History Series / TorchwoodMiracleDay

* SupermanStaysOutOfGotham: The Doctor's absence doesn't even get a LampshadeHanging like in ''Series/TorchwoodChildrenOfEarth'' this time around. Martha, Mickey or any useful UNIT higher ups that can lend a hand are nowhere to be seen.

For an episode guide, see ''Torchwood'''s [[Recap/{{Torchwood}} Recap page]].

* OnlyOnePlausibleSuspect: Towards the tail end of the series we're told there's another evil [[TheMole Mole]] in the CIA other than the ObviouslyEvil FatBastard that was outed earlier. There are three CIA operatives that aren't part of the main cast. One is DaChief and working pretty diligently with Torchwood and wants the case solved and the mole outed. The second is developing the software to find the mole. That leaves the third, who was [[spoiler:featured prominently in the first episode, who we had just been reminded exists the episode prior, and who just had her wardrobe change up to [[EvilIsSexy low cut cleavage showing dresses]]]]. To be fair though, the audience is let in on it before the heroes, who were busy juggling the IdiotBall the entire season.

* {{Gayngst}}: Although Captain Jack Harkness is absolutely devoid of any shame about his [[AnythingThatMoves sexuality]], his boyfriend Angelo suffers from deep-seated religious gayngst due to being raised Catholic in a small Italian town in the early 1900s. With terrible consequences for poor Jack...

* AfterlifeAvenger: Oswald’s last moments are spent bragging about how he will chase his victim in hell.

* AndIMustScream: Goes hand in hand with FateWorseThanDeath below. In a world where people can't die, paralyzing injuries just got a whole lot worse.

* AndStarring: For Bill Pullman.

* BadassBureaucrat: As of episode nine, Esther's skills at intelligence analysis qualify as this.

* BelligerentSexualTension: Rex and Vera's relationship would be a textbook example.
* BigBad: The Three Families.

* BlessedWithSuck: The whole world.

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: The whole premise. Everlasting life for a planet of 5 billion people has terrible consequences.

''Torchwood: Miracle Day'' is the fourth series of ''Series/{{Torchwood}}'', which began airing on Starz on July 8, 2011. It's a ten-part miniseries, similar to ''[[Series/TorchwoodChildrenOfEarth Children of Earth]]'' in tone. The storyline is a [[Creator/TheBBC BBC America]] / Starz co-production that's set in both Britain and America.

** ''Ahistory: An Unofficial Chronology of Doctor Who'' manages to create a sizable gap between "Night Terrors" and "Closing Time" such that no ''Doctor Who'' episodes took place during the Miracle. It's still weird that nobody ever refers to it again, but ''Doctor Who'' is ''full'' of things like that which nobody ever refers to again. It doesn't matter how many times the Daleks invade present-day Earth, the next companion will never have heard of them before.

* AnyoneCanDie: Proudly retains this trait.
** Some of them like [[spoiler:Rex]] do it thrice.
** This trope is especially impressive given that part of the premise is that no one can die.

* ArtisticLicenseEconomics: Connected to WritersCannotDoMath below, four months is far too fast for global recession to settle in due to mounting pension payments with nobody dying. Consider also that the most economically influential countries already have low death rate, so the Miracle would have the least impact there.

* RealityEnsues: The whole premise. Everlasting life for a planet of 5 billion people has terrible consequences.

In a bit of a role reversal from previous airing schedules of both ''Doctor Who'' and ''Torchwood'', The American channel Starz aired the episodes first on fridays, and then aired in Britain the following thursday, six days later (with Canada and Australia airing them in-between). The episodes finally landed on BBC America several years later.

->''"Meet Oswald Danes. Teacher. Or, rather, '''was'''. Now he's a prisoner, for raping and murdering a 12-year-old girl, and when asked about his crime only said: "She should've run faster."''

->''The death penalty is a charged topic, a question of whether it is justice or vengeance, whether or not it is wrong for the state to have the power to take a life, whether it is a punishment unfairly used, or better than they deserve. It is a question that causes much debate.''

->''And yet in the case of Oswald Danes, there was no one at the prison to protest his execution. No one wants to stand by a man who abused the trust placed in him, performed so immoral an act, and then snuffed out a life [when] it barely had time to take in the potential of this world. Oswald Danes is a reminder of the words of Millaud when voting on the fate of King Louis XVI: "Today, if death did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it."''

->''[...] Today is the day that death does not exist.''

->''Today is Miracle Day''."
-->-- '''[[Website/SFDebris Chuck Sonnenburg]]''', [[https://sfdebris.com/videos/tv/miracleday.php Torchwood: Miracle day review part 1]].

* CanonDiscontinuity: It's quite hard to fit the events of this series into the main timeline of ''Doctor Who''. And while it's never explicitly mentioned when Miracle day events start and end (the whole series is in the span of about 6-8 months), you have to wonder that, considering the global catastrophe, the rush for medicine and the whole '''not dying''' that happens during the whole series, how future companions like Oswald, Bill, Yaz, Ryan and Graham seemingly forget about the events of ''Miracle Day''. This has lead ''Miracle Day'', and even Torchwood in general after 2011, being in one hell of a ContinuitySnarl. The episode [[Recap/DoctorWhoS38E1E2Spyfall Spyfall]] makes a passing reference to the team being disbanded, but again, no allusions to the events from either ''Children of Earth'' or ''Miracle Day'' were given, so the canonicity of Miracle Day is completely ambiguous. Some fans [[FanonDiscontinuity prefer it this way]], of course.

