TORCHWOOD: MIRACLE DAY - TV Guide: Roush Review: Weekend Picks Friday, July 15, 2011
Jul 15, 2011
by Matt Roush
... Here are some more highlights of another busy summer weekend:
Torchwood: Miracle Day (Friday, 10/9c, Starz)
I was away when this provocative sci-fi thriller premiered last week, so here are a few excerpts from my magazine review:
While HBO's hit True Blood feeds our fascination with the undead, the 10-part Torchwood: Miracle Day is all about the undying, or "the death of death." It's an audacious sci-fi premise: What happens when people everywhere suddenly stop dying, even when their time is up? A miracle to be sure, but the economic, ecological and medical implications are catastrophic. Re-enter the remnants of Torchwood, the crack alien-fighting unit that's all too acquainted with mortality.
The only surviving members — dashing Capt. Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), who in a neat twist finds his immortality reversed, and scrappy earth-mother Gwen (Eve Myles) — are reunited to battle a global conspiracy, recruited by a mortally injured yet undying CIA agent (a tiresomely bullheaded Mekhi Phifer) who pledges to get to the bottom of this mystery if it kills him. Because it can't.
Torchwood raised its game when it evolved to a miniseries format in 2009's grippingly horrific Children of Earth, but Miracle Day is double the length, which in the early chapters leads to some ponderous, if topical, mumbo-jumbo about universal health care and sinister Big Pharmaceuticals. Our heroes' new companions may be less than electrifying, but there's plenty of action to compensate — and, as always, sex (though Capt. Jack now asks about protection) — and a chilling adversary in Oswald Danes (Bill Pullman), a psycho killer who survives execution and becomes a perverse cult hero in the media.
I'm impatiently dying to see what dark and freaky places Torchwood will take us to before it's over...
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