Hello, dear listener and welcome back to 500 Year Diary.
The only Doctor Who podcast with no children, except that Daft sod
who keeps dropping his phone in the sea.
I'm Nathan.
I am Adam.
I'm James.
And I'm Peter.
It's Monday, the 6th of July, 2009.
It's been just over a year since Owen and Tosh died on BBC 2 and
just over 2 years and 8 months since Gwen 1st met Jack over on BBC
3.
But tonight at 9 p.m. on BBC One, Torchwood will become a massive
television event, as nearly 6000000 people tune in to watch, as
Earth's children deliver a terrifying alien message, and as
torchwood blows itself to smithereens.
It's time to watch Torchwood, Children of Earth, day one.
So, we've done one episode, I think, of Torchwood on 500 year
diary, and I have no idea how we all feel about it.
So what's your feeling about tortured, Adam?
I enjoyed it up to a point.
I felt like it was.
Was that .2 minutes into episode one?
Maybe about 15. more generous than you.
No, I think it was, like, it kept being sold to me as Doctor Who
for grownups.
Yeah, because it was going to have, you know, violence and sex and
they were going to swear maybe.
And it ended up being Doctor Who for adolescents, who were had far
too many hormones, way too obsessed with sex and no real idea of
what to do with themselves as an adult.
So a male Doctor Who fan then?
I mean, it was also kind of like unpleasantly nasty in places.
Yes. and I'm picking things like countryside. and what's that one
with the screaming adult?
adult who just screams all the time.
Anyway, doesn't matter.
Like, there were a couple of cute episodes, like the one where the
people were out of time.
That was really sweet.
Isn't that called Out of Time?
It kind of shows it shows you how much we can remember.
I know.
I liked the Sex Gas Alien episode.
The sex gas alien episode.
Was that was that the one that was literally an Eddie Murphy
routine come to line?
Which he used to do this thing during the AIDS crisis.
It was 1983.
He goes, what happens next?
You just stick your dick in and explode?
And then that became a whole plot in torture.
I'm like, Jesus, that is thin.
It is also called day one, like this episode.
Isn't that the episode we did?
It's always that's everything changed.
Everything changes.
My feelings on Torchwood are that like anything that pitches
itself as more adult and more serious, it inevitably ends up as
more camp. as like series D of Lake 7.
We're going to be all gun as, no, it's impossibly camp.
And I think, I do appreciate that aspect of torchwood, but it's
also not interesting enough, I think, as a concept or in the bunch
of characters that they assemble to really sustain that.
And so I was pretty well astonished coming into children of Earth
how little we miss Owen and Tosh, you are not terrible characters
but you realise they didn't actually add anything apart from being
part of the gang.
Yeah, I missed Susie the most.
She's gone in episode one.
Yeah.
Indira Varma.
Yeah, I mean, Andy Pryor is a spectacular casting director.
Like, I did not know half of the people who were in this 1st
episode, but like, I didn't know Kush Jumbo was in it.
And she's one of my favourite actors of all time now.
Love her in the good fight.
She's the best in the good fight.
She's so good.
She's wonderful in this. she's great in this.
And also, you know, I didn't realise the series she does on Apple
TV with Peter Capoldi was a reunion. used to be his secretary.
But yeah, it's things like that.
People like who turn up and you're like, 0 my god.
Has this person always been around?
And I have to say, like, the woman who plays Yanto's sister
Rhiannon?
I think is astonishingly great.
And the woman who plays Jack's daughter, Alice.
Oh my god.
Both of them are so rustly.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
They've written.
I mean, you know, Russell Wright's good kitchen sink and his best
scenes are around kitchen sinks in this episode.
Like, frankly, they're just the ones that make you actually have
hair standing up on your arm.
You're like, oh, it's real.
It's people.
It's average, everyday people are being affected by this.
Actually, can I just say, I think that's what Torchwood, up until
this point, broadly has been missing, is kind of the actual
intimate to hand the scenes of people talking about life as
opposed to the science fiction threat of the week.
And I think, really, you can only contrast that as being the
different approaches of Chris Chipnell and Russell T. Yeah, yeah
yeah.
I mean, I think actually perhaps the most grown up thing about
children of Earth, which is vastly more grown up than series one
and 2 of Torchwood is that it has children in it.
And having children in Doctor Who is controversial and we know
people who absolutely hate it.
Right here.
That's why we hide them off and put them into their own show and
try and kill them all.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
But for me, you know, the worst thing I think about classic Doctor
Who is at times it is just the story of men at work meeting
aliens.
And so children are excluded from that.
But in fact, the experience of having children and being
responsible for them, the experience of loving a child, of sitting
awake at night, you know, remembering that your job is to keep
this child alive until the next day, all of that stuff, which I
don't know, none of us have experienced here.
But is, you know, an important part of adulthood for most people.
And it's interesting.
I think that this show that children of earth lands very
differently for people who have children.
