Doctor Who Club of Australia

[Tegan]

Well. Not as good as Cyberwoman, (no surprises there!) but I think it's got to have a sequel later in the series. Too much left undone and unsaid at the end. The close-up of Jasmine as a fairy from the old fairy photos more or less shouted that.

Slow to start, and it seemed aimless until half way through the episode, but it picked up well after that. Also a nice look into the past of Captain Jack.

I don't think Jack responded to Estelle in the way one would expect, treating her more like a slightly dotty Aunt than an ex-lover, even given the now apparant age difference.

The bit where Jasmine was skipping along put me in mind of one of the Classic series Dalek stories. I can't place whic one it was now.

Not great, but I think like the first two Cybermen stories from Dr Who, it will resolve in the greater story arc. I'm going to reserve judgement 'til later on.

Maybe an episode where the Doctor takes Jack and the crew back to 1917 to search out Jasmine? Or as Jack is a former Time Agent, maybe he has his own tricks up the sleeve. He just seemed way to willing to let Jasmine go along with the "fairies".

And one little thing, I think it was Owen who said that Arthur Conan Doyle was sucked in by the original fairy photos along with Harry Houdini.

While Doyle was indeed a public supporter of the photos, Houdini was definitely skeptical of the whole deal. He and Doyle had a lot of public spats over the whole debacle.

[meglos]

A good story. I liked the look back into Jacks past. So Jack does'nt age? Just like the Doctor. Could he be the Doctor's son?

[Amano07]

[Tegan]

[Tegan]

[dave]

I didn't like this one much. The fairies/beasts towards the end shouldn't have been shown in close up, as they weren't very convincing. Gwen seems to be piecing things together about Jack; I wonder when she'll work out he's travelled in time, as she'd be more likely to think him immortal right now (who's to say he's not?)

Of course the Doctor was a father, he had a grandchild with him originally.

[frobisher]

[quote="Tegan"][quote="meglos"]A good story. I liked the look back into Jacks past. So Jack does'nt age? Just like the Doctor. Could he be the Doctor's son?[/quote]

Juicy! Now that's a connection I didn't make. He'd have to be a Time Lord though, rather than just a common Gallifrean.

Food for thought though. THe Doctor did say that he was "a father once" didn't he?[/quote]

In I am a dalek it says he was married and he got the 2nd version of the sonic screw driver (first one got destroyed in peter davison's the visitation) as a wedding present

[Tegan]

[dave]

I really, really hope you're right about the multi-series story arcs, as this remains my hope for both new DW and TW. However, I've seen little evidence of planning ahead further than the current series at the time in new DW.

If we do see the fairies again, I hope they look better. No mention of them in the brief episode synopses at Wikipedia however, and they've been rather accurate thus far.

[phase5]

The best story of the series so far.

(Yes, I know a lot of people prefer "The Trouble With Lisa"; and yes it's enjoyable to watch; but it threw away the whole cyberman concept built up in Series 2 of DW just to have a sexy Cyber(wo)man chase the team around the base for 30 minutes).

It's what I thought Torchwood would be like.

And no swearing and no sex that I noticed; not that I object to either; it's just been poorly handled in the past.

[Fantastic!]

Having only watched eps 1, 3, 4, and 5, I have been finding myself looking forward to watching them only to come to the end and think "oh yeah,.." -don't get me wrong I do like Torchwood especially the 1st ep, but it hasn't completely drawn me in yet. Gwen is growing on me. (of course I already liked Jack)
This was a great episode! although it didn't really have a 'problem' and not really a 'solution' I was hooked! I guess this is the type of Sci-fi that I love.
I too will be waiting to see if they expand this story at all.
Was good to get some more background on Jack and the series seems to be 'getting somewhere' Can't wait to see the next one!

[Theta Sigma]

A very good debut to the Whoniverse by Sapphire and Steel creator PJ Hammond and was surprised that he was credited as Peter J Hammond.

It definitely felt emotional when Jack held the dead Estelle in her arms and when Jack made the difficult choice of allowing the "fairies" in taking Jasmine. I also think that Jasmine's mother's partner really deserved what he got.

