In particular, once I'm hooked on a TV show, it's practically impossible to make me stop watching it. Even if a show becomes so cheesy that you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a cheese pizza with extra cheese (e.g. the third new season of Doctor Who - please, please fire the writer who wrote Evolution of the Daleks), or earns me the eternal disdain of my fellows (e.g. Kim Possible - enough said), I'll soldier on through and enjoy the ride anyway.
But even my tolerance has limits. Push me far enough and I will push back, hard. Which brings me to Exhibit A.
Torchwood.
Torchwood starts out quite promisingly. An adult-oriented Doctor Who spinoff, featuring Captain Jack Harkness and set in a darker, moodier version of Cardiff, dealing with nasty alien nasties (as opposed to the cheesy alien sort-of-nasties of Doctor Who), full of reasonably strong characters with lots of potential for conflict and/or edgy love interest - what could go wrong? I mean, seriously, you'd have to be a moron to mess that up.
Episode #6 (Countrycide): Cue the morons.
Since when was Torchwood supposed to be a barbaric, pointless, C-grade slasher horror film? Since never, that's when.
- First point: Slasher horror sucks. Take pornography and replace the sex with gore, and slasher horror is what you get. Maybe there are some sickos that enjoy rubbing off to de-skinned corpses; I'm not one of them.
- Second point: Even on the level of a slasher horror film, this episode sucks. It uses every stupid horror cliche in the book. Help, help, I was running away from the baddie through the woods and I fell over and I can't get up! Help, help, the
zombiescannibals are trying to bust down the barricaded doors! Help, help, we're in the middle of nowhere and there's nobody nearby to help us! Help, help, the bad guys are bad because they're bad and no other reason! - Third point: The character development is shot to hell in this episode. Jack spontaneously becomes a mean bastard; Gwen accumulates even more reasons to hate Owen's guts and then leaves her long-time boyfriend to start sleeping with him, because she can; and the cannibal villagers have no motivation for anything they do (see also: bad because they're bad).
Edit: This article (language warning) sums the crappiness of this episode up nicely, if somewhat verbosely.