See also space babies, which does a similar thing.
Well, you say lands.
You know, I think part of what made this episode so terrifying is
how children are used as the horror.
Like, they're suddenly all joined up.
They're suddenly screaming and chanting and for people like us and
many Doctor Who fans.
That is terrifying because children symbolise our friends being
taken away from us.
Isn't that just children?
Yeah, exactly.
They're all joined up and they're always screaming.
It is true though, but like Russell's tapping into what it is to
be a gay man and have all of your friends, all of your straight
friends, especially.
And now most of your gay friends as well be taken away by these
screaming, needy creatures that want to be fed all the time.
In fact, there's that shock of discovering that Jack has a child
as well.
And because Jackson Mortal, in a way, he sort of opts out of the
children thing because one thing terrifying that children do is
that they replace you and they end up getting all your staff.
And that's not going to happen to Jack.
So in a way, he's got one foot in either camp.
But we discover that Jack as a child, we discover that Gwen is
pregnant during the course of this episode.
And you're right.
That thing about children, like it's a little bit like the mid
itch cuckoos, which obviously this is in some way kind of riffing
on, that children are actually kind of terrifying.
I mean, I'll stand in a year 7 Latin class with sort of, you know
24, 12 year olds in front of me.
And if they all decide to rush me.
Do you know what I mean?
I'm not sure there's much I could do about it Really?
It's also visually the midage cuckoos, well, village of the dam.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Most of those kids are blonde.
Yeah, and white.
No, when you said about your kids rushing you, all I could think
of was that scene in Blake 7's, the web, where the decimas were.
I was seeing weapons.
Which is riffing on suddenly last summer.
I mean, the children are absolutely terrifying.
And one of the things about this story, I think, which makes it
very, very different from Torchwood series one and two, is how
immediately cinematic it is.
And because torch would generally is like small things happening
in corners of Cardiff and stuff. to suddenly have a aliens of
London style worldwide crisis involving children.
Just opens it out.
And one of the things that, you know, the 1st episode of Torchwood
does.
It has a couple of scenes.
Television will tend to have a scene in a place and then move to
another plane, right?
But these intercuts between people.
So we see Lois and Frobisher arrive at work in the morning and we
intercart between them.
When the children start talking in unison, we see shots of Stephen
at school.
We see shots of David and Misha at school.
We see other schools that we don't know the children in because
it's sort of happening all over England as well at the same time.
And so the scale of it.
Just the way it's shot and the way it's told is much, much more
cinematic, I think, than torchwood has tended to be.
Yeah, except it's still kind of stuck in that let's fill a 169
frame with someone's entire head.
Yeah, yeah.
Because your television is a small thing.
It's like, no, no, my television is the size of my room.
Yeah, and I don't really need to look up Gwen's nostrils.
In HD.
That's the way that Russell does alien invasion.
Yeah, yeah.
So all throughout the 1st 4 series of New Doctor Who, which had
preceded this.
Anytime you get an alien invasion, then you have those kind of
worldwide implications.
Yeah, Trinity Wells.
Yeah, Trinity Wells to pop up commenting on it.
I think you can make it worldwide without leaning into the camp
when there's an existential horror.
Yes.
And as you correctly pointed out, the loss of children is that.
And it has, I mean, we can feel it, even though none of us have
children that we know of.
And it leans into that kind of every, everyday thing that happens
where you learn about children being taken.
So we've learnt in recent years about Russia abducting Ukrainian
children and taking them to Russia.
When I was in South Korea a couple of years ago, I went to the
Museum of the War there.
And it was astonishing how many people, like 100s of 1000s of
people, including children, were abducted and taken to the north
when the north invaded at the start of the 1950s.
And I think there's something absolutely horrific about that.
And when you get a big high concept like that, which people react
viscerally to, it sets the stage for something that feels
important and global.
The other interesting thing is, of course, the 1st time the
children stop, they just stop and they don't say anything.
And none of the adults that we see interacting with the children
actually notice it happening.
Like, that's not quite right.
When they 1st stop, obviously Gwen's getting money out of the ATM
and she sees 2 children stopping and 2 parents kind of
remonstrating with them.
But when we go to the Frobisher's house and when we go to Alice's
house and when we go to Rhiannon and Johnny's house, the Davies
household, like no one actually notices them stop.
And the fact that children are not expected to be the centre of
this narrative and they aren't.
Like there are no child characters in this.
As such, there are children who are kind of backdrops or props or
you know, set dressing.
And then suddenly, they get foregrounded in a really horrific
way.
But they are still kind of weirdly incomprehensible to us.
Like we don't understand how they behave or why.
The parents are kind of like suspect that the children are joking
or playing a game.
I like all of those various reactions from parents, including the
best one, I thought, was, Yanto's sister, who sort of looks a bit
askance at the 2 kids who then break out of the spell and she just
kind of slightly rolls her eyes and goes on with things like that
playing a little game.