[Odnet]

I really liked this. Best episode so far. I like it when the stories are clever and have a twist. The fairies didn't look real enough though.
As for Jack's immortality, I think it all started when he was resurrected in 'The Parting of Ways'. He said in the first Torchwood episode that he had some questions to ask a certain Doctor. I bet the first one is "How come I can't die now"

[Theta Sigma]

From Phantom at knowfirst.info:
Ratings for Small Worlds was 768000, this is up from 756000 for Cyberwoman the previous week.

[Sulp Niar]

‘Small Worlds’ was another very strong episode of Torchwood, but more of the ‘Ghost Machine’ mould than an overtly action piece like ‘Cyberwoman’. ‘Small Worlds’ harboured on a premise that in actual fact could have been realised in TV Doctor Who; girl gets caught up with fairies (sorry, faeries) and many people die. Even the deaths themselves, such as choking on petals and drowning from rain, aren’t too disturbing for Doctor Who – after all, ‘The Shakespeare Code’ screened only a weekend ago and that had a man die from drowning (that said, Mary Whitehouse didn’t like drowning, so...). The only things that really made this for an adult audience were the nature of the guy at the start – who at first I thought was part of some government conspiracy special unit until I quickly realised he was merely a paedophile (merely?) – and just the fact that the new stepdad harassed Jasmine, slapping her and calling her a bitch. I guess then that ‘Small Worlds’ works for me because it could very easily be an EDA for a few reasons: mysterious man has seen something similar in the past; mysterious man has to let the “aliens” win to save the world; people die in bizarre and gruesome ways. In fact, it shines of a latter novel such as ‘The Deadstone Memorial’ (which I compare it to for that domestic approach). It’s almost like ‘Fear Her’ on speed, by which I mean better and more adult. And speed is better and more adult than drawing, intrinsically – of course, not so if it’s a warped child metaphor with the drawing as opposed to children on drugs (unless you’ve seen Trainspotting, good god, that scene...) but anyway this doesn’t matter because ‘Small Worlds’ is about a creepy little girl anyway.

As with ‘Ghost Machine’ and, to an extent, ‘Cyberwoman’, I’m forced to admit that I didn’t know where this one was going. I did expect Estelle to get caught up in events, but I didn’t expect her to die. By the end of the story I was rather sucked in, desperate to find out what would happen next – which the ad breaks didn’t exactly help, thank you so very much Ten. Actually, if I’m going to be honest, some of the dialogue wasn’t all that flash hot in this story; Jack saying “before hell breaks loose” is an example, because even though I can see him saying it, it doesn’t make it any less embarrassing. Gwen quotes that old “your evil is my good” adage; curiously, by the way, Eve Myles slips up in a scene here, as she yells “Tell me Jack!” and then looks embarrassed (although the character is meant to be embarrassed, I’m sure she genuinely overacted too). But above all this, ‘Small Worlds’ just went off in places I didn’t expect. I especially didn’t expect the Wild West “through the tunnel” bit, which was incredibly simplistic and effective at the same time. I didn’t expect the guy to start vomiting flower petals at the start. And to be honest, I didn’t expect Captain Jack to just let Jasmine go at the end. I’m not surprised Jasmine’s mum started hitting him; she’s just seen her husband and daughter gone in one fell swoop. Man, that Captain Jack is a barstard.

Apart from plot and set pieces, what made this story work so well was the direction. The tiny details were the best: the flicks to the cat (which appears to be moving in time to the faeries’ giggles, disturbingly enough) in Estelle’s death scene works really well; seeing rain through the faeries’ POV looked quite sublime; Gwen running back over those numbered circles in the playground; and many more I’ve forgotten but were very well done. I also thought, even though they were CGI, the faeries in their full form worked incredibly well, because although they looked a bit like stock fantasy creatures, this works with the concept and it blended with the foliage of its surroundings enough to be perfect – and besides, we only see brief glimpses so even if it could have got tired, it never did.

