Monday, November 06, 2006

Remember, remember...

...you're a Womble. Ah, Guy Fawkes Night (and the fortnight either side of it), when the good folk of England are expected to endure the sounds of heavy shelling in memory of a Catholic fundamentalist terrorist. On the positive side, oooh, pretty shiny lights.

One day, it is my fond and fervent hope, Marvel will actually publish a book I want to buy. Something that the editors are sufficiently confident about in its own right that they won't feel obliged to shoehorn in guest appearances from Spider-Man or other "fan favourites" after three issues in a craven attempt to inflate sales. Paul Cornell's Wisdom looks promising, very promising. Stan Lee Meets emphatically does not.

So, Torchwood! Torchwood came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and it's aaaaall out of bubblegum. At last, a post-watershed Cybermen story! Not that it didn't have some massive holes, such as why the conversion machine apparently spends the first two or three minutes in operation waving its blades about to absolutely no effect, or why Cyber-Lisa should think that the Frankenstein business at the end of the episode would persuade Ianto to become a Cyberman (the "That'd look cool" syndrome in both cases, I suspect). But still, a passable episode. We did think for a few minutes there that the whole team might self-destruct before the end of the series. Even if he hasn't gone, I'll expect Ianto to be thoroughly traumatised for the next few weeks.

But I'm still more excited about next week's! It's P J Hammond! It's evil fairies! What could possibly go wrong?!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Imagine the fun if your flat doesn't look out over any thing other than other buildings so you can't even see the pretty colours and pretty much just get the shelling...ah well

Torchwood raises such fun questions such as when are his team gonna twig that Jack is actually Captain Scarlet (Or my favourite, Wolverine)? I mean the guy got electrocuted TWICE in full view of them for goddness sake??!!

Coming to your question about Lisa's motivation, doesn't what she says indicate that Lisa was at least in partial control throughout? "I did it all for you"

John Toon said...

Well yes, that's her motivation, but it's her reasoning I'm confused about. I mean, she did it for Ianto specifically to try to persuade him to upgrade. Even after the brain transplant, when she's fully organic again, she wants them to upgrade together. I took away from that the impression that however much of Lisa was left, the Cybertech was always in control, just using her to recruit more Cybermen.

What gets me is why the Cybertech, especially if it was using her mind, should reason that the best way to upgrade Ianto was to abandon Lisa's half-converted body, transplant the brain into another girl's body, do its best lumbering zombie impression and lo, the pair of them upgrade off into the sunset. Just forcing him into the machine would've done it, and without emotions he wouldn't have been angry at her afterwards.