Yeah.
They're often thought to be playing a game.
And very frequently, when the 456 kind of drop the kids and and
they stop being possessed, they go back and start playing.
Yeah.
Like that's what they kind of... they've had no memory of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I feel like Russell's childhood is showing here and I think he was
a fan of John Wyndham.
Because as you said, the midwitch cuckoos.
But also, I've just read The Kraken Wakes for the 1st time in like
about 30 or 40 years.
There you go.
That's what you call the episode with Jack's butt crack.
Kraken wings.
But like this feels like that same thing where it's all over the
world.
Yeah, but we're just seeing the English side of it.
Like it's happening everywhere, but we're just seeing the English
side of it.
And it made me realise that the war between the hoozy and the
doozies is, in fact, the Krakenwakes, again.
Yeah, yeah.
Like they're coming from the sea.
Like he has been trying to make. why doesn't he just adapt it?
It would be great.
I mean, the sea devils actually explicitly forbid travel like over
the sea, which is a thing that becomes impossible in the Kraken
Wakes because there's something that slices the bottom off boats
as they sort of travel.
It's a great book.
And also it ends terribly.
Yes.
Like it ends in catastrophe.
It is, you know, a full apocalypse.
And that's kind of what I feel like Russell's going for, but then
his TV head kicks in and goes, oh, I've got to reset the dial, so
everyone's fine.
Yeah.
And we will we will talk about how it ends because, of course, it
ends in a deeply terrifying and unsatisfying way with evil Denise
in charge of Great Britain.
Yeah.
But yes, it is very, it is very kind of Wyndham.
Yeah, it is.
I feel like he's, you know, going, oh, these were all the things I
loved when I was a kid as well as Doctor Who.
Yeah, yeah.
And so Torchwood is his John Wyndham Pastiche show.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely it is.
And Chipnell didn't listen to him.
Seasons one and two.
That's kind of the overall impression I get with children of
earth.
I don't know which came first, the chicken on the egg.
I don't know if they decided what they wanted to do, and then the
BBC went, this would go well on BBC One in a primetime spot.
Or if they knew they were being promoted to BBC One and Russell
just sat there going, I know that this show can be better and
deeper and more serious.
And so let's pitch for that.
Yeah.
And the fact that it was 5 days worldwide.
Like, we got to watch it every day as it happened was pretty
spectacular.
And the fact that it's 5 days, like in story terms.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which I think is an advantage that sort of Aristotelian unity is
an absolute advantage that it has over the war between the land
and the sea, which happens over a period of months.
And I also just think just the way it's structured is really quite
incredible because the aliens don't arrive until day three.
They're not here on Wednesday.
They arrive on a Wednesday.
It's hump day.
It is literally Monday to Friday because people are going to work
every day.
So it does happen, you know, at the same time.
But those 2 days.
Like the 2 days leading up to that isn't just preparation.
In fact, it's Frobisher trying to kill Jack, isn't it?
Because he was involved in the thing in 1965.
Oh yeah, the blank page thing where you're like, what does that
mean?
And then she's like, oh, I know.
I'm going kill all these people.
I mean, that's great too.
The blank page thing is so good.
Oh, it's so creepy because you're like, what is it?
What does it mean?
She's looking at a blank page.
Yeah.
And then we don't find out until Lois logs, yeah.
Like, why is the password to a super top secret?
I know.
Organisation on a posted note?
On the on the screen?
Because she's a boomer.
Bridget's a boomer.
What's coyotes?
Gwen is going to an ATM.
I mean, we can't talk.
The reason they were able to steal all that jewellery from the
Louvre is because the password was the Louvre.
I mean, Granton, most people can't spell it.
Can we take a moment?
I know they don't feature very much in this episode, but can we
take a moment to appreciate the elegance of the naming of the
456?
Yeah.
There is no other sequence of 3 single numbers that sounds in any
way ominous?
They can't be called the 234.
They can't be called the 6, 7, 8.
That sounds ridiculous.
Or the 7, 8, 9.
Which is a joke.
They did that in Voyager.
Whereas the 456 sounds ominous.
For some reason.
It's just the sound of those words following each other.
I think too, that just the fact that each number goes up by one
and we're counting down to their arrival all the way through.
So I think, you know, there's that as well.
And just the fact that they don't get a name.
I mean, they are more than any other kind of Doctor Who villain, a
kind of weird Lovecraftian, inexplicable thing.
And we'll obviously get there.
I think that they are incredibly brilliant.
They could never appear in Doctor Who.
Like, they're just not a Doctor Who Monster.
I think also there's a subconscious thing going on in that we know
at the beginning it's only 5 episodes.
Yeah.
And calling them the 456 implies there's more than we're not going
to see it all.
Like it's not explicit, but it just feels like the what is six?
Like we're only getting 5 days.
Like what, what if there's something awful on the sixth?
