Oh, Thank You Very Bloody Much, Torchwood

(I’m going to do my best to avoid specifics and spoilers in this post, but I am reacting immediately to the final episode, which I only finished watching fifteen minutes ago, as well as to the season in general.)

And thank you, Torchwood. Thank you very bloody much.

You know, I asked really nicely.

All I wanted was some relief from unremitting horror and distress. Occasionally save the victim of the week. Perhaps a few jokes. The odd light-hearted episode.

But could you bring yourself to manage that? Oh, I think you know the answer to that, now, don’t you?

And yet you teased us.

You brought in James Marsters in a role that didn’t make me want to punch his character in the face. (And, honestly, that became the case fairly shortly after the fourth season of Buffy. It certainly wasn’t the actor’s fault, but rather a result of the way in which they manipulated the development of the other characters in order to keep Spike an integral part of the show. That did annoy me. Although I’ll forgive a lot for the sake of his part in the Muppet episode of Angel.)

But he was lovely in Torchwood, and it was an interesting new angle on Captain Jack’s character.

And there were shades of this season that reminded me of the good old days of Doctor Who—the original Doctor Who, that is.

The quality was far more consistent than the first season: some of these episodes frightened me as much as good old episodes like “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy”“. (Oh, those clowns! They still haunt me.)

I even mentioned how lovely I thought Cardiff looked in the show, and you had to go and mess with that, as well.

In fact, was there anything I liked about the show that you were willing to leave intact, Torchwood?

Don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing inherently bad about shifting the boundaries of an audience’s expectations about a show. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that programmes that don’t do that rapidly stagnate, and lose the audience that they’re attempting to placate.

But there are degrees, Torchwood. And I really don’t enjoy spending my Saturday nights weeping in front of the television.

So if you could just bear that in mind next season, I’d really appreciate it.

I’m a loyal fan, you know, and I could handle a little bit of placating before I stagnate, I think.