The characters are a lot more likable with a more defined inner life (especially Owen), there's more sparkly team banter and humor, and more general detail that makes the world feel lived in.
I found myself describing the first two episodes to spatch and rushthatspeaks as "proto-Torchwood," which was a fascinating experience of an actual early show rather than, say, an unaired pilot. I could see what they were aiming for, because by the second season they had achieved it, but they absolutely did not land it right off the bat. The darkness and goofiness were fighting rather than playing off one another, the team dynamics were more bitchy than bantering, everyone felt like a slight AU of themselves (I am just as glad the show didn't run with it, but I was amused by its brief flirtation in the second episode with irresponsible mad science Owen: "Rat jam!") and the show itself hadn't yet relaxed into its own freewheeling WTF, which made some of its boundary-pushing unnecessarily awkward—I love that canonically no one on the show is straight, but there were better ways to establish its bisexual bona fides than the alien roofies and the alien sex gas. The third episode felt like it suddenly snapped into focus: I could see how we got there from here. I recognized the Tosh who guides her comrades by CCTV and cheers Gwen for snagging the alien artifact even if she lost the suspect, the Owen who does his doctor's best to save the life of a man against whose face he was holding a knife a moment ago. I'm sure it didn't hurt that I liked the conceit of the ghost machine best of the alien weirdnesses on offer so far, but the characters starting to feel like themselves made such a difference. I'm sure it will continue to flail for a bit, but if I had been watching week by week, this episode is where I would have decided to keep coming back out of more than curiosity or inertia.
(There are still elements in the first two episodes that are valuable and interesting. In "Everything Changes," I liked not just the bait-and-switch with Suzie, but the reasons for it, establishing immediately the wear and tear and the stakes of working for Torchwood; the entire sequence with Gwen delivering pizza and the team utterly failing to pretend they didn't clock her, capped by Owen copping to being the twat who orders pizza to a top-secret extra-governmental agency under its own name, is genuinely funny and juvenile without being too mean-spirited and of course it was Owen, no wonder Ianto's got custody of the pizza orders in season two. "Day One" mostly showcased the value of Gwen to the team, but I liked some of its dialogue: "Period military is not the dress code of a straight man." I was interested by the brief catalogue of the different Torchwood locations—London, destroyed in the Battle of Canary Wharf; Glasgow, which Jack makes sound like a one-man operation; Cardiff, on account of the Rift; and the one that went missing, whose location is never specified but given the distribution of the other branches across England, Scotland, and Wales, I promptly assumed Torchwood Four had been in Northern Ireland, in which case it probably just fell through a fairy ring one day and that's all there is to it. That's nice worldbuilding! There's just all the other stuff that feels frustratingly out of true.)
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I found myself describing the first two episodes to
(There are still elements in the first two episodes that are valuable and interesting. In "Everything Changes," I liked not just the bait-and-switch with Suzie, but the reasons for it, establishing immediately the wear and tear and the stakes of working for Torchwood; the entire sequence with Gwen delivering pizza and the team utterly failing to pretend they didn't clock her, capped by Owen copping to being the twat who orders pizza to a top-secret extra-governmental agency under its own name, is genuinely funny and juvenile without being too mean-spirited and of course it was Owen, no wonder Ianto's got custody of the pizza orders in season two. "Day One" mostly showcased the value of Gwen to the team, but I liked some of its dialogue: "Period military is not the dress code of a straight man." I was interested by the brief catalogue of the different Torchwood locations—London, destroyed in the Battle of Canary Wharf; Glasgow, which Jack makes sound like a one-man operation; Cardiff, on account of the Rift; and the one that went missing, whose location is never specified but given the distribution of the other branches across England, Scotland, and Wales, I promptly assumed Torchwood Four had been in Northern Ireland, in which case it probably just fell through a fairy ring one day and that's all there is to it. That's nice worldbuilding! There's just all the other stuff that feels frustratingly out of true.)