It is good.
It kind of sets up a thing in the back of your mind that you're
like, no, it was something awful on the sixth.
It was called Miracle Day.
Oh, that was more than six.
The other thing that having a five-part story enables, and
something that we've missed in Doctor Who, Sandifer points out
that this is the longest Doctor Who story.
It's about 10 minutes longer than Dalek's Master Plan.
It's, you know, an hour longer than the war games.
It's not quite as long as Trial of a Time Lord, but that's...
Is that one story or four?
Of course it's not.
And it enables us to have a much, much bigger regular cast, and
that's another thing that's cinematic.
I mean, we think, you know, we've lost Tosh and Owen, and then so
we only have 3 people in Torchwood, but, you know, there's a five
part story.
People appear in every episode.
It's the biggest cast of the Torchwood season and it also just
enables us to open things out.
You know, as you said before, Adam, they're incredibly well cast
but I also think that they're really just terrifically well drawn
as well.
Also, the fact that we get the bait and switch of the new doctor
like, oh, we need a new medical guy.
He's obviously being groomed to go and work in torchwood and at
the end of the episode where like, oh, he was a secret plant of
the government.
Oh, he's now not a thing at all.
I've always loved faint in drama where they set up characters who
are as well drawn as a new regular character would be.
And then, as you said, beat and switched them out.
See Susie in episode one.
And, you know, people like, I mentioned Star Trek Voyager earlier
Cesca. set up as a member of the regular crew, like, or at least
in a semi-regular role and then becomes villain. you know, I think
that really works well.
And I think also what day one of Children of Earth brings home is
just how essential Jack and Gwen are to the series and that's it.
It's really a series about them and their contrasting characters.
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to spoil episode four.
Oh, you can tell that it's happening because there's a little too
much.
Are we a couple?
say, oh, yeah, not for long, long.
But also I think I remember feeling that Yanto was safe because we
killed Owen and Tosh at the end of the previous year.
And that just leaves us with 2 regulars.
So we obviously have a massively expanded role for Kai Owen as
Reese.
We give a really unexpected family to Yanto.
Yeah.
And I think it's a brilliant choice, actually.
It is a really good choice, isn't it?
We need, we need there to be working class children or children on
a council estate for episode 5 to work once we decide that we're
just going to give all of the children of the poor people to the
476.
You see?
It doesn't work. to the 456.
Once we decide that, we need to see them and we absolutely need to
see that, but also just giving that backstory to Yanto, you know
who's super secretive and super private, in series one and two, and
then we get that thing towards the end of this where Gwen tries to
connect with Rhiannon by talking about the father only to discover
that his backstory, that cheesy backstory, about his father, the
master tailor as if that's a thing in like 2007 or whatever.
I kind of love that the implication is that, you know, in this
episode that Yanto has so tried to distance himself from his past
that he absolutely forgets that you cannot leave a car in the
street there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Those kids have been given to the forefighters.
Well, they were planning to do that. literally what was on the
cards.
I think.
That's the best scene of the story between Yanto and his sister.
The best scene in the episode, I should say.
There's better scenes to come in the story.
And it's because it has emotional truth to it.
Oh good.
When she says, dad died in you and you left, you know, you'd never
tell me anything anymore.
And she's like, she's not twisting the knife.
She sort of is, but she doesn't seem whiny or anything.
No, it feels very kind of like, you know, I'm just telling you
that it hurt me.
Also, I want to know what's going on.
Like it's still a very fraternal, you know, moment.
It's like we're brother and sister, like it also, I think, mirrored
the stories of some gay men, especially going back.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. where through choice or no choice.
They had to turn their backs on their families.
They had to walk away from that.
And even the sympathetic members of families who were left, like
maybe a sister didn't really have a window into their lives.
And that's awkward and painful.
And I think you can see that with Ianto and his sister.
The one thing that I think they would change now, if they were
making it 15 years later, was that his brother-in-law coming in
and wisecracking about taking up the arse doesn't quite land.
Oh, God, no.
It's a little bit too much, but I do think it is kind of funny
because, of course, Rhiannon has just told him that his secret
is...
And then Johnny comes in and calls him, oh, you've gone bender, you
know, like that's awesome.
It's fine.
I also think that it's very rustly in that scene, how they're kind
of like they're talking across purposes to each other a little
bit.
But then she just breaks slightly and says, but is he a good man?
Is good to you?
Yeah, yeah.
And that's that's a very rustly thing to ask.
And that reminded me of a scene, in the film, beautiful thing from
the 90s, where the lead guy's mother who is played by the
wonderful Linda Henry from EastEnders, is struggling to understand
his relationship with his schoolmate and his next-door neighbour.
And all she asks him is, is he good to you?
And he says, yes, and she just breaks down tears and says, is he?
And like, that's a very important beat, I think, for someone who's
learning these things about someone close to them that they didn't
know.
