Carrying a Torch ... For Torchwood (Yes, We Just Went There).

Well, kids, it looks like Heroes is over for the season. Is that a good or bad thing? We can't decide. What we do know is that we need a show to fill that time. We're not yet sure what NBC will come up with, it being the Olympics and all, and can we just take a moment to say how much we LOVE THE OLYMPICS?!?!? Love. Them. And, really, they're kind of like science fiction - have you seen those skiers flying through the air? Crazy talk.

We digress. What we're trying to say is that we need a new sci-fi show, stat. While we work on finding something to recap every week, let us tell you about what is possibly our favorite sci-fi show ever.

If you're new to the sci-fi genre, we will let you in on a little secret: Doctor Who. Doctor Who is fun for several reasons:

1. It's low-budget, and therefore, highly entertaining
2. It's British, which makes it better than anything American, just kidding, we don't want to turn into Gwyneth Paltrow here
3. The Doctor is generally (in new episodes, at least) played by an attractive gentleman.

We know you're sold, but before you run out the door to your local Blockbuster - or look the show up on Netflix, where you can find quite a few episodes available to watch instantly - we want to tell you about a show we think we might like even more than Doctor Who.

Probably a lot of people are going to call us blasphemers for having just said that, especially if they know what show we're about to discuss. But we shall persist in our love of this show, because it is awesome. During the second season of the most recent Doctor Who incarnation, the BBC capitalized on a couple of the show's more interesting secondary characters and created a spinoff. That spinoff is called Torchwood.

We once said on our (personal) Twitter account that we thought it was silly for people to watch Torchwood without watching Doctor Who first. We stand by that statement. Doctor Who is awesome. But one of the defining characteristics of The Doctor is that he steadfastly refuses to tell anyone anything about his past. We get to know quite a lot about his present, and about his relationships with the ladies who travel with him (of course they're always ladies ... no television show is complete without some palpable sexual tension), but hardly anything about his own personality or what his life was like before his planet was destroyed in the Time War. We think that's super lame.

What we love about Torchwood is the character development. The show revolves around Gwen Cooper (who is a descendant of the Gwen Cooper who was in the TOTALLY AWESOME Doctor Who episode about Charles Dickens, and is, of course, played by the same woman), a police officer in Cardiff. She discovers Torchwood accidentally, and although they try to erase her memory of it, she's too smart for them bwahahaha etc. Torchwood is led by Captain Jack Harkness, who is also in several episodes of Doctor Who and who cannot die. The other Torchwood officers include Doctor Owen Harper, who dies twice; Toshiko Sato, who carries a major torch for Owen but only dies once; and Ianto Jones, who is sleeping with Captain Jack and who has remained alive thus far. What, we never said Torchwood wasn't also full of cheesy things.

Whereas Doctor Who is primarily about crazy alien stuff and how smart-but-not-remotely-readable the Doctor is, Torchwood puts the aliens aside and focuses on the characters.

Let's pause to think about what we just said.

Pause over. In summation: We love us some Doctor Who, but we really appreciate the writers' decision to allow viewers to get to know the people of Torchwood. Also, we kind of have a thing for Ianto.