Torchwood and Timetabling

Well, I watched the first episode of the new series of Torchwood tonight.

I'm impressed.

The first series went a bit overboard when trying to be “darker and edgier” than Doctor Who and often ended up with unlikable heroes and unsympathetic villains shooting at and having sex with each other for no particular reason, usually to the detriment of the character development and plot.

Right from the start, the new series establishes a lighter tone with the now sans Jack Torchwood team chasing a sports car-driving alien through the streets of Cardiff in their trademark SUV. This isn't played for laughs however as we quickly learn that, despite its humorous appearance and introduction, this alien is armed, dangerous and knowledgeable about the team. This whole section also serves to reintroduce all the characters and give Captain Jack a suitably dramatic entrance.

While some witty banter helped a lot, the thing that really made the Torchwood characters more appealing was that they were actually competent at their jobs. Remember in the first series how they didn't notice a half-converted Cyberman in their own basement for months? None of that here, much to my relief.

The team manage to work together and actually save some lives for once rather than just whining and letting a combination of Jack and random chance fix everything. This makes the characters and their role as defenders of the planet so much more believable than it was before.

You could try to chalk it up to character development – everyone had to grow up while Jack was away or else the world wound have imploded – but really this is how it should have been in the first place. There's been a subtle but hugely important shift in the tone of the show and it's all the better for it.


Nothing much going on today. Spent a lot of time watching Firefly in between lessons, to my great delight. Room changes are still going on so we got put in one of the science labs for Maths today. It was the lab where I had Higher Chemistry and it reminded me that, more or less one year ago, I would've been studying like mad for my Chemisty prelim. And now I barely remember any of it. Strange.

I also currently have a problem facing me – I have no idea where my Physics class is going to be tomorrow morning. I know we've been shunted out of our usual room but I think the room we're going to has changed several times, meaning that the schedules posted around the school are probably wrong.

Normally, I'd just go for safety in numbers and hang around with my classmates until we either found the room or collectively gave up, hoping that any blame would be spread thin. Since I'll be coming in late, presumably after everyone else finds the room, I'm more or less screwed.

I was about to ask Sam to leave me a note of some kind when, for the first time I can ever recall, he decides to go to bed early and logs off. Hopefully, someone in my class or, more likely, my teacher will have the common sense to get me the information somehow if the room has indeed changed.

I couldn't think of a good enough pun

You know that feeling that you get when you've just cut your fingernails and the tips of your fingers are kind of tingly, but in an annoying way? I hate that feeling.


As always happens with Mondays, today was a fairly easy day. All we did in Physics, my one lesson, was a neat experiment and some simple calculations to predict and confirm its findings. We even got out early, because it was our last lesson of the term where the whole class would be there, so our teacher didn't want to start the next section.

Someone had brought in a 360 for the last week of term and we decided to use it to watch a DVD rather than play games for once. Due to an argument that apparently started a couple of weeks ago, we wound up watching The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Naturally, I'd heard of the film before but I'd never actually watched it, despite my dad having the whole Dollars trilogy in a boxset.

We spent the first little while, when there were more of us in the room over lunch, making fun of the film, talking over the dialogue. We decided, for instance, that Angel Eyes (the Bad) was not searching for a man who could tell him the location of a huge stash of money, but was actually trying to find his keys.

Despite all the life-threatening situations he got into, we knew that the Man with No Name couldn't die, because he was played by Clint Eastwood. As far as we were concerned, even the doctors in the film knew this and said as much when asked if he was going to die. Hell, the man could attract cannonballs somehow – you don't go through life with that little quirk without being unbelievably badass, or possibly a cross between Magneto and Wolverine.

Tuco's pink parasol was the source of much hilarity.

But as time went by and those who weren't interested went off to do other things, those of us who were hung around. We started complaining, not when people talked over the dialogue, so much as when they distracted us from the brilliant music and the tense and epic scenes. We watched with baited breath as we tried to figure out what the characters would do next. We continued to marvel at the pinnacle of bad-assery that is Clint Eastwood but we also began to like and care for the character.

At least, I did. I really like that film. So much so that I think I'm going to watch it again, probably in conjunction with its prequels and hopefully with some friends, since the experience was much enhanced by the running commentary at times.

You know what? My first purchases from the iTunes store were made tonight, more than a month after setting up my account for my iPhone. It was the two main soundtrack themes for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

I rarely buy songs. I rarely watch a movie, or even a TV series, twice through, especially in quick succession. But I truly love this film. Maybe it was just the atmosphere in the common room that helped me have fun with it, but during the later scenes, I was on the edge of my seat.

It's a truly great film and if you haven't seen it, I can do nothing but highly recommend it to you.


As for me, I'm going to think up some kind of pun as a title for this post and then retire to bed. It's been a busy day, somehow. Tomorrow should be nice and easy, seeing as how I have first two lessons off (during which time we fully intend to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail) and then a couple of lessons, followed by lunch and the infant/junior department nativity play in the afternoon.

Have a nice day. I did.