agree is the sign of a brilliantly written and put together drama. The acting, particularly from Peter Capaldi, was fantastic.

I’m quite glad as well that the BBC didn’t shy away from the hideous aspects of the conclusion. There was nothing cosy about it for anyone.

I’d never watched any Torchwood before but I’m going to – although feedback from many people is that this series was its pinnacle.

I can’t imagine either Gordon Brown or David Cameron, who both clearly find such joy in their children, making the decisions that the Government in the progamme made. Nor can I imagine that they will ever have to – I mean, druggie aliens appearing on your doorstep are hardly a common occurrence.

What was clever about the writing, though, was that RTD used sspects of the current political scene to create a credibility to what the fictitious government decided to do. That, along with Jack’s actions, was what made the series incredibly scary. The thing in the tank was almost irrelevant, although there’s nothing like sloshing around green goo to make you jump.

Tom said a while back “I’ll probably get round to the West Lothian Question when I’ve run out of important issues to write about.”

It’s amazing the things that are more important than the West Lothian Question in your world Tom. Star wars, Britain’s Got Talent and children’s television series.

One more thing that I wondered – if Aaron Sorkin, rather than RTD, had been tackling the Government’s response to the same set of circumstances, what would Jed Bartlet have done?

I enjoyed the show, despite the plot holes you could ahem, fly a double decker bus through. However, the ending was possibly the most disturbing thing I’ve seen on mainstream tv in this country.

As for the politicians, Tom’s right, it must have been the Tories – Labour would surely have gone for the soft middle-class target, parents who would have compliantly sent their kids to school.

I’ve watched all of Torchwood, and I tell you that if you go to the other series expecting something half as good as “Children of Earth” you’ll be sorely disappointed. At its best it’s good, but sometimes it’s just cringeworthy.

@ InfoholicUK

‘As for the politicians, Tom’s right, it must have been the Tories – Labour would surely have gone for the soft middle-class target, parents who would have compliantly sent their kids to school.’

I’ve gone over the entry again twice now, and if TH said anything about Tories, I must have missed it, although it wouldn’t have surprised me.

Yep, there were plot holes, but creating something entirely logically consistent, involving extraterrestrials, and making it good drama, takes exceptional skill, and as many viewers wouldn’t ‘get it’, as currently criticise the holes.

But the most glaring gap was raised by the 456 its/themselves. Thousands of children, probably more, die everyday. Was it one every three seconds (’snap!’)? If they’d used middle men, drug runners, to take a few hundred at a time for 30 years, it could hardly have gone as badly as turning up and demanding millions (billions?) of children.

Actually, perhaps it makes perfect sense. Maybe the 456 were just a bunch of space hippies who, in the middle of a huge bender, suddenly got the ‘brilliant’ notion to cut out those middle men, and score a huge stash straight from the source, and were too stoned to think it through? All that ‘we are coming’ stuff could have been the equivalent of ringing up and asking for ‘Mike Rotch’.

That sniffing ‘remnant’ messes it up a bit, though. Take him out, and you have no clue for beating the 456.

I bet the children acting in it enjoyed themselves. Especially the scene where they had to scream in unison. Not a sound that is often tolerated by boring adults.

I watched the first series of Torchwood and wasn’t particularly impressed and gave up on it after that, thus I didn’t make any effort to watch the Children of Earth.

However given your good review here Tom, and others I’ve seen elsewhere, I’ll give this one a go – thank goodness for BBC iplayer

@Joe K – sorry, the Tories comment by Tom was on Twitter, not above. My comment was intended with same presumed level of seriousness as his i.e. none.

The most glaring holes for me

*SPOILER ALERT – LOOK AWAY NOW*

1..Having got 60% of the 10% from schools with practically no resistance, the Government decided that rather than sweep up a few more schools, they’d go for the tricky missing individuals. Why ?

2..Why did the PM tell Frobisher in advance he was going to take his kids. And why, given there was no-one else in the room, did Frobisher not attempt to kill the PM on the spot.

But as I said, I enjoyed it notwithstanding.

I enjoyed it greatly, and note the way they stopped talking about children, but “Units” to make it more cold and calculating.

Of course the thing is… if such a thing were to happen you do indeed get rid of the children that are more likely to cost the state money in the long run via benefit dependency and council housing demands. It was very cold, very calculating and speaks volumes of the potential disconnect between the government and it’s people when all morality and ethical thinking is cast aside.

Indeed. Which is why it was fiction.

I thought it was great drama, completely gripping, but the politicians were more like pantomime villains than real politicians. Which was their function – they were the bad guys, not the alien. Genuine moral dilemma with what Jack did.

@ InfoholicUK
‘@Joe K – sorry, the Tories comment by Tom was on Twitter, not above. My comment was intended with same presumed level of seriousness as his i.e. none.’

I getcha.

I can’t be the only one who thought Frobisher was requisitioning something (probably a gun, which indeed is what it turned out to be) to free Jack Harkness so that he could, in turn, save the day. What he actually did surprised me, but I guess he must have known that attacking the PM wouldn’t save his daughters.

This whole ‘child hating’ thing of Tom’s though, if it isn’t also irony, is perplexing. Is it because RTD has aliens stealing children, or because a child gets killed, or children are violently taken away from their parents? A lot more adult characters actually died in these episodes, and it seems to me that Davis was making a point about the value of children in the world, especially with those words from the 456 (now there’s irony). I would say that the kids were treated pretty sympathetically, hardly the work of a ‘misopediast’.

Interestingly, this post on the IMBD Torchwood boards, in reply to someone who asked if Captain Jack torturing his grandson to death was good TV, pinpoints the drama very succinctly:

‘Jackal is right, he now has to live with what he has done to his grandson and daughter. It really seems from reading so many comments here is that people wanted a happy ending, to some extent it was, they fought back, 1 died to save 10% of the children. Much of the show was showing how all the people in control were easy to give the children to the aliens, unless it was their own, Jack had to. Were you expecting him to run outside and find someone elses kid?’

With all the news stories about the British death toll in Afghanistan at the moment, particularly the age of many of the recently killed, I’ve had another thought about RTD’s motivation. As I said on the Afghanistan entry, there’s a distinct lack of MPs coming home in body bags. Nor do I know of any MPs with children serving in A-stan or Iraq, though you’d think that with over 600 of them, there might be some. Is there an allegory/metaphor here, in that Jack tried to save everybody’s children, but in the end, he sacrificed his own flesh and blood for what was right, when ministers were prepared to send the children of others into the meat grinder?

Doesn’t this ‘We have to fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here?’ really mean ‘We have to send other people’s children over there for the terrorists to kill, so that they don’t kill our children over here?’?

Russell T Davies’ Who world has so far given us a Prime Minister who was killed by farting aliens in Downing Street, his successor in Harriet Jones was brought down by the Doctor with just a few words (and later extermindated by Daleks, having just redeemed herself), before along came the Master as Prime Minister (Vote Saxon, anyone?), and he too died. And now Torchwood has given us an untrustworthy MP willing to sell everyone out to save himself. Davies doesn’t like politicians much, does he?

Torchwood improves with a re-visit. My wife hates Doctor Who with a passion, but when I got the first TW DVD box set, I started watching, and she was hooked by the end of the first episode.

Series one was fumbling around trying to be adult, series two was a huge improvement, and the third was excellent, compulsive viewing. Loved it.