Monday, October 17, 2005

Torchwood Revealed!

The BBC has revealed that a new adult-oriented series called Torchwood will be spun off from Doctor Who.

Torchwood will be about a group of investigators tracking alien activity and solving human crime in present day England. It will feature John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness, from Doctor Who, and will be shown post-watershed on BBC3. Russell T Davies describes the flavour of it like this:

"Torchwood will be a dark, clever, wild, sexy, British crime/sci-fi paranoid thriller cop show with a sense of humour - the X Files meets This Life."


More details can be found via the BBC link above, and this article in The Independent gives in-depth information.

Torchwood will also be referenced in the Doctor Who Christmas Special, and Series Two of Doctor Who.

Technorati tags:

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Adam and the Cybermen


A speculation in story-form…

Adam Mitchell loved working for Van Statten, cataloguing his alien artefacts. For an uber-geek who loved to tinker with unusual technology, it was the perfect job. Adam wasn’t evil. He would never think of himself as a bad man. Just the same as most people - willing to bend the rules a little to suit himself. Nothing that would hurt anybody.

Like keeping a few trinkets for himself to play with. Nothing big, and nothing spectacular. Nothing that anyone would be likely to notice. Van Statten wouldn’t miss the odd rock, the odd claw. Van Statten had the metal head. He wouldn’t miss a little metal finger.

And then The Doctor came. And Rose. And the Dalek came to life, and everything turned upside down.


Was it just a few weeks later that Adam found himself back home, with no job, and a strange device buried in his forehead?

But Adam was a genius, and he still had references from Geocomtex. Soon he was back in business, and going from strength to strength. A PhD from Cambridge, and then working in government labs. And finally, Doctor Adam Mitchell, a Senior Fellow at the world famous Torchwood Institute.


Torchwood studied everything that was exciting and important.

It was when Adam saw a demonstration of the nanofusion cell that he had his brainwave. Somehow, it seemed like just the right power source for that little metal finger, so long forgotten.

He sneaked one of the nanofusion prototypes into his pocket, and took it home.

He dug the finger out of a dusty box where it had lain for years, and hooked up the cell. It jerked almost imperceptibly, or so Adam thought, and started to grow very slightly warm.

“Recharging perhaps?” he thought. “I’ll leave it overnight, and take a look in the morning.”


Adam was awoken by the scream of his daughter.

“Mummy!”

He flung himself down the stairs towards the shrieking, into the kitchen.

His wife, but not his wife, turned. Her body seemed half-eaten by metal.

Her head something like a head he’d seen in a glass case, long ago.


For the second time in his life, Adam fainted.

Technorati tags:

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

"Grown men with a gleam in their eye..."

Christopher Eccleston commented in one of his interviews that:

There was a different energy on the set the day of the Daleks. Grown men with a gleam in their eye, because of this thing...

That could apply to Doctor Who as whole, not just the Daleks.

As I create this blog, I'm asking myself what it is about Doctor Who that makes it so appealing that a grown man like me finds it worthwhile to write about it.

Part of it is that it captured our imaginations when we were very young, and it has a special place in our lives because of that. Part of it is that the new series is often funny, thought-provoking and moving. It satisfies adult tastes as well as entertaining young children.

But perhaps there is more to it than that. The Doctor is an archetypal hero, of a kind that appears in many myths and stories throughout history, and which seems to find a resonance with all cultures. Perhaps these stories meet some deep need in us.


In any case, Doctor Who is loved by people of all ages, and it provides a meeting point for an interesting and fun community, where adults and young people can talk together as friends.

Technorati tags:

Saturday, August 20, 2005

Torchwood Speculations

The Doctor Who community is buzzing with talk of Torchwood. It looks like this will be the hidden meme spanning season two, just as Bad Wolf did through the first season.

Russell T Davis has said that the new season's meme has already been mentioned, and that it's an anagram. One of the answers to the Weakest Link quiz last season was that the Great Cobalt Pyramid was built on the ruins of the famous Torchwood Institute.

I'll leave you to spot the anagram.


We - the folks from Tamino BadWolf - think the Torchwood Institute will be involved in a Cybermen story, as part of the season finale.

Our reasoning: Torchwood will be an arc that spans the whole season, and so will culminate in the season finale. And the Cybermen will be so looked forward to by so many people as the highlight of the season that they too will be saved up for a big climax!

Possibly the Torchwood Institute studied extra-terrestrial life, possibly it studied cybernetics.

Perhaps a visit to the Great Cobalt Pyramid will reveal entombed cybermen, and a journey back in time to the Torchwood Institute will be needed to investigate further.

Maybe the institute was somehow involved in the creation or later development of the Cybermen. We'd love to see a Genesis of the Cybermen type story!


What do you think?

Technorati tags:

Welcome!

Welcome to my newly created Blog!

Bad Meme Hunting will focus on the Torchwood phenomenon in Doctor Who, with occasional pieces on other Doctor Who matters.

I am new to blogging and Blogger, and my first few posts will be experiments to learn how to configure my blog, and use the tools available.

These will be replaced by meaningful content shortly.

In the meantime, you might want to check out the Torchwood discussions in the Tamino BadWolf Forum. The title of my blog was inspired by Scott Matthewman's "Bad Wolf Hunting", and many of the people from that group now hang out at Tamino Badwolf.

Happy Hunting!