All they really want to know is, is that person good to you?
Are you happy?
I think too, you know, like it's 2009.
So it's not the Middle Ages or anything.
But I mean, it's still a big TV event written by a gay man and
centring the gay experience in that way and in that broader way
that you were talking about, sort of alienation from family.
And so I do think Johnny coming in and cracking wise works well to
kind of diffuse that a little bit.
I think you also get away with it because it's working-class
Cardiff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And Johnny will show himself to be a very good man, even as early
as the very next episode, I think.
I'm not quite sure why he throws a brick about 2 feet away.
I know.
It's Auros.
I think that's what happens when you let a gay man director.
I could just throw something.
That's what butcher men do throw things.
As with many gay men back in the day, you know, taking you back to
the school baseball field and that, you try to throw that ball and
you think it's going to go the entire length of the pitch, but it
just lands.
Yeah, when you, like, what you should do is get someone who is
good at bowling with their right hand and then ask them to do it
with their left hand and go, that's how we all throw.
And let's also talk about Alice and Stephen.
I think she is stunning as well.
I think those 2 actresses are just amazingly great.
Yeah.
But the woman who plays, Alice is so beautiful and like a bit sad
and stuff, those scenes in episode 2 where she keeps ringing
Jack's phone.
That's the next episode.
You're going to talk about it.
I know, I know.
But here, there's a great moment, I think.
Because it's established.
We know by the end of his conversation with her that we kind of
could predict how this is going to end because both Yanto and Jack
go to find a child.
They go to a relative that has a child and they both offer to take
the child out.
And the moment that Jack says, oh, I want to spend some time with
Stephen today, she just says, you bastard, you're not
experimenting with him, not ever.
That's why I tell you to stay away because you're dangerous.
Like all of that stuff, which is obviously paid off in episode 5
is here and clearly established in episode one.
I mean, also from the gay experience.
This happens a lot.
It's like, I want to go to Disneyland.
Can I take your child, so I don't look like a weirdo.
Don't they have gay days now?
They do.
They do now.
You know.
Like, it's like, oh, I really want to go and see this film.
I need to see Zootopia too, but I can't go on my own.
I think it's also a reflection of that experience where when
you're a gay man and you do have a lot of kind of, you know, you
have a favoured status in the family.
The kids, I don't know, about your experience, but a lot of sort
of my younger cousins, but children are with my cousins, um, and
godchildren and that.
You get to spend that incredible time with them in a focussed
situation.
So you're sort of the great gay uncle who flies in and takes them
to the cinema.
Yeah, the favourite uncle.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think that's a little bit of a twist on that.
It's also the thing too, which we were talking about before
because we don't have children we never kind of graduate into the
next generation.
And so there's that as well.
I mean, there's a sense in which people with children see us as
not completely adult because we've never had that.
Also dangerous.
Like, you know, it's like, I don't know if I can trust them not to
take my kid to somewhere terrible and do, like, you know, the
elocution of Benjamin Franklin that's currently playing the
Stephen J.
Spears play from the 70s and it's about this flamboyant teacher
who kind of lets this kid smoke and drink and carry on and it's
like, the whole gay people are always corrupting children.
Well, it's because we don't have the lived experience of being
parents.
And so I can think of when I took my cousin's kids to see Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory in London, and I let them have far too
much sugar.
And I didn't realise what I was doing.
I didn't realise that we needed to stop, you know, one sugar and
then maybe one more sugar and that was it.
And all of a sudden these great kids, who I loved being around and
we had a great time together, turned into monsters and wouldn't
listen to a word that I said.
And I realised with this sudden sinking feeling that I had done
that.
I'd given them too much sugar and that was the problem.
So, so, I mean, there's that, and there's several times, I've just
rewatched episodes one and 2, and there's several times where
people get, like, Yanto when he goes to speak to a child who's
just kind of zoned down in episode 2 in the playground, and the
parent calls him a perv and tells him to get away.
Because that's the other thing about children too, is that parents
own them or regard themselves as owning them in some way.
They're protecting them.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
But the whole idea around it because, I mean, the four, five, 6
are literally that.
You know, people say the show kind of characterises them as if
they're drug addicts, but there's a sense in which they're also
kind of paedophiles. you know what I mean?
Like they violate children's bodily autonomy in order to get some
kind of satisfaction for themselves, some kind of physical
satisfaction.
And so there's all that concern around pedos and perverts and
stuff all the way through and people defending their children
against interference from people outside.
And there's that moment where Alice is talking about Steven's
father and and like it's another rustly thing where, you know, he
married her.
Do you know what I mean?
We don't need to be told who her is, you know, it's a Russell
thing.
But, you know, he sends postcards.
He remembers his birthday and then she concludes with there are
worse fathers as well, which I think is also pretty gray.
It is pretty good.
Well, she's looking at one, really.
She is, exactly right.
Exactly.
