Arkan The Terrible

Description: Part of the problem, as I see it, is that the show tries to be two very different things at once. From the promotional material and the lead-in of the Doctor Who two-parter "Army of Ghosts"-"Doomsday" I expected Torchwood to be a large, high-tech operation with near-unlimited resources and lots of high-tech, alien-detecting and –capturing equipment. Something like the setup Angel and company had after they took over the Los Angeles branch of Wolfram and Hart. Or better yet, like the Lower Elements Police in the Artemis Fowl series. The LEP are a large organization charged with keeping fairy activity secret from humans, or Mud People. Fortunately for them, quite apart from their magic, they’re armed with technology at least a century ahead of ours. This gives them the ability to, for instance, hack into just about every electronic human communication system on the planet, and set off security alerts if they get a certain number of fairy-related keywords. It also gives them cool hardware like flying suits with super high-tech helmets and laserguns with nuclear batteries, and the ability, when needed, to freeze time in a given area for up to eight hours in unfrozen time. (Admittedly this is more Magitech than straight technology. Then again, so is a lot of what goes on in Torchwood.) And the point here is not that the fairies use technology as a substitute for good ol’ human (well, fairy) faculties, but that they use it to cut out the boring stuff like figuring out there’s a troll on the loose and where it is, and getting to it, and thus save the good ol’ faculties for the important stuff, like dealing with a rampaging troll, or a rogue fairy manufacturer, or an American tycoon with his hands on a piece of advanced fairy technology. With Torchwood I didn’t necessarily expect something that big and far-reaching, but something comparable, and at a comparable level of technology and efficiency. Instead, what I got was a shoestring operation of five people, whose primary method of investigating possible alien activity and artifacts can be summed up as "poke it and see what happens but carefully." Tricorders? Not a chance. Experts? Nuh-uh. Procedures? Sorry, what? Now doing things low-tech and informally would be fine, it worked for four seasons of Angel and most of Buffy, but in Torchwood, they've got all this amazing equipment, some of which they even know how to work. They have the computer skills to hack into Gwen's personal computer in episode 1 and monitor alien activity on CCTV, yet they can't use their computers to, say, analyze how the resurrection glove works, or research what the contents of the comet in "Day One" might be, or postulate a weakness of the fairy creatures in "Small Worlds." Technology on Torchwood is a plot device, and its usefulness is entirely plot-sensitive.