Watching Torchwood

One thing i always find slightly annoying with drama that's aimed at an adult audience is when the writers feel the need to be nasty to the regular characters; it's almost the norm with Spooks for example, at least once a season there's a death or a similar yanking of the heart strings, be it Harry and Ruth finally getting together before she's forced to run away and hide, Colin being killed, Zaf disappearing or a myriad of other situations and that show isn't alone. We have, it seems, to watch these characters really suffer for it to be considered real i suspect.

Torchwood makes its characters suffer as well and we suffer along with them, the multi-story thread that was Owen's death being the most recent example and the effect was increased by the Torchwood Declassified after the episode where he was shot, lots of commentary from Burn Gorman about how he'd like to go out in a similar fashion as the hero and RTD saying about how hard it was to take the step of killing a major character... what a sneaky trick that was! Instead of him dying we end up with Owen the zombie, slowly going out of his mind, being relieved of duty and, as we found him at the start of tonight's episode, perched on the edge of a building... but as usual for Torchwood, all isn't as it seems and he was there purely to save the woman who was planning to end it all. i bloody cheered when i realised that Owen was going to come out of the other side of the ordeal and would be staying with the team, i really did.

Torchwood is part of the Doctor Who universe in that respect, it will be nasty to it's characters but, at the end of the day, it's rarely terminal and we love it all the more for that...