Torchwood: 4 Things Miracle Day Got Wrong (And 4 Things It Got Right)

4. Straight Into The Action

One thing you can credit Miracle Day for is its high octane opening episode. Before the opening titles fans had been introduced to the majority of the show's plethora of new characters as well as the concept of the Miracle itself and, as the episode proceeded to fly by at an excellent pace, viewers sat on the edge of their seats with their mouths opened wide at the scale of all the escalating drama. It was ultimately going to be the only episode of the entire run worth writing home about, however, but at least it's something. You can't deny that as drama premiere episodes go, Miracle Day's The New World - which, coincidentally, was the working title of the series as a whole - pretty much ticks all the boxes. The premise of the story was well defined and established, there was a menagerie of interesting new characters, and the beginnings of their respective arcs, to boot, plenty of explosions and there was even the customary helicopter/car beach chase scene thrown in for good measure. As the end credits rolled, Jack was well and truly back and it felt like he had never been away. As the title of its opening episode suggested, Torchwood really was in a whole new world and if the rest of the series had maintained the standard of its premiere, it would ultimately have been a bloody good world, too. What's more, writers took on the daring task of launching the episode with the execution of one of the season's more controversial characters, convicted child murderer Oswald Danes, and fans got to witness his death by lethal injection - which, at the hands of the new Miracle, he ultimately survived - in the first few minutes of the episode. What a way to start! It was definitely a way to affirm its arrival and it suggested that Torchwood still wasn't afraid to take risks and push the boundaries of television drama. Once again though, as the story progressed, the story failed to live up to the strong promises of its opening sequence.