Let's talk about Lois as well.
She was so gray.
Sorry.
So great.
I think, again, you know, we saw that thing where her and
Frobisher arrive at work the same time.
She's running late in a bus.
He's, you know, being driven there, driven to the front door.
I just think she is unbelievably charming and likeable and just
terrifically smart.
So was she, she wasn't going to be Martha, was she?
I think in an iteration of the story, that was the Martha kind of
void.
Yeah, it wasn't exactly the same character.
But, you know, having said what you just said then about
unbelievably likeable and smart, that basically is Martha.
Yeah.
So she occupies that kind of questioning insider role.
Yeah.
And she's so good at that, like, having 13 things going on in her
mind about what is going on right here, right now that I am a
complete, you know, outsider too.
And also our viewpoint of the machinations that are going on in
this office because it's like, we don't know anything unless she
knows it.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, you know.
And we watch her discover it.
She works it out and it's all done just by looking at computer
screens and just sort of being careful and clever. almost no
dialogue in this 1st episode.
Like it's a lot of eye acting.
Sandra suggests that her role in a way has an advantage over
bringing Martha back because Martha is someone who fights aliens
and that kind of thing.
And she is perhaps the one good, normal person.
I think Rhiannon as well, an Alice, but, you know, the one person
in government at least who is doing the right thing and standing
up.
And so by episode two, she's already committing treason because at
the end of episode one, she learns that a boss is having people
killed.
I also think if that had been Martha.
Obviously, that would have been great, but it also would have
waited the story badly, I think, because it would have turned all
of those scenes in the office into an A plot strand with one of
your A characters.
Whereas what you really want to do is follow the regular torchwood
characters and having a character who is not returning, as you
said, is just like us, a member of the public in there, means that
you're not distracting from that.
Also, it doesn't work structurally if you have Martha in there
unless you work out a way of her not being able to contact torch.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I just would end it in 2 episodes.
I don't think it was as simple as swapping out masters kind of
different.
I think there's a certain amount of restructuring and retelling of
the story that went on there.
Yeah.
And of course, Peter Capaldi.
Can I just say that you have to be very careful with Doctor Who
fans of a certain age when you call a character Frobisher?
I had the same feeling.
I was like, if they opened the door on as a penguin, this is
amazing.
See, Stephen Moffatt always said that he runs like a penguin with
a task.
Oh my God.
In my head, Canon, he is Frobish.
Oh, yeah, a really bad week.
Your head cannon's very weird.
Literally a cannon.
He's incredible And you know, it just shows what kind of range he
has because that performance is so different from either his
performance as the doctor or in the thick of it as Malcolm
Tucker.
Or Kycillius.
That's lovely.
And I think he really grounds the story.
All the scenes with him don't feel like fantastical.
I'm talking about episode one here.
Don't feel like fantastical science fiction.
They feel like workplace drama.
Yeah, yeah.
And he's got, he like, he's such a great actor.
You feel the secret that's weighing on him the entire time.
Yeah. because it's not really mentioned.
No one really says anything about it.
Like, we don't really find out properly until much later.
Like there's all the alien stuff where like, is it the same?
Are they the same thing as this old guy that's screaming on the
lawn?
Well, the fact that he falls to his knees and starts screaming and
crying when the girls start talking because he knows what it
means.
Like he actually knows what it means.
And that's what's great.
It's that mystery of, you know, those 3 names that no one that we
know have nothing to do with Torchwood at all, and then Jack
Harkness.
What is that?
The fact that, and the genius of having that opening scene where
we're cutting around the adults.
We don't see a single adult in that opening scene.
And later on when we revisit it, Jack will be there.
There'll be men with guns in it. there will be adults around there
engineering it, but Clem's memory of it doesn't, for some reason
doesn't include any of the adults.
And that will only come later.
Again, speaking of actors that have storied careers, like the guy
playing clam is spectacular.
Yeah, yeah.
Like he's in Lost Tango and Halifax, he's, I think he's on the
archers now.
Who's into everyone?
All great British actors end up in soap.
Yeah they do.
And he's incredible.
Like, and he has like 2 or 3 scenes.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh my god, everyone is kind of hitting it to the back wall in this
show.
Also that that scene where Gwen is interviewing.
Oh, yeah.
And she's like, like she keeps touching his hand.
Yeah.
Like, like she's trying to connect with him.
Yeah, it's so moving.
I loved her reaction when he grabs her wrist and sniffs it
affronted and weirded out, but knows that there's something which
she needs to address here.
Yeah.
I just think the fact that he can smell them coming.
Yeah.
Like, he can tell if she's lying and he can tell that the 456 are
on their way back and has he been...
I love that he can smell that she's pregnant.
I mean, he is amazingly great.
And later on when he gets to be homophobic in a later episode, I
think it actually kind of manages to work really kind of terribly
well.
But just the kind of the sequence of events as well.
