Torchwood – “Small Worlds”

Well, blow me if that wasn’t a decent episode of Torchwood. Maybe miracles do happen.

Okay, so there were still some over-sold moments, the music was awful and John Barrowman *really* can’t do the range of emotions required for the role, but overall this successfully focused on mood and storytelling over cliched character-conflict for its own sake. The CGI was a bit on the cartoonish side but the design of the creatures worked well, and for once they took some darker plot decisions without it feeling overly forced.

The preceding episodes tried much harder than this one, without being anything like as effective. In fact the whole episode only served to highlight the vast gulf that separates making vaguely mature genre television from whatever the hell Torchwood has been doing over the past several weeks. (Largely standing around shouting “Look at me, aren’t I Gritty, Sexy and Dark?”)

Sadly next week’s episode comes to you from the writer of “Cyberwoman” so I don’t expect this to become a trend.