Yet another episode of Torchwood TV I feel largely lacks any sort of value. After all the interesting stuff Torchwood had been doing for a few episodes, and even showing a side of Owen I finally found a bit of empathy around in Out of Time, we get this ridiculous monster fight club story that I found to be a real slog to get through.

It isn't just that the story is sloppy, or that Owen reverts back to a boring edge lord. Nor that the entire episode gets bogged down relationship melodrama stuff with him, as well as Gwen and Rhys on the side. I also think this episode looks pretty awful and doesn't have a lot of heart in the production of the cage arena or monsters. It all just looks so cheap to me and the Weevils are so boring - both in looks and behaviours. That they became a bit of a recurring thing in Torchwood mythology is not positive in my eyes.

On the whole, while I respect that this episode might have its fans, I am not one of them, and this is yet another example of early Torchwood largely causing me to check out. There's a certainly meanness to Combat that Torchwood too often hit upon with characters like Owen - it feels a lot more cynical and out of sorts with the tone of the larger Doctor Who franchise and it is something I always struggle with. This is especially relevant with a character like Owen who was implied to be a sex pest right from the beginning, and it leaves me really struggling to connect with these characters in content that offers little else in terms of writing or other strengths (which is something they did eventually start to compensate for with stuff like Series 3).

The only positive I can say about reviewing this series is that is has left me appreciating that Big Finish did a great job at getting me to care about this franchise. It is pretty cool that they were able to better develop things and leave us with more than the handful of TV stories that worked, and a graveyard of content like Combat that largely amounts to a whole bunch of nonsense I am not terribly interested in revisiting again in the future.