Torchwood, BBC One

Fat chance. Although supposedly the Torchwood team had all been killed in action some unspecified time ago, we were barely 15 minutes in when time-travelling troubleshooter Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) dramatically materialised in the midst of mounting bafflement over the death of Death. On what was swiftly dubbed Miracle Day, people all over the world had suddenly stopped dying, despite suffering from normally life-terminating illnesses or being involved in what, on the face of it, were fatal accidents.

 

 

One of the latter had smitten the CIA’s Rex Matheson (Mekhi Phifer), who was horribly impaled by a steel rod in a road accident, yet amazingly remained alive, although extremely bad-tempered. The beginning of the phenomenon of un-death had coincided with an unexplained email message saying simply “Torchwood” which had been received by American security services, and soon Matheson was en route for Wales to track down Cooper and find out what the hell was happening. This prompted some wry culture-shock jokes, such as the moment when Matheson found himself driving across the Severn Bridge into the Principality. “You mean Wales is separate?” he barked into his phone. “It’s like the British equivalent of New Jersey.” His mood was not brightened by having to pay the toll.

Quite how the UK-to-USA link will function throughout the remaining episodes remains to be seen, although it’s refreshing to see that the enhanced budget has run to 10 episodes instead of being lopped to a stingy BBC-style four. The American sequences have the look and feel of Stateside shows like CSI or Fringe, and make an incongruous match with location shots of downtown Cardiff or the Millennium Centre. Still, a climactic scene where Harkness and co in their jeep waged a running battle against a helicopter across a beautifully lit expanse of Welsh beach was both exciting and opulently cinematic. The mix of characters also helps to demolish genre clichés, with the Welsh turning the Glamorgan lilt up to 11 in comical contrast to the spook-speak of Matheson or his glamorous blonde CIA comrade Esther Drummond (Alexa Havins, pictured above). I wonder if they subtitle it for American viewers.

Plenty of plot unravelling lies in store, but we can feel certain that convicted killer Oswald Danes is going to loom ever larger as the series progresses. Played with quiet creepiness by Bill Pullman (pictured left), who was the President in the alien-invasion movie Independence Day, Danes was condemned to death for the murder of a 12-year-old girl (“She should have run faster,” he commented). However, since he was executed on Miracle Day, the poison didn’t work, after which Danes was able to argue successfully that the sentence had been carried out correctly and it was merely his good fortune that the laws of nature happened to have been changed.

Call it sci-fi or call it fantasy, but this new-look Torchwood has style, high drama and strong characters, and also poses some chin-stroking philosophical questions. Not the least of these is the realisation that if all human beings were to stop dying (even the assassin hideously mangled by his own bomb), the planet would rapidly choke to death from the ensuing population explosion. Captain Jack has much to ponder.