Interestingly, at this point, I’m starting to notice things in Torchwood that I fear will grate over the next few episodes. They certainly didn’t annoy me here, but I still picked up on them. For a start, one of the shots reveals that, and I didn’t know this beforehand, the Torchwood van has “Torchwood” written on it. You know, for a secret organisation who pride themselves on being invisible to most, putting their name on the van is incredibly silly. It could be a bit of postmodernism, but unlike the “ordering pizza under the name ‘Torchwood’” gag was amusing, this just didn’t work. I won’t pretend that UNIT weren’t guilty of overt secrecy at times either, but then I won’t pretend that Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks didn’t know this, which is why they turned the Brigadier into such a comedic buffoon (which I didn’t like, but at least it makes sense with what we’ve seen in those stories). Secondly, Murray Gold’s music finally started to feel a bit uncomfortable; I wasn’t tempted to punch the screen or anything as I have been with Doctor Who, but in scenes such as Estelle’s death, I certainly felt that the overblown music threatened to take away the poignancy of the moment. God, even a scene where Jasmine’s mother sees her daughter in bed is covered with sweet family music that I guess is trying to tell us that these people are – quite possibly – related and feel love for each other. That’s astonishing news, Murray! It’s telling that the best uses of music in the story are the child chorusing in the wind attack at the school, and – best of all – the use of silence in the tunnel scene.

Oh, by the way, Ianto had perhaps two lines in this story. Well, looks like things are back to normal for the Torchwood gang.

I do have one more niggle, and that’s the bully who kicks Jasmine – no matter how much the camera tries to hide it, the kick looks woeful, and it’s obvious Jasmine couldn’t come to any harm. Even without faeries watching her back. Overall though, ‘Small Worlds’ was utterly superb, and I really did think it was great. Pity next week’s title is a terrible pun, then, but hey, I’ve learnt to keep an open mind with Torchwood so far.

In fact, halfway through this story, the sheer experience of watching this show finally registered with me. First of all, I really started to notice that this was on Channel Ten. I didn’t mind the ad breaks up until now, and most of the ad breaks in ‘Small Worlds’ worked as well, logically cutting the episode up (an entirely different – especially in terms of tone – scene started after an ad, a scene with Estelle doing some sort of pagan ritual [I assume that’s what it was]), but the last one was just taking the piss, as Captain Jack asked, “What could I have done?”. Annoyingly, after the ad break, we cut back to Gwen zooming on the Jasmine faerie’s face (a great idea and well realised, by the way), but this lasts for about fifteen seconds before the trailer for next week’s came on. This was simply annoying; why can’t they simply do an ad break between the end of the episode and the trailer? Oh, I know, because they think people will switch off. Oh, bollocks. Amusingly, another Ten problem I had was that some of the ads really screwed around with ‘Small Worlds’ – one ad had someone who looked and dressed like Gwen sitting down to eat with children, which was disturbing in itself, but after the “Estelle is drowned by rain” stuff, an post office ad showed us a man rained on whilst no-one else was. Oh dear.

My main problem though was simply that this episode was ‘Small Worlds’, and this was the first episode where I was dying to know what happened next; not something I’d had beforehand. To recap, ‘Everything Changes’ and ‘Cyberwoman’ could survive ad breaks because they were action-based and largely pulpy, so taking a breather didn’t matter. ‘Day One’ was silly, and the main thing to look forward to was yet another sex scene or two, so that didn’t matter. ‘Ghost Machine’ could have been a problem but wasn’t, and I think this is purely because it felt more like a character driven story than a plot driven one. However, ‘Small Worlds’ was the latter, and cutting up a climactic ending and increasingly interesting plot with “breathers” is not a good idea. Being sucked into characters is fine, because loyalty is there and they’re not going to be any less impactful because of an ad break (just as human beings are no less interesting if you don’t hang around them all day), but being sucked into a plot and being cut around is an awful thing. Can you imagine, come Saturday, reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Harrows, getting sucked in – as I’m sure I will be – and then someone barging in and saying something that you disagree with (as I do with most of Ten’s programming)? It’s terribly annoying.

[Panecea]

[ADAMK]

[Tegan]

[montypython]

This was one of my favourite episodes. I love sci fi stories involving mythical creatures, especially when they're thought to be friendly but end up completely the opposite.

Creepy little kids and horror - the two go hand in hand. The Ring, The Omen, Hide and Seek ... I could go on, but it'd take a while.

Did anyone else get annoyed with Tosh? Every time she observed a new weather pattern she was like "That's impossible, it's meant to be a nice day". We've already accepted the fact that it's the fairies messing with the weather!

You've gotta feel for Jasmine's mother. Losing her boyfriend and her daughter within 5 minutes of each other must be difficult.

I thought the ending was predictable, but still mysterious. Oh, and right out of The Shining (another horror movie with creepy little kids).

[Sulp Niar]