Monday 6 July 2009

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day One

They're Not Here Until Wednesday

Unearthly Children, Episode 1
Saturday 14 March 2026

After 44 years, the 456 are coming back, but before they get here there’s a fair amount of setting up to do. First, remind us how scary and weird children are; second, introduce us to a troupe of amazing new actors; and third, blow up the entire show. Should be fun.

Notes and links

The Torchwood episode with the screaming adult that Nathan struggles to name is Season 2, Episode 11, Adrift, in which Ruth Jones searches for her son Jonah, who disappeared seven months ago, only to discover that he fell into the rift and is now an ugly adult with a massive latex head who screams non-stop for twenty hours a day. Horrible, and in no way entertaining.

Adam refers to Eddie Murphy’s 1983 comedy special Delirious, which caused a stir when it appeared on Netflix in 2017 and everyone discovered the lovable Donkey’s homophobic history. (Murphy apologised for the routine in 1996.) Here’s the clip that seems to have inspired Torchwood S1E2 Day One.

Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi are reunited in Criminal Record (2024) on Apple TV. They play a pair of detectives investigating a murder for which the wrong person may have been convicted. Season 2 will premiere on Apple TV on 22 April.

The Midwich Cuckoos is a 1957 science fiction novel by John Wyndham about a village whose female residents become mysteriously pregnant after a Doctor who and the Dæmons–style alien incident. The result: two sets of 30 identical Children who operate as two gestalt entities, speaking and thinking in unison. A film adaptation was released in 1960 as Village of the Damned, and it has been adapted several times for both film and television since then.

Inevitably, Nathan refers to El Sandifer’s essay on Children of Earth: Day One.

We also mention Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953), which is the story of a husband-and-wife team of radio scriptwriters who live through what slow and largely unseen alien invasion which turns the sea against humanity. It has a lot in common with another five-episode Doctor Who spinoff, The War Between the Land and the Sea.

Ianto talks to his sister about Jack, and Peter is reminded of a similar scene from Beautiful Thing (1996). Directed by Hettie Macdonald (Blink, The Magician’s Apprentice, The Witch’s Familiar), Beautiful Thing is a romantic comedy about a gay boy living with a single mother on a council estate, who falls in love with his next-door neighbour.

Adam talks about anxieties around queer men and children, and mentions the current production of The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney, starring Simon Burke. Elocution is a one-hand play in which a queer elocution teacher describes his interactions with a young queer pupil and the hostility he encounters as a result. It was written by Steve J. Spears, and the original production in 1976 starred Gordon Chater.

Frobisher is also the name of one of the Doctor’s comic-book companions — a shape-shifting hardboiled detective who usually takes the form of a penguin.

Here’s the Dead Ringers Torchwood sketch from 2007.

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And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Since releasing the Season 3 finale of 500 Year Diary, we’ve released a whole new Doctor Who podcast: The Entirety of Flight Through Entirety. It’s the master feed for all four of our Doctor Who podcasts: Flight Through Entirety, 500 Year Diary, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, and Jodie into Terror. Head over to the website and subscribe, so that you don’t have to keep obsessively refreshing four separate feeds to hear our warm-to-lukewarm takes on every single Doctor Who story.

Over on Startling Barbara Bain, we’re nearing the end of Series 1 and considering the prospect of rewatching Series 2 with some apprehension. Still, in the meantime, we recently watched Space Brain, in which Alpha is apparently attacked by the same foam machine that caused Pat Troughton so much delight in The Seeds of Death.

And finally, on Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford just watched the first episode of Season 2 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Homecoming, a charming and intriguing relaunch, despite a surprising lack of incident.