Contributor: Gregg Wright
Well, I’ll say one thing about “Miracle Day”. It’s not a very predictable show, at least in terms of the larger story, which could be see as either a bad thing or a good thing. I suppose a flashback episode makes sense right about now, given the previous hints about something vitally important to Miracle Day happening in the past. A drawn out recounting of one of Jack’s romances from the 1920s isn’t exactly what I was expecting, or hoping for. But still, the flashback scenes were more interesting than just about anything seen on the show so far, and I’d probably go so far as to say that this is the best episode of the show so far.
As other reviewers have noted, this episode marks a major shift in focus and tone to something that much more closely resembles the original “Torchwood”. I still have issues with the writing, but I’m so tired of Phicorp, Davies’ clumsy social commentary, and all the new American characters that it’s hard not to appreciate a more serious episode that focuses almost entirely on Jack and Gwen. The character drama doesn’t work quite as well as I might have hoped, more so in the present than in the flashbacks, but it did manage to finally give the show some of the character depth its been missing from the start.
This episode has been described as a “soft reboot” for the show, which isn’t that far off the mark. It now feels like much of the show’s previous plot has been a waste of time. I wanted the social/political ramifications of the miracle to be a part of “Miracle Day”, but they took over the entire narrative of the show, and weren’t compelling enough to warrant that level of focus. What was the point of Phicorp? Or Danes? As I’ve said, I like Bill Pullman’s performance, but Danes and Phicorp were built up as being such grandly important parts of the mystery, and they both turned out to be tools for the Triangle.
There were a couple of things pointed out in other reviews that I didn’t notice while watching. Of course, it’s almost impossible to miss the taking of blood from Jack and the handshake by the three shady characters who seem to have “bought” Jack from the butcher. But I didn’t consider the possibility that the blood taken from Jack might be what Jack gave “them, so long ago”. And I didn’t notice that the handshake formed a triangle. Somehow, I don’t feel much closer to understanding what’s going on.
Murray Gold’s score is still oddly detrimental to this show. Looking back, it appears that Ben Foster was responsible for the vast majority of the original show’
