Death In Torchwood: Could Doctor Who Learn Something?
Guest contributor Nathan Lobo takes a look.
As I was watching Torchwood again, the more recent ‘deaths’ of Clara and Missy in ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’ sprang to the forefront of my mind. The feeling was more questioning why I felt this was not so powerful a cliffhanger as I had expected. This led me onto questioning death in Doctor Who when I stumbled across a fascinating recent article by Jacob Whittle on this very site. He talks about ‘the feeling of contradiction’ that accompanies death in Doctor Who. Watching Torchwood helped me understand where I feel Doctor Who could improve when it comes to handling this so that more people might not feel so negative about the revival of dead characters.
Death is not overused in Torchwood. It doesn’t need to be because its main character has already defeated death in a more grounded way than the Doctor and so the issue of cheating death seems almost frivolous compared to this. So when characters do come back, the impact of their return has already been lessened by the repeated revivals of Jack. Suzie and Owen are both great examples of this. But I feel there is another reason that these revivals don’t grate us so much as some of the repeated deaths and revivals in Doctor Who. This is because the way that they are revived is more realistic and based in fact. We can relate to these because we can hope that they might come real. A gauntlet which uses shared brain activity as a rope is more tangible and within our scientific reach than the space hopper of time travel using incoming weapon fire to recharge the teleport function.
In other words, we can more easily conceive a resurrection gauntlet so its use and the people it brings back are less fanciful and more realistic. When Suzie returns, she does so several episodes later. In Doctor Who, there is not enough time for us to see how the characters deal with this as we should. Examples of this are Both Jennys (Jennies?) and Danny. All of them, and many more, are ‘revived’ in the same episode in which they are killed. Suzie’s return has more of an impact on everyone, including the audience because after we’ve almost forgotten her, she’s back, wreaking even more havoc than she did.
The premise of Jack dying repeatedly and coming back to life repeatedly is given to the audience from the outset. We find this out at the end of the first episode of Torchwood when Suzie shoots him, which also in effect gives Suzie’s death more finality. This means we expect it every time Jack dies. Therefore, in Miracle Day, when Jack orders Gwen to kill him at the end, the tension is stacked so high because we do not know whether he will survive, even though he is a main character. We instinctively fear for the character because, after six years of believing this is a character that cannot die, in less that three weeks, our preconceptions about him are flipped on their head and we are told he can die and he is about to.
In Doctor Who, I feel the repeated deaths of, for example, Rory are used in a way that now has diminished the meaning and impact of every death after him, unlike the use of Jack’s repeated deaths. Here, when Rory dies, he doesn’t just die, but on occasion dies more than once in the space of one episode (See ‘Cold Blood’ and ‘The Curse of the Black Spot’). The first time Rory dies, we are half given the impression he is in a dream when he dies, so when the dream state is revealed, we are forgiving. But in the very next story, he dies again, not once but twice, and in such a way that we feel it’s for good. Bringing him back seems slightly cheesy but it works within the premise of the episode. After a few series of ‘To die or not to die’, performed by the great Rory Williams, we come to ‘The Angels in Manhattan’ where he dies a grand total of three times in one episode. Perhaps controversially, because of his many, many deaths, I didn’t feel his last, and final, death was as powerful as it should or could have been, which then had a knock-on effect on my opinions of Amy’s death. Now every time that a major character dies, we automatically assume that they’ll come back to life because now Doctor Who has experience of that and not enough experience of just killing people off.
One of the most heartfelt deaths in the history of Doctor Who would have to be that of Adric, not purely because of the Doctor’s reaction to the death, but mainly because of the finality and the fact that it made it very unlikely for the character to come back, and if he did, it would be because the Doctor is visiting before the death, making the meeting even more bittersweet. In Torchwood, the same applies to the deaths of Tosh, Owen (when he dies for good) and Ianto. Jack’s revivals are also important here. When characters die, and die for good, their death causes so much emotional impact because of the shock of them not coming back to life, which has become almost usual. There’s even a shrine to Ianto in Cardiff where fans come to mourn his death because it was so powerful. Even though Owen had died before and come back to life, his second death was even more poignant not just because of the context of dying along with Tosh while talking to her, but because this was a character who had dealt with the problems that arise with coming back to life. We had seem him suffer but come through (sort of) so when he finally dies, the sadness has been ramped up to max.
Therefore, next time you watch Torchwood, and I would always recommend it, just ponder how differently the deaths in Torchwood are presented to those in Doctor Who. That ‘feeling of contradiction’ that Jacob talks about in his article is not there as much as in Doctor Who. It’s interesting, is it not?