** ''Ahistory: An Unofficial Chronology of Doctor Who'' manages to create a sizable gap between "Night Terrors" and "Closing Time" such that no ''Doctor Who'' episodes took place during the Miracle. It's still weird that nobody ever refers to it again, but ''Doctor Who'' is ''full'' of things like that which nobody ever refers to again, and in many cases appear to suffer collective amnesia about less than a year later.

* SeparatedByACommonLanguage: Esther annoys Gwen by pointing out the minor differences in American and British vocabulary, like crisps/chips.

->''"Meet Oswald Danes. Teacher. Or, rather, '''was'''. Now he's a prisoner, for raping and murdering a 12-year-old girl, and when asked about his crime only said: "She should've run faster."''\\\

''The death penalty is a charged topic, a question of whether it is justice or vengeance, whether or not it is wrong for the state to have the power to take a life, whether it is a punishment unfairly used, or better than they deserve. It is a question that causes much debate.''\\\

''And yet in the case of Oswald Danes, there was no one at the prison to protest his execution. No one wants to stand by a man who abused the trust placed in him, performed so immoral an act, and then snuffed out a life [when] it barely had time to take in the potential of this world. Oswald Danes is a reminder of the words of Millaud when voting on the fate of King Louis XVI: "Today, if death did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it."''\\\

''[...] Today is the day that death does not exist.''\\\

''Today is Miracle Day''."

->''"Meet Oswald Danes. Teacher. Or, rather, '''was'''. Now he's a prisoner, for raping and murdering a 12-year-old girl, and when asked about his crime only said: "She should've run faster."''

->''The death penalty is a charged topic, a question of whether it is justice or vengeance, whether or not it is wrong for the state to have the power to take a life, whether it is a punishment unfairly used, or better than they deserve. It is a question that causes much debate.''

->''And yet in the case of Oswald Danes, there was no one at the prison to protest his execution. No one wants to stand by a man who abused the trust placed in him, performed so immoral an act, and then snuffed out a life [when] it barely had time to take in the potential of this world. Oswald Danes is a reminder of the words of Millaud when voting on the fate of King Louis XVI: "Today, if death did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it."''

->''[...] Today is the day that death does not exist.''

->''Today is Miracle Day''."

** In a perhaps more literal example of this, [[spoiler: an assassin gets shot right in the throat. Right before he was about to reveal his employer, too]].

* BigNo: [[spoiler: Rex after Esther is shot in the final episode. Gwen also gives a variant later in the same episode when Rex is shot.]]
* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler: Despite the Families surviving to plot another day, the world is back to normal after the nightmare that was the miracle, Torchwood is back, TheMole was shot to death and rather than die Rex is now immortal, though only time will tell if that's a good thing or not. But Esther and Vera are dead, along with Gwen's dad.]]

* BookEnds: [[spoiler: Oswald Danes dies.]]
** And in a smaller example, both the first and last episodes involve, at some point, a suicide bomber -- the Mook assassin in "The New World" and [[spoiler: Oswald]] in "The Blood Line".

** [[spoiler: Rex survives what should be certain death]]

* CallBack: Jack directly compares himself to the Doctor, and takes on human companions. [[spoiler: He also admits that they 'kill him', just as his role model once said.]]

* ChekhovsGunman: In the first couple of episodes, we meet a few of Esther's CIA Watch coworkers. In Episode 8, [[spoiler: one of them is revealed to be a [[TheMole mole]] for the Families]].

* DisneyVillainDeath: [[spoiler: One of the Family leaders is thrown into the heart of the Blessing once death comes back. Nobody knows whether that kills you or not, but it's probably not comfortable either way.]]

* DoomedMoralVictor: Or Doomed Immoral Victor anyway. [[spoiler: Oswald Danes blows himself up to bury the Blessing and kill a Family leader. He still reckons he's going to Hell for his crimes, but views this as a victory because Hell is full of bad little girls...]]

** In a straight example, Stuart Owens asks a friend to investigate a construction site bought by [=PhiCorp=]; he finds [[spoiler: The Blessing, which is in a chasm underground between Buenos Aires and Shanghai that causes people to discover their true selves.]] It drives him to jump from a height guaranteed to render him Category 1.

* EldritchAbomination: [[spoiler: The Blessing turns out to be a beneficial version of this, living in symbiosis with the human race.]]

** [[spoiler: Ellis Hartley Monroe gets sent through a car crusher. We get a quick shot of her inside the wreckage.]] [[AndIMustScream She'll be there a very long time]].

** Everyone who is Category 1 gets [[spoiler: burned alive]]. One can only hope such a fate is the exception to the rule.

* FlatWhat: Everyone's reaction to [[spoiler: Rex being immortal]] at the end of the last episode.

* FriendOrIdolDecision: For the Torchwood team, the friend is [[spoiler: Esther]] and the idol is [[spoiler: mortality]]. They choose [[spoiler: the idol.]]

* {{Hypocrite}}: Rex bites Esther's head off for [[spoiler: visiting her sister's house and being made by a hitman]] when he [[spoiler:visited his dad while they're in Venice Beach and could have compromised them as well had Esther not already done so.]] Since nobody knows what Rex did, he can continue acting smug towards Esther without her realizing his hypocrisy. Also, to be fