This brings us to the topic of sex. There is a lot of it in Torchwood, but it often feels sledge-hammered into the plots, as if the writers feel that it is necessary to make the show feel more "adult". But when everybody seems to want to bed everybody else, things start to feel silly. In the second season there is more of a feeling of continuity to the relationships/flings in the series, but there are still the occasional lapses: in one episode Ianto (the pretty boy of the group) is crying over his recently deceased girlfriend, in the next he is shagging - hey, ho - Captain Jack, who is his sex buddy. This is all the more bizarre as he was also doing it, in retrospect, while the girlfriend was still alive. And yes — Ianto is bisexual it seems, but then so is everybody else in the cast. All the main characters have had at least one encounter with someone of their own gender. Now, I like to see gays and lesbians represented on television, but it should make some psychological sense.

Death is also a recurring theme in Torchwood and it ends quite a few episodes on a downer. But the series has a weird concept of an afterlife; there is something, but this something is a vast darkness in which apparently nothing happens. It seems a bit half-hearted as afterlives go. However, death does kick off the most interesting storyline of the second season, starting with the apparent death of one of the main characters. The psychological consequences make for an interesting arc that is actually carried through to the finale.

Torchwood tries to be "gritty" and "real" while telling stories about monsters. In many ways it is the Angel to Doctor Who’s Buffy. It even pays homage to Buffy’s concept of a Hellmouth — a pseudo-scientific rationale that is given to explain why so many weird things happen in Cardiff. The link between these series is made stronger by two welcome appearances of James Marsters (who played Spike in both Buffy and Angel) in the second season, as a former lover of Captain Jack. As he jokes in the second season finale, "It’s all about sex with you people." Ironically, Torchwood feels sillier than Doctor Who, because the latter is a full-on, high adventure science fiction series where anything goes, while Torchwood makes unsuccessful grabs at realism. These only serve to make the moments when major threats are averted with some vague techno-babble stand out more.