Torchwood: Children of Earth – Day One

In Scotland in 1965 a group of children are taken out in to the middle of nowhere by bus. When the bus stops they all get off and a bright light suddenly appears over the road. All the children walk towards the light….. except one. He runs.

In present day Cardiff, the Torchwood team are presented with a new problem when children suddenly stop and begin chanting the words ‘we are coming’. It soon becomes clear that the same phenomenon is happening all over the World and that all the children stopped at exactly the same time and they are all chanting in English.

The UK government begins to get worried but a mid level minister who has the ear of the prime minister seems more worried than others. He is Torchwood’s ‘man in the government’ but is he working with them or against them? When Jack is captured and impregnated with a bomb, he unknowingly brings about the destruction of the Torchwood hub. Ianto and Gwen barely get away with their lives but even with his ability to regenerate and cheat death, could Jack have possibly survived an explosion so big which originated inside him?

Torchwood has been ‘promoted’ to newer and better slots on British television since it first aired. It started out in season one on BBC3 and was promoted to BBC2 for its second outing. However, John Barrowman seems to have mixed feelings about their latest promotion to prime time BBC1. He has been quoted as saying that it is almost as if they were being punished for their success, as at the same time as promoting the series to the best slot available on the network, the BBC cut the production from a full season of 13 episode to only 5.

That being said, the writers, producers and actors have done an incredible job of turning what could have been a bit of a limp third season into what looks set to be, if this first episode is anything to go by, one of the television events of 2009. With 5.9 million viewers watching this first episode, which is way more than the number who watched any of the previous episodes, the BBC may end up kicking themselves for having cut it short.