Torchwood: Miracle Day - A Retrospective

Now, in case anyone wants the events of the past two and a half months dredged up from the memory hole they're bound to be tossed into, here are all of the things about Torchwood: Miracle Day that the show presented as important, but wound up meaning nothing.

1 - Oswald Danes, rapist and murderer

So much of the program was devoted to the travails of this freed murderer that one would be forgiven for thinking that he had some role to play in the proceedings. None of it mattered, though. Not his becoming a media darling, not him telling people that they were 'Angels' - no, despite the fact that each of his words were supposedly being crafted to create a specific effect, we never did find out what it was, or see any evidence that he was being successful.

2 - Remember when they murdered Sarah Palin?


During the fuss over what to do with all of the walking corpses, a fake Sarah Palin showed up to announce that dead is dead, and anyone who ought to be deceased should be put out of their misery. The villains murder her because her suggestion is actually what they're working on, but since they've already got a spokesman in Oswald, they don't need her.

Of course, since we're later told that the villains' MO is to keep their hands very far off of everything, wouldn't it make more sense to let this woman go around preaching the categorization of life, so it would look like it was coming from the grass roots, rather than an evil conspiracy?

Also, did no one notice that this Sarah Palin-y media darling had mysteriously disappeared?

3 - Why did the Asian guy lie to Winston?

Later in the show we learned that the thing that the Asian guy found in Shanghai showed you truths about yourself - maybe the guy saw something about himself that he couldn't live with, but he also clearly found out what was causing the Miracle. Since he was going to kill himself anyway and wouldn't live to see the consequences, why not tell Winston about it?

4 - Why didn't Winston understand how English works?

There's only one sense of the term 'Middle Man'. It can't be used to describe someone who's not good or bad, but rather just there.

5 - Who made all those high-quality mass-produced masks for the soulless after just one day of everyone not dying?

Also, why did the Soulless never come up in the story again?

6 - What the hell was the Reaper talking about?

According to the villains' hired assassin, this whole scheme revolved around Jack, and a grudge that the villains had against them. Except it turned out that Jack never actually met the villains, and they had no reason to have a problem with him. Did the writers seriously put that in before having any idea what the ending was going to be?

7 - Angelo. Just... Angelo.

An entire episode was devoted to Angelo's relationship with Jack, and then a second spent hanging out at Angelo's house. If Angelo knew about the edges of the villains' plan, and that it somehow involved Jack, why didn't he tell Jack about it at literally any time in the past 90 years? Wouldn't literally any time before becoming a comatose old man have been the better opportunity?

8 - Didn't Angelo have a techno-magical plate under his bed?

I'm sure that really happened. For no reason he built a plate in his house that would make him immune from the Miracle. A Miracle that, according to the show, he didn't know was coming. Also he didn't have the slightest idea of the mechanics of how it was going to work (no one did, really). Why would he build that thing, then? Would he even know how?

9 - The whole character of evil PR lady.

Why did the villains think it was important to have someone working to manipulate language, first in scripting Oswald's (nonsensical, pointless) speeches, and later editing out mentions of the word 'Blessing' from the news. Why did they do any of this?

Let's pause for a second to consider the term 'Blessing'. It's not like is a rare word - within the world of the show it was used to describe two separate magical phenomena: Jack's blood and the hole in the world. More to the point, though, the hole in the world wasn't titled by some magical infallible force - this is just a random codename that the villains assigned the hole in the world. A codename that they have no reason to suspect that the heroes have access to - and even if they do, it's such a common word that trying to find references to it would be essentially useless.

This is the equivalent of searching for references to a person somewhere in the world, and all you know is that his name is Steve. It's hidden by virtue of it its commonness - trying to remove references to a single person named Steve will only draw attention to your work.

Also, how did that random Asian burned guy know it was called 'The Blessing'?

10 - Death Camps

The show spent two episodes on an entirely pointless storyline about cleaning up a biological waste hazard. Nothing they discovered in these two episodes mattered, nor was there any reason to think it would. Yet the show covered it anyhow.

11 - "Too Alive"

In the first few episodes all the people who were killed had 'too much life' in them. Exploded people still had consciousness, people with their heads on backwards got up and walked around. What was that? Why did it go away?

12 - "We've captured Bond!" 'Good - bring him to the heart of our evil laboratory!'

Sorry to go all old-school with the complaints, but the entire scheme failed due to the lack of a few guys with guns hanging around the outside of the industrial elevator. Especially since literally every third character on this show walked around with a vest made of dynamite.

13 - Don't they have Black Sites for people like her?

Gwen openly, acting under her own name, committed an act of terrorism against the UK government. There were no repercussions from this. How? Huh?

Let's go with that as my two-word review for the whole series: How? Huh?