Like there's enough going on, you know, the fact now there's an
adult who is talking at the same time as the children and saying
the same things.
Why is that?
That's super interesting, of, you know, Gwen calling Reese and
Reese working out. that, you know, this is a message being sent to
England because it's happening during the school run and at
morning break.
So we get vision of all of them on television and stuff.
All of that stuff is so good and so clever.
Yeah, that kind of stuff happens a lot because people in these
situations like a torchwood don't have normal lives.
So they don't think of the normal things.
No, the everyday.
And it takes someone like Reese to go, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was
school and lunch.
It's like, oh, yeah.
Well, remember that moment where Jack and Yantua up top and
they're kind of going, where on earth could I get you a child?
I can get you a laser.
I can get you a weevil, you know, but I can't get you a child.
Where did children come from?
How do people even get them?
You know?
And so it is that.
It is absolutely that.
But it's that it's that thing because they're science fiction
people and because their families are not.
Yeah.
And I love, oh, that's one of my other favourite moments is when
Gwen says to the prospective new tortured member.
He's like, what's down there?
She goes, oh, big science fiction based.
Well, and of course, that's the other thing that happens as well
is that the things about torture that are a bit naft actually just
all get exploded here at this point.
And so that including Captain Jack.
Including Captain Jack, the car, that wretched car with the LEDs
on it that just makes them look like absolute bell ends when they
drive up.
You know, that gets stolen and trashed.
But we blow up the base.
And like, I think the base, like, in a sense, obviously the base
is just the TARDIS, isn't it?
And you've got a sort of time travelling immortal as the lead
someone who can't die.
All of that sort of thing.
It is just redoing Doctor Who.
I think that that said deserves praise, I think.
Yeah, and I think it also sells the idea that torture is a
Victorian era invention by giving it the aesthetics of the
underground as well, which is from a similar era.
Where does that underground go?
In Cardiff.
Next to a bay.
Yeah, it's one way of raising mistakes, isn't it?
Because as far back as I can remember, and I was probably the
influence of the Empire strikes back when I was boy.
I have loved stories where the heroes are targeted in their home
or their base and have to flee in different directions.
And so the best X-Men film, X-Men 2 does that.
Empire Strikesback is obviously the ultimate example of it.
But I think destroying their base and scattering them is just one
way of saying the stakes are high now.
We're doing unprecedented things.
But it is also saying we're not doing just torchwood anymore.
Yeah, it's it's a whole big story.
And you know, one of the most NAF things about the 1st 2 series of
Torchwood is Jack just going up to the top of that skyscraper
overlooking Cardiff Bay to sort of, you know, to talk about what
just happened in the episode and what they all learnt from it.
I think those scenes are ridiculous and camp and Russell's got no
one going to do any more of that.
No more standing on that.
Have you ever seen the Dead Ringers?
No.
Parody of Torture when it's very, very funny and references that.
Captain Jack, no disrespect to John Barrowman has always been the
weakest part of the show.
The emotional core has always been Gwen.
I would say the acting talent has always been Eve Miles as well.
Oh, she's incredible.
She's absolutely great.
I like the way that Children of Earth addresses Jack and Yanto's
relationship properly.
It doesn't turn into kind of like the titillation that tortured
was always going for.
You know, it starts to become an actual relationship where they
mean something to each other rather than sex gas monster antics.
And I think it brings out depth in Gareth David Lloyd's
performance I haven't seen previously.
And it also made me think of the fact that Yanto and Jack look
like they're a good pair.
They work well on screen.
Whereas if you had the original casting idea for Yanto's character
which was the little twink who was Margaret's secretary in
Boomtown.
You would never have been able to do that story because he just
looked like, you know, aptly for children of earth, a schoolboy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so it look, it's a proper adult gay relationship, which, you
know, torchwood is never going to be high character drama, but in
terms of what it seeks to achieve, is actually developed and
showcased pretty well on screen.
And I think the fact that they are now together lends the story
import.
It means that the regulars who we've got left are tied together
more closely.
I also love that it's kind of, without putting a name to it at one
of our earliest introductions to fluid sexuality.
You know, he doesn't say he's bisexual.
He doesn't label it.
He doesn't say, I've become gay.
He doesn't label that.
He's like, yeah, he goes, I'm just having a relationship with this
particular man.
And, you know, that could turn into anything in the future.
You could become pansexual.
Who knows?
But at this moment, it's one person that he has who has a
different gender than the last bunch of people he was in a
relationship with.
It's a very modern way of looking at.
Yeah, but it's without that fluid sexuality that, you know, became
a big talking point 5 or 6 years later.
I mean, we even have Alice talking to Jack about attending her
mother's funeral.
You know, and how her mother felt about him not ageing and stuff.
So that was a relationship that continued over decades that we've
never heard about.
And again, there's that sort of fluidity and that came with Jack
didn't you?
Like he was always bisexual.
