This has been a very, very long week for me, it is late (well, it is for me. I am getting old) and I have a headache. So I am sure I have this wrong and Miracle Day was not a metaphor for the fear of vaginas.

Right?

For a start, it is a bit old hat isn’t it? Torchwood did fear of female sexuality back in series one with the orgasm eating alien and the cyberbabe. And really, if you going to deal with that there are a lot of ways to do it that are at least clever and interesting. Not giant earth vaginas that leave you forever changed if you spill your fluids into it.

Not to mention the evil lesbian. For a GLBT friendly show, Torchwood has a lot of evil lesbians. Have we ever had a lesbian-for-good on the show? Not bisexuals, just a plain old lesbian?

I digress, like I said it is very late.

Anyhow, so the earth has this vagina and the Three Families found it while looking for immortality. How immortality led them to the earth’s fanny isn’t totally clear. I get they found some odd statistics about average life expectancy (and I admit, at that point I got completely distracted from what was going on on screen thinking about statistics and if that worked) but why they were looking at that while searching for immortality is beyond me.

(Oh, and Heinlein did the whole idea better anyhow.)

So, somehow they worked out that tossing immortal blood in both ends would cause the Miracle. Except, they couldn’t test it. They didn’t have all that much blood. So how did they know it would cause immortality? How did they know to buy up all that land and build crematoriums? How did they know Jack would become mortal?

Especially the last, since Jack isn’t immortal. Jack is just fixed. A fixed point in time imagined by Rose while she was basically the Universe. So, how would his completely ordinary blood make the vagina reset the average age of death to never?

I am clearly thinking about this more than the writers did.

Anyhow, basically Jack, Gwen and Rex broke into the Three Families base and simultaneously bled mortality into the vagina. It promptly reset everyone to mortal. Mostly everyone. Jack and Rex, who had transfused Jack’s blood into him, are now both immortal. This makes no sense with Jack’s mythology, but since I can’t go through that again I am just going to imagine it as mortality positive and negative.

If you squint and are drunk as a fart, it might even make sense.

No.

At this point, it really doesn’t matter. The entire thing has been glossy and bloody and cost a whole lot of money. That is really what matters isn’t it?

Except then I look at Oswald Danes and poor fridged Esther, and I wonder how my quirky, campy, sex positive Torchwood came to this? It was never free of unfortunate gender problems, but it wasn’t…nasty like this.

Esther’s death was narratively pointless, as was her character in many ways. There have been no occasions where I looked at Esther’s character and thought she was vital to the story. Her contributions were easily replicable using other characters and her character growth through the story impacted the narrative minimally. She followed Rex, he made the decisions and she carried them out. Occasionally she would smile grimly.

The only thing her death actually accomplished was inspiring Gwen’s semi-awesome speech. A speech that stopped being awesome as soon as she dragged stupid Oswald into it. Look, the Miracle was a horrible thing. It wasn’t about life everlasting, it was about the relentless progress towards being a soul trapped in a body that can’t die but can’t fix itself either.

Yet none of the debates around what they were doing referenced this simple fact. Gwen shouldn’t have rabbited on about no one having the power of life and death. It was simplistic, naive and childish. Every drunk with a knife has the power of life and death, it isn’t right but it is common.

It also annoyed me because it tried to give Oswald Danes some sort of relevance to the overarching narrative. Which is laughable, because he was a pointless, controversial character created to incite comment. He had no point.

A mirror to Jack? Well, no. Jack might have killed a child, lots of children, but he didn’t rape them and he didn’t enjoy killing them. Nor does the fact that Oswald Danes was worse make Jack any better.

The Messiah for the Three Families? Well, no. For a start, why did they need a Messiah in the first place? To test Jilly, maybe. It is a silly test though. Plus, they abandoned that whole thing after a couple of episodes dealing with it.

A character with a point? No?

Even at the end, as he flashed his mac (tasteful) to show his sticks and claimed to be ‘vital’, he was a pointless character. Either Jack or Gwen could have worn that vest. If Oswald pulled the trigger, none of them would have survived anyhow. They could have had a monkey do it, then we would at least have felt bad for the monkey.

Instead, we had Oswald Dane’s exploding into the earth vagina as he screamed that his victim was a bad little girl in hell and he was coming to rape her. Coming to rape all those bad little girls.

Oh, it would have felt false if he had repented. This, however, was repellent. RTD decided, for some reason, that what the show really needed was a paedophile having a big, damn, heroic death scene.

It was nasty. Genuinely unpleasant.

I don’t like where they have taken Torchwood. After all this time watching it, since the first episode, I think I am done. I doubt they will care. I don’t think women are the audience they want anymore.