Fighting the Alien Threat from the Streets of Cardiff

For a show that ran for an astounding 26 years, from 1963–1989, what's surprising about Doctor WhoThe longest running sci-fi franchise (at least in terms of sheer seasons), Doctor Who has seen cancelations, relaunches, and reboots, but the core of the series remains the same: a madman in a box traveling through time and space. is that in all that time, the series never managed to get a proper spin-off up and running. The first and only attempt from the original run of Who came in 1981 when a spin-off pilot was commissioned and aired. This series, K-9 and Company, wasn't picked up, and Doctor Who itself would come to an end five years later, marking the end of an era.

Right up until the new show, 2005's Doctor Who revival, came around. The restarted show was a huge success, and after a well received first season, a spin-off for one of the leader characters of the series was commissions. Captain Jack Harkness, a delightfully fun time traveler introduced in the Series 1 episode "The Empty Child", was a fan favorite and people wanted him back. He was given his own team of people to work with, set in the oft-visited on New Who location of Cardiff, Wales, and the series was set to order for 13 episodes. But to get to all of that we have to first investigate the setup of the pilot.

The first thing you'll notice with Torchwood (which, in universe, is a British super secret organization dedicated to fighting alien threats, and was mentioned in a number of Doctor Who episodes before getting it's own series) is that despite the presence of Harkness (still played by John Barrowman), he's not the main character. Oh, he's there, and a major presence. A co-lead, if you will. But it's newly introduced character PC Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), a cop who encounters the Torchwood team and ends up working for them. She becomes the heart and soul of the series, their motivating presence that leads them on their adventures. Without her, Torchwood as an organization wouldn't end up having adventures at all.

This first episode, though, doesn't have much in the way of alien threats. Going out and searching for aliens and what they may be doing isn't the concern of the team just yet. No, we first see the Torchwood team -- Captain Jack (Barrowman), second-in-command Suzie Costello (Indira Varma), medical scientist Owen Harper (Burn Gorman), tech specialist Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori), and office manager Ianto Jones (Gareth David-Lloyd) -- as they're at a crime scene, investigating a mysterious stabbing. The victim is dead, but with a alien glove the team is able to bring him back to life for two minutes, all so they can investigate the power of the glove. They don't actually care about his death, they just want to study the glove and see all it can do. And so, after two minutes, the guy dies once more (never to be revived) and the team moves on.

But observing all of this is Gwen (Miles), a Police Constable who wanted to know who Torchwood was and what they were up to. She runs off when the Torchwood team leaves, but then she runs into them again at a hospital. There a weird alien creature, a weevil, attacks a man and kills him. As the weevil is alien in origin, the Torchwood team covers it all up. But when Gwen finds her way to the Torchwood base, and manages to sneak her way in, she learns that this is all Torchwood does: find aliens, grab their tech, store it away, cover it up. She convinces them that maybe, just maybe, they should be investigating alien crimes as a way to stop bad things from happening. They could be doing more, she says, and after they figure out who is actually performing these murders, Jack agrees. And thus begins the adventures of Fringe Division... no, wait, that's a different show.

Going back and watching this first episode, which does feel very different in concept and tone from the rest of the series, is interesting. Where the rest of the series does feel like a follow on to the concepts of The X-Files, and a precursor to later series Fringe (as they're all playing in the same sci-fi pool), this pilot doesn't really focus on any of that at all. It's a more human episode, one driven entirely by its characters, which also makes it one of the strongest of the whole run because, well, the characters are the best part of this series.

The stand out is, without a doubt, Eva Miles's Gwen. While Jack Harkness was the draw for fans, sucking them in with more adventures with this suave time traveler, Miles has the charisma and acting chops to stand toe-to-toe with him. She spends this episode going from one adventure to another, trying to figure out what's going on, but even knowing the plot of the series and what is to come, Gwen's story isn't boring here. It's not something rote to get through before we can enjoy the whole series. She's a great character who is driven and you want to see her succeed in finding Torchwood and, obviously, becoming a part of their team.

Interestingly, Jack really isn't as much of a factor here. He plays this wise, older, above it all character, the leader of this team who guides them. Because of that he doesn't get to be as fun and free spirited as he was on Doctor Who. I don't know if that was a shock for fans at the time -- I was still just happy to have the character around -- but it is interesting to note how much he isn't really a factor here. For the most part anyone could have been in the leadership role and the series would have felt, more or less, the same.

Meanwhile, the side characters of Owen and Tosh kind of come into view here. He's an ass, and she's kind of an innocent, but they each have their jobs to do. Suzie get the least focus character-wise, and that makes sense when you learn she's also the killer they're tracking (spoilers for an 18-year-old episode). It's one of those things where you feel like, "man, we don't really know anything about her," and then when she's revealed it's like, "oh, yeah, that makes sense. That's not great writing."

But then, it is a pilot episode. Pilots are generally when the show is still trying to feel itself out. Sure, this was the first episode in a pre-ordered set of thirteen, but at the same time any time you're filming a series you have to figure everything out. The look, the feel, the vibe. This pilot has the feel for the characters, and the vibe of the series. It just had to figure out all the quirks of its scripts. From experience, having watched this show before, it doesn't always manage to nail it (and, as we'll get to, there are reasons why).

Still, as far as first episodes go, this does get a lot right. It drops us into the world, lets us know the rules of whats going to come in the series, and gives us characters we can like. Not all shows even manage that for their first outing. It's not perfect, and for the entirety of it's run Torchwood remains far from perfect, but it is watchable. And it does give us a nice, different perspective of the Doctor Who universe. It's worth watching just for that.