beatrice_otter | From the reaction, I thought Children of Earth was going to be a lot worse.

All in all, depressing as it is, I thought it was very well done, both in writing and acting, except for one or two things.

Steven and Alice. We didn't see enough of them with Captain Jack. Anytime a child dies, there's going to be a punch in the gut feeling, we all know that. But that feeling was supposed to be ramped up by OMG! JACK HARKNESS IS SACRIFICING HIS OWN GRANDSON WHILE HIS DAUGHTER WATCHES! But in the one scene of him with the two of them we had in the entire miniseries, Jack and Alice were fairly adversarial while Steven played in the background and Jack tried to manipulate her into letting him have Steven so he could experiment with him. For good reasons, of course, and he wasn't planning on doing anything that might hurt him at that point, but still. Not indicative of a close relationship, and by the time Steven gets sacrificed we already know Jack is willing to sacrifice children for the greater good. So the sacrificing scene is a lot less climactic than it should be.
WTF was up with their first attempt to stop the 456 aliens? They've got this wonderful setup to get in the building, perfectly done, dramatic, and then they get there and their entire plan is "The 456 will surrender when they hear that Torchwood is on the case now! All the universe is in fear of Jack Harkness' charm and good looks and righteous wrath!" And then they're surprised when it doesn't work? WTF? And they have no backup plan even though they're all heading in where they know everyone wants to kill them and if they slip up they're dead? And the only weapons or equipment they have to take on aliens they know nothing about is two hand guns? WTFBBQ? I just ... there are no words for the sheer idiocy of that idea. I sat there and stared and waited for some brilliant twist. But no, they actually were that stupid. They had someone the 456 had modified, and they didn't even try to get him somewhere they could figure out what had been done to see if they could find a weakness. I mean, they could still have failed the first time and gotten Ianto killed, I can see why the writers wanted that for a dramatic beat, but they could have done it without first making everyone imbeciles.
The government's actions would have been much more realistic if they'd had someone trying to figure out how to kill the 456 and failing and when the Americans realized Britain had had contact with the 456 before, if they'd showed them the work they'd done and how they hadn't been able to figure out anything and the American scientists had looked at it and gone, yeah, we've got nothing, either. Because yeah, we get told at the very end of the last episode that people are working on it, but for the first four episodes all we see are Evil Politicians (tm) who are going to Sell Out The World! They felt like B-movie villains, instead of real people in an impossible situation.

Aside from those three things, though, it was a very well-written script from a technical point of view, and very well done.