Berengaria

This month's Torchwood magazine is not so interesting for James fans...but next month! Get it if you can, it will have a big spread on the behind the scenes stuff of last episode in which
James features prominently.

Goddess_of_Mischief

YouTube - Torchwood - Exit Wounds Preview 2

Clip of James in his next Torchwood episode Exit Wounds.

Berengaria

Thanks, NikaD, looks like its going to be a great episode. I know Captain John is supposed to be evil but he makes me laugh.

Goddess_of_Mischief

He makes me laugh to. And his reason for tying Jack up makes it sound like he's acting like a petulant child.

'You won't spend time with me.'

He might be evil, but he's just acting so cute.

Berengaria

from dwtscifi:


The Rift: London Torchwood Convention

The Rift, the world’s first all-Torchwood convention, will be held on Saturday 26 April 2008 at Porchester Hall in Central London.

The confirmed guest list includes series regulars Eve Myles (Gwen) and Gareth David Lloyd (Ianto); episode guest stars James Marsters (Captain John Hart) and Alan Dale (Copley); producer Richard Stokes; writers Chris Chibnall, James Moran and Cath Tregenna; and Doctor Who author Keith Topping. The price of admission includes question and answer sessions, a number of autographs and an evening concert by Marsters.

Marsters, who has appeared at a number of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel conventions, says he expects The Rift to have its own identity. “Buffy conventions have their own flavor. Back when I was young and [an attendee at] conventions for Star Trek, they had their own character. I suspect that a Torchwood event will have its own character. I suspect it’s going to be pretty cool, pretty intelligent and pretty randy.

“Frankly, we have three of the best writers from Torchwood and I think that the writers usually come up with the nastiest jokes during conventions and the most truthful comments. The fans get to learn more of what’s really going on behind the scenes.”

Some of the guests will be new to the convention scene, but Marsters says he doesn’t foresee having to act as a guide. “No, they’re Welsh!” he laughs. “They know what’s up. I think Eve’s going to take to it like a duck to water. Gareth has a very dry sense of humour…He’s going to do very well.”

This will be Marsters’ first convention appearance since the airing of his first Torchwood episode, which saw him in a passionate smooch with John Barrowman’s Captain Jack. Is he looking forward to the Q & As? “Hell, yeah!” he exclaims. “I can’t wait!”

Event organiser Steve Himber, who is producing The Rift with JM Live, says all the guests are really looking forward to it. “Eve Myles has been talking it up quite a bit, I understand, and James Moran is just downright giddy on his blog about the whole thing and being part of it. They’ve all been really supportive. I think they’ve been looking for something like this, to satisfy the hunger of the fandom.”

baileycat

Their enthusiasm is infectious. I'm sure April 26th will be a great day for everyone.

fozzy81

Im so looking forward to April 26th

Berengaria

Here's a new "Exit Wounds" trailer....very exciting!

YouTube - Torchwood 2x13

fozzy81

is it not friday yet?

baileycat

Thanks for the trailer link!

Berengaria

from citypaper:

Bi Sci-Fi
BBC's Gleefully Bonkers Torchwood Returns Born-Again Queer Hard For Its Second Season

By Ian Grey

The 2006 first season of BBC America's Torchwood was the most singularly vexing tease of a televisual sci-fi experience a geek could imagine. For every strange delight--the show's instantly identifiable gritty/glossy digital noir look, queered Hawksian banter, sudden-death romance, and fevered willingness to insert sex into everything, typified by an episode about an alien who feeds off orgasms--there was an equal negative. The worst offenders: a reliance on 11th-hour high-tech deux ex machinas and an increasingly Lost-like sense that the show's creators were just making **** up as they went along.

But with the second season, currently airing Saturday nights on BBC America, Torchwood's bi-sci-fi geek promise of being a randy mix of Queer as Folk and Doctor Who--creator Russell T. Davies respectively created/reanimated both shows--is seriously fulfilled, thanks to the appropriation of one actor from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and a generous infusion of tropes from Joss Whedon's classic.

Still, with the good chance that you've neither seen nor heard of Torchwood, some exposition. Torchwood is a secret group operating "outside the government, beyond the police" so as to staunch the flow of aliens, ghosts, Romans, the black plague, and sundry other inter-temporal flotsam slipping into our world through the Rift--a space-time anomaly in Cardiff, Wales. Working from an underground lair done up in retro tubeway chic, complete with mortuary and in-house pet pterodactyl, Torchwood is composed of plucky local cop Gwen (Eve Myles), laddish cynic physician Owen (Burn Gorman), IT girl Toshiko (Naoko Mori), and fashion-conscious teaboy (!) Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd). All are under the command of the ever-grinning, mysterious, possibly immortal American Capt. Jack Harkness (John Barrowman).