Yeah, just like, you know, any goals whole.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's right.
Omnisexual.
And he holds a goal.
I can't speak English to her.
Thanks, Melania.
It also reflects something that they that they tackle in Doctor
Who, the main show, if you cast Captain Jack in the role of the
doctor and Yanto in the role of the companion, the doctor
explicitly says at some points, I go on, I stay the same
companions die.
In fact, there's that kind of joke.
Remember where the 2 of them come into the hub while she's doing
some research and he says something about how you die like a dog.
You know, I go on, you die like a dog, uh, as a kind of joke, which
of course, will come sort of horribly true kind of by the end of
her.
I also think that Eve Miles, you're right, is obviously kind of
just the best person in the show.
And I do like how this episode goes back to everything changes
where you have the character hanging around above the hub and them
watching.
And she goes, you bastards, that's what you did to me.
Yeah.
And again, just it's incredibly interesting, I think, how that 1st
episode of Torch would kind of is the anti-Doctor Who in the sense
that you've got Indira Varma's character kind of has been driven
mad by how dreadful and awful the universe is.
And we do touch on that in that conversation with, um, it's the
opposite of Doctor Who, where do you know what I mean?
The universe is full of wonders and we go outside and experience
the wonder of the universe.
But Torchwood is the filth and the dregs of the universe come
here.
And so you've got her saying how kind of disgusting everything
is.
And then you have that scene between Gwen and Rupesh.
Hot repair.
Absolutely.
He will go on to be in 600 and something episodes of Emmerdale
after this.
That conversation where he says that people are killing themselves
at twice the previous raid, you know, that there is something
terrible about the universe that's revealed by the existence of
aliens, and not just us losing our place, our central place in the
universe.
See, this is why I still think torchwood is, you know, Doctor Who
is childlike wonder.
Yeah.
And torture is that crushing angst you go through when you're
going through puberty, when you are like, I don't know where I
fit.
I mean, high school.
Like I've got all these feelings downstairs.
I'm making a mess in my bed.
Yeah, yeah.
It's everything's dirty and disgusting and I feel like crap and
that is very much a high school experience.
But I mean, I think here it goes beyond that to some kind of real
adult terrors as well.
We're in we're in uni now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We having trouble making all of our tunes.
Oh, but I think it's like my child is sick and it's my job to keep
them alive until dawn and I don't know whether I'm going to be
able to do it.
Like there's real proper scary, horrible adult fears at the base
of this, which is why we're watching this on easy mode and some of
the people who will be joining us later in the season. actually
find this a lot more challenging and a lot more harrowing to watch
I think.
It's certainly interesting.
That's the same series that brought a cyberwoman.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Who had to be sprayed with goop?
Did the pterodactyl get blown up?
Yes.
The fanway got blown up.
Oh, yeah.
Poor pterotactyl.
I mean, I think that's the point, though.
That was the point.
No, no.
The point was to blow up the terror.
In a way, yes, because that 1st episode of Torture, doesn't it end
with the pterodactyl, like flying into camera or flying towards
us?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. tortured.
But what my point I was actually coming back to, it's not the same
series.
Yeah.
It's a different show with the same name.
Yeah.
In many ways, the evolution of Torchwood mirrors the evolution of
Gwen's makeover.
When she starts in this series, she's much more looking like the
character she played in the unquired dead by children of earth.
She's looking smoking hot.
Yeah.
Well, that's all the time we have for these a week.
We'll be back next week to prepare for the return of the 456 in
Torchwood, Children of Earth, day two.
In the meantime, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts
and you can keep up with us on our website, 500yearDiary.com, where
you'll find our social media links as well as links to all of our
other podcasts, including the entirety of flight through entirety
which comprises every episode of our 4 Doctor Who podcasts.
Until next time, remember to lock your car door when you park it
and stop leaving that artificial arse on the passenger seat.
That's no way to talk about Owen.
Thank you very much for listening and good night.
Bye.
Ta-ta.
Good night.
That was 500 year diary, starring Nathan Bottomley, Peter
Griffiths, Adam Richard, and James Selwood.
The theme was composed by Cameron Larm.
This episode, they're not here until Wednesday, was recorded on
the 1st of March 2026 and released on the 15th of March.
As you've just heard, we have a new podcast out, The Entirety of
Flight to Entirety, which is a combined feed containing every
episode of our 4 Doctor Who podcasts, including this one.
So if you're sick of cluttering up your podcast with all our
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subscribe.
I love that he can smell that she's pregnant.
That's free.
Silence of the lab.
But Gwen's wearing Les du temps, not today.
What did multiple migs say?
I'll do my whole silence that I'm music, but not careful.
If only they transferred him into those little cells in the base
amazing.
What do the crankies say to you?
Hello, Gwen.
Van dabby jersey.
That's great.
Just that line, I myself cannot.
It's so good.
Like, I think he, I mean, he is amazingly great.