Chicago Reader | TV Review | Giving Fan Fiction Its Head: The BBC’s Torchwood: sci-fi where everyone’s bi and hot guys cryE By Noah Berlatsky

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Television

Giving Fan Fiction Its Head

The BBC’s Torchwood: sci-fi where everyone’s bi and hot guys cry

Torchwood: the complete second season (BBC Video)

By Noah Berlatsky

October 2, 2008

Television’s sci-fi melodramas have long inspired their devotees to do more than just watch. The predominantly female viewers of these shows want to pick the characters up and strip them down—to possess and be possessed by them. And so each episode triggers heaving, endlessly provocative streams of online fan fiction in which trite story lines and gaping plot holes become fodder for orgiastic metatextual romance.

The BBC sci-fi series Torchwood, whose second season just came out on DVD, looks like a lot of other examples of the genre. The premise—a group of supersecret operatives in Cardiff, Wales, protects the earth from aliens—is a perfect hybrid of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X Files, Star Trek, and Dr. Who, all of which have huge fanfic followings.

In fact, the pastiche is so perfect it outdoes the originals. Torchwood isn’t so much a TV series as a fangirl’s wet dream. Where shows like Star Trek and Buffy merely inspired fanfic, Torchwood gives the impression of having been inspired by it. Fanfic creates new stories for established series characters; Torchwood was spun off from the revamped Dr. Who series. (“Torchwood” is in fact an anagram of “Doctor Who.”) Fanfic relies on the reframing of established events to justify new story lines, a device referred to as “retroactive continuity,” or retcon; Torchwood characters cover up their public interactions with aliens by means of a memory-wipe drug called Retcon. Fanfic writers will often introduce a “Mary Sue”—a surrogate for the viewer who wins over the real characters with her depth and general wonderfulness; Torchwood’s first season revolved around Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), a normal, everyday viewer surrogate who stumbles into the world of Torchwood and wows all the other characters with her depth and general wonderfulness.

But all that’s just icing. The main link between Torchwood and fan fiction is sex. Specifically, gay sex. Even more specifically, angsty, hot guys who indulge in tortured romance and witty repartee as a prelude to gay sex.

Everybody knows that guys love lesbian porn. The fact that many women like gay male porn is less established, but the evidence has been quietly mounting. Perhaps the biggest tween girl phenomenon of the last 15 years is the spectacular success of shojo manga—romance comics from Japan, written by women for girls. Shojo narratives often center around romantic trysts between boys. There’s even an explicit subgenre called yaoi—a word that’s sometimes jokingly translated as “Stop! My butt hurts!”

There are huge fanfic communities associated with almost every shojo title. But the obsession with gay sex is hardly confined to them. Female Star Trek fans of the 1970s started penning slash fiction, a fanfic subgenre in which characters (Kirk and Spock, for instance) explore some of the repressed aspects of their relationship. With the Internet as a spur, slash fiction has metastasized. If you had a dime for every illicit Snape/Harry Potter encounter out there, you’d be almost as rich as I’d be if I had a quarter for every Xander/Spike pairing.

Spike, of course, is the brutal, charismatic, ambivalently redeemed vampire who stole the show in both Buffy and its spin-off, Angel. Not coincidentally, James Marsters, the actor who played Spike, appears in Torchwood’s second-season premiere as a brutal, charismatic, ambivalently redeemed “time agent” named Captain John Hart. He and the dashing leader of the Torchwood crew, Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), have a history, and when we see them together for the first time in the episode, “Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang,” they stare soulfully at each other . . . exchange blows . . . and then lock lips. That noise drowning out the pounding rock music on the soundtrack is the sound of millions of rapturous fangirls flapping their arms and going squeeee!

The Captain Jack/Captain John relationship is definitely a series highlight, reveling as it does in the homoerotic aspect of the hero/villain duality that most cultural products repress. When Captain John returns in the season finale, “Exit Wounds,” he declares that he wants revenge because Jack hasn’t spent enough time with him. It’s archvillain as spurned lover, which opens up a whole new perspective on Batman and Joker—or, for that matter, George Bush and Osama Bin Laden. Just get a room, guys.

For most male action heroes, from Clint Eastwood to Melvin Van Peebles to Keanu Reeves, masculinity equals emotional remoteness. Even the relatively effete Dr. Who shows his nads by never quite being able to say “I love you.” In Torchwood, though, pretty much everyone is bi, and so the fear of feminizing emotional display is suspended. A mysterious time traveler with a tragic past, Captain Jack would be all broodingly taciturn and repressed in any other show. Here he’s flamboyant, flirting outrageously with middle-aged secretaries, babbling about his fetish for office spaces, and impulsively resurrecting a team member because he can’t bear to see him go. He cries when he’s sad, hugs those he loves, and giggles when someone says something funny. And, in the second season at least, he’s in a stable, caring, and supportive relationship with his adorably dry teammate Ianto Jones (Gareth David-Lloyd.) In other words, engaging in anal sex frees Jack from having to act like he’s got a pole up his ass.

If the best parts of Torchwood spring from its gender-bending affinities with the slash subgenre of fan fiction, its downsides do too. The writers are way, way too enamored of drippy melodrama, on the altar of which they’re willing to sacrifice even minimal consistency. Virtually every episode ends in A Very Tragic Death—of a major character, of a minor character, of a space whale, it hardly seems to matter as long as they can get everybody weeping. Plus, every Torchwood character has a traumatic backstory: Jack’s past, which involves dead parents, a lost brother, and an ill-defined sepia-toned landscape, is hard to beat for idiocy, and yet I think the prize has to go to Owen Harper (Burn Gorman), who, late in the second season, acquires a never-before-mentioned dead fiancee.

The reliance on soap opera-style tearjerking is especially frustrating because the cast is uniformly stellar. As Ianto, who’s sort of an office manager/auxiliary team member, Gareth-Lloyd rarely has much to do, but he really delivers: his deeply uncomfortable twitchiness when Jack first asks him out is one of the funniest things I’ve seen on television. Naoko Mori is also a gem as Toshiko Sato, the team’s nerdy computer whiz. Her subtle blend of innocence, eagerness, and bravery—as well as her painfully unrequited crush on Owen—provides the series’s most heartbreaking moments. The best episodes (like the comic “Something Borrowed” or “Adam,” in which Tosh and the assholeish Owen switch personalities) just demonstrate how great Torchwood could be if the actors weren’t so frequently saddled with duff scripts.

But that’s television, I guess. Torchwood isn’t quite great. But it is a watershed: the first show to take fanfic conventions into the mainstream. Unsurprisingly, Torchwood’s exploitation of a hitherto underserved fetish has resulted in excellent ratings: its debut broke BBC audience records. With such success, there are sure to be imitators. The manporn deluge cometh.