Leaving off with Jack’s blood being mysteriously drawn toward some part of Shanghai, the two teams set off in search of the Blessing and the Three Families. In what has to be an entry for the record of "Most Pointless Monologues Crammed Into An Hour," our final meeting between Torchwood and the Three Families is nothing but every character speechifying about what they think the Blessing truly is. Here’s a hint: nobody has a solid idea. All we know is that there is a hole going from one end of the Earth to another that is filled with some strange energy that forces you to see the truth of your soul and is also somehow the focal calibration point of human mortality. When Abelmarch, Casterdane and Frines collected Jack’s blood back in 1928, they eventually discovered that if you feed the Blessing the blood of an immortal, it will take that and make everybody on Earth immortal. If you’re lost, don’t feel upset. This whole explanation makes no sense.

You know what? I give up. This whole thing stopped making any sense about ten minutes into the episode. It has been well established that Jack’s immortality has nothing to do with his blood and everything to do with the Time Vortex resurrecting him and making him a fixed point in time. So why is his blood such a key factor in this? When Jack tries some semblance of explaining what the Blessing is and how it got there, ‘Doctor Who’ fans might get a little kick out of his references back to the Silurians and the Raknoss. But in the end, the explanation comes down to a very simple line of dialogue:
Gwen: "You have no bloody clue, do you?"
Jack: "Nope."
When you’ve built up an entire season toward this one moment, to give us such a pithy explanation is just a letdown. Rex and Esther’s clever thinking ahead that gives them the advantage over the Three Families at the last minute feels too much like a cop out.

Another disappointment is what is done with Gwen. The writers and producers of this season have gone to great lengths to make her into a real badass, and it was working well. I was on board with it. But her final moment to truly be the badass that she has been all season ends up being little more than a pitiful slug-fest with Jilly over an elevator.
And then there’s the representatives from the Three Families themselves. In Shanghai, you have a woman who monologues with such grandeur over such completely irrelevant information that her speeches stop the already slow-moving plot cold. In Buenos Aires, you have a man who is overly smug for no good reason. Every line he utters is dripping with so much smarm, he becomes a walking talking bad guy cliché. These are not the super villains one would expect to be at the heart of a century-old conspiracy.

While we have a cryptic meeting between Jilly and one of the surviving operatives of the Families that lays out the fact that they have a "Plan B," I honestly couldn’t care less. The Three Families is not an interesting villain, and their methods for world domination are overly complicated and pointless.
For a season that had such a strong start with an intriguing and thought-provoking concept, it was deeply upsetting to see it sputter about halfway through and ultimately lose all momentum and coherence in a finale that felt more like a quick patch to a badly mangled story. ‘Torchwood: Miracle Day’ showed so much promise and potential, and didn’t meet any of it.
Facebook Comments