From what I have heard and read, a lot of people who have not seen Torchwood before, or who had seen it and didn’t like it much, really liked the recent five-day series, so you can only imagine how it was received in this house where we are all fans of the first two series.  We really enjoyed it if that is the right word for something so grim and apocalyptic.  Maybe ‘appreciated’ is more appropriate.There was a real sense of event to the whole thing, some great performances, particularly from Peter Capaldi and Katy Wix, but above all the programme did what science fiction is supposed to to: it made you think.  In the very best science fiction the science is almost secondary because it is not about the science but about human nature and how people would react to given events.  A great example of this is The Day of the Triffids (currently being repeated on BBC Four, and being re-made).   It is not about the triffids or about everyone going blind; it is about how everyone reacts to that and copes with it.

So in Torchwood, there is an alien menace with lots of unanswered questions (if they have a demand for millions of children, how come they got by for so long with just a dozen?  How do they remotely deliver a virus to a specific place?  With so much power why didn’t they just take what they wanted anyway? etc.)  but that is secondary to the response from the government, from the Americans, from the normal population, and from characters we already know.

I have a book called The Meek Inheritance by James Balmain, that is pretty depressing.  It was written when AIDS was still new and extrapolated the hysteria at that time, speculating a situation where a government came up with a unique plan to isolate the ‘plague’ which was breathtaking in its callousness but where each step towards it followed logically from the last.  No aliens in that book, but it is science fiction in the sense of being speculative fiction.  Similarly Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear starts with a premise of human evolution creating a new species but the whole book is really about how the world reacts to that.

Torchwood was similar in that the abiding memory of it will not be the obscured alien thrashing about in its tank, or its arrival in a column of flame: it will be when the female politicain says “what else are school league tables for” or when Frobisher goes into his daughters’ bedroom and three shots are heard, followed by a fourth, or some other shocking moment like that.

Watching Day One I would have imagined that the scenes of entire playgrounds full of children frozen in silence and then intoning together would be the memorable ones, hardly suspecting how they would be overshadowed by the later days’ events.

There were so many things wrong with the series, possibly a result of having to cut down on the planned number of episodes to go onto BBC One, but really they are so easily ignored in the face of the extremely brave writing. – allowing children to die so vividly, even at the hands of somebody who is notionally the hero.  The word I have seen most often in any commentary about the show is “harrowing” and I think that is with good reason, because it was a very bleak picture of human nature that was painted.

Having seen it all, knowing that there was a way to defeat the 456, albeit using a typical Russel T Davies macguffin, it is easy to say with the benefit of hindsight what the government should have done, but while watching Day Four or Day Three it was painful to imagine what should have been done, or even what you would have done yourself, although I would hope most of us would recoil from the idea of using such events as an excuse for a class-based version of ethnic cleansing.

There is still plenty to think about, even now.  Was there a metaphor for dealing with terrorists in the story?   Were the 456 like terrorists or more like mobsters with a protection racket anyway?   If there ever was such a situation, would we, or should we, give up a large part of the population to save the rest?   Or just be defiant and then face the consequences?

It was interesting how the character of Frobisher helped develop the plan to round up 10% of the children to save the rest (and the adults) using the perfectly logical justification of it being a necessary sacrifice but then in the end, when it was his own children, he not only killed them but himself.   Surely the irony was intentional: when it came to the crunch he really did think that it was better to not survive himself if it meant living with the guilt of being a survivor even though he could only appreciate that on a family scale and not on a global scale.   An even more cruel irony was that it was all unnecessary as Captain Jack prevented the abduction anyway and so that family died for nothing.

So much to think about.

The scheduling did help, as it was supposed to, create a sense of an event.  Like the programme 24 it made teh whole thing feel more like real time, although it created its own problems: not everybody can find the time to watch it as it happens and there were so many people recording it in order to view it all at once in a marathon session that it was hard to discuss because there would always be someone trying to stop you spoiling it for them.

While the deeper issues are still there to ponder one, there are the other more practical questions now: will there be another Torchwood?  Who will be in it?  Where will it be based?  Where will Doctor Who refuel his Tardis now?  Plenty of fuel for the rumour mill there!