Wheeee! I've finished Torchwood Season Two! So what did I think of it?

Firstly, it didn't feel like some kind of quantum leap forward from Season One. It's still the same show, but their secret weapon is that they've tweaked it to feel less dreary and joyless. They're willing to shake up the format, with new regulars in James Marsters, that one-off reality-warping guy and Freema Agyeman. Burn Gorman gets killed and doesn't let that stop him. Crucially they've also become willing to have fun, with Ianto getting one-liners (until Gary Russell becomes script editor) and laughs to be had in episodes like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Something Borrowed. Season One never lightened up! Ever! Look back through the list of episodes and you'll see a slate of grim, monotonous tracts with the mission statement of making the Whoniverse as shitty as possible when the Doctor isn't around. It doesn't feel like a series in which someone like Martha Jones would be welcome, whereas in season two she fits right in and changes the show's chemistry while she's there.

They've improved the relationships too. A big problem I had with season one was Gwen lying to Rhys all the time and the tiresome sex stuff. People would sleep with other people in rather sad, unpleasant subplots that you knew from the beginning were never going to lead anywhere. It wasn't adult. It was just predictable and boring. This year though, I don't think any of the regulars sleeps with anyone with whom they're not in some kind of long-term relationship. Gwen stops lying to Rhys and marries him! I can't pretend I started liking her, but at least I stopped thinking she was scum.

Looking in more detail at the episodes, for me they split about half-and-half into good and less so. Five episodes I thought were genuinely strong. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is fun. It's what you'd expect of an episode guest-starring James Marsters and I don't think that's a small achievement for this show. Adam is doing really well at a kind of story Buffy used to do. Dead Man Walking is a showcase for Burn Gorman and the living dead, which is as cool as it sounds even if the formula doesn't work so well for A Day in the Death. Adrift isn't a big story, but it does what it's doing very well. Finally I really, really like Exit Wounds.

Then you've got episodes I quite liked. Something Borrowed is funny, while Fragments is perfectly okay.

Of the weaker episodes, none of them strike me as horrible. Sleeper is poor. To The Last Man is okay, but falls away a bit towards the end. Meat is very silly, but personally I enjoyed it a lot. Reset is pointless but efficient. A Day in the Death is 45 minutes of Burn Gorman angst about being dead, which perhaps isn't the best use of his time. From Out of the Rain forgot to have a plot, but it's also the P.J. Hammond one and gets points for weirdness. You wouldn't hang anyone for perpetrating those.

The acting can be good, but overall seems significantly worse than in comparable New Who. I spy a smaller budget. Nikki Amuka-Bird in Sleeper or Lachlan Nieboer in Exit Wounds aren't good enough and it's not fair to say "hey, it's just Torchwood". They have had some good guest stars, though, and James Marsters for me is cooler than most of the people they've had on Who. If the BBC do end up getting that American Torchwood series off the ground, I hope they try to get him back for it. Other changes include a broadening of the show's view of its own mythology. Season One's references to Torchwood's own history just involved previous TV stories, e.g. Cyberwoman, They Keep Killing Suzie. This year though we had two different early Torchwood teams, one in 1918 (To The Last Man) and one from a couple of decades earlier (Fragments). However that's a little evolutionary footnote and now we're really looking at the minor details.

At the end of the day, it's still Torchwood. They haven't reinvented anything. It's not even remotely like the way Rusty deliberately set out in Children of Earth to demonstrate what he thought Torchwood should have been. Most of these distinctions I've been talking about are either specific fixes or hair-splitting and I'm sure most people would say that there was no difference at all between the seasons. It's still the same cast dealing with the same problems, despite a little progress in the form of Ianto's one-liners and the Gwen-Rhys relationship being stabilised. I've also heard it said that they returned to Fun Innuendo Jack instead of Brooding Angst Jack, but I can't say I registered a big difference there personally. Overall if you didn't care two hoots about the regulars and/or didn't like the actors playing them in Season One, you're unlikely to fall in love with Season Two. That's the show's biggest problem, actually. If there's one thing we've learned from New Who, it's that if you're unlucky enough to dislike the heroes of a show, you're almost vanishingly unlikely to give a toss what happens to them. In comparison I'm not that fussed about the scattershot genre splash across the episodes, although there's been some progress on that front too.

No, the two biggest differences for me are: (a) specific fixes that make it less unpleasant, and (b) a lighter touch. Season Two is less Sturm and Drang. Season One occasionally seemed too much like hard work, but these thirteen episodes went past fairly painlessly. Half of them I thought were even good.