Unfortunately, the first season strained to define its themes and characters with sufficient velocity to prevent U.K. viewers from switching to Heroes' vanilla recombinant pulp, often devolving into an alien-of-the-week format dashed with tantalizing bits of identity politics. What kept fans tuning in was the promise of the Torchwood crew and Capt. Jack, who was kind of great from Day 1. A sexually omnivorous, fine-jawed scamp in a 1940s military long coat, Barrowman plays him like a camp Tom Cruise, alternately/simultaneously arrogant, pigheaded, flirty, world-weary, and idealistic. But in the first season's fantastic finale, Jack morphed from lovable rogue into an entirely new genre archetype.

Due to a time-machine gaffe by Owen, an inter-temporal, life-absorbing God--"The Great Destroyer," no less--threatens life on Earth. With the chips down, Jack's browbeating and flirtatiousness dissolve to reveal an absolute, almost fatherly love of his co-workers. He forgives Owen and sacrifices his own immortal self--seemingly for keeps this time--to slay the opposition. One acolyte--excuse us, Gwen--waits at his side for days until Jack rises briefly before disappearing, presumably to allow his followers to follow his example and continue his good works.

Needless to say, it's cheeky to blatantly reposition your horny gay-leaning hero as a Christ substitute, a deliriously fun conceit that prefaced the high learning curve seen in the second season's opener, an episode aptly titled "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang." It opens with the chase for a coke-snorting alien blowfish--seriously--and the cheerfully unexplained return of Jack, before segueing to time traveler Capt. John (James Marsters, aka Spike from Buffy), who swaggers out of the Rift done up in Adam Ant pirate-punk gear, paralyzing lip gloss, and a horny leer to the accompaniment of Ennio Morricone-esque audio camp.

Captains John and Jack meet in a sleazy bar, make out like demons, beat the crap out of each other, share a drink, and then bitch about each other's wrinkles. If you'd never seen the show, you could be forgiven for thinking your TV went completely insane. Turns out, John is Jack's dark doppelgänger/ex-lover gone gleefully bad and willing to **** and/or kill every member of Torchwood in order to--well, no spoilage here.

Marsters' appearance is both a reminder of just how much Torchwood already owes Buffy--for obvious instance, the alien-spewing Rift is a sci-fi take on Buffy's demon-spewing Hellmouth-- and a preview of just how smartly it would appropriate from Whedon's world, which, in a weird/wonderful bit of intertextual alchemy, has allowed Davies' show to become more indelibly, well, Torchwood-like. Like Buffy herself, Gwen struggles to keep her life as a normal person and world saver separate. Toshiko has expanded from a dangerously archetypical "Asian"--all cool competence and raised Spock brows--into Torchwood's Willow surrogate, the show's supercute, smart, intrinsically open-souled center.%uFFFD

But geeky citations aside, what Torchwood most effectively assimilates from Whedon are supernatural nasties who function as metaphors for the characters' inner demons, along with a sweetly humanistic wallow in the gang's existential big pains. In that way that renders the science fictional literary, Jack's horrifically traumatic youth is revealed; his response to it explains why he needs to help people. A parallel-universe episode offers the anxious, socially inept Owen hiding under his semi-********* skin. And Toshiko finally meets a man she can love--a WWI soldier suffering from PTSD--but her painful duty to the greater good trumps romances, and so much for that.

And so fused in a cauldron of its characters' essential loneliness, the Torchwood crew, as in most great TV, coheres into a alternative viable family. Beyond that, the current season shows that beneath its bisexual snogs and smart quips, Torchwood is about difference, empathy, and striving to do the right thing in an indifferent world while knowing you'll inevitably getting it wrong half the time and learning to forgive yourself for doing so. And so Torchwood now isn't just delightful; it's kind of essential, inspirational even.

Goddess_of_Mischief

Love that. I'm hoping maybe that James will keep appearing as Captain John, I'm getting quite fond of the villian, even after only seeing a few clips for his second episode in Torchwood.

Berengaria

I am so excited about the finale being on tv in the UK tonight (it's past midnight where I am). Really haven't been this interested in any show since Angel went off the air.

Goddess_of_Mischief

I hope JM's scenes will be up on youtube right away, lol.

baileycat

I'm hoping that too.

Nice article. It was great to see someone cite the Buffyverse significance to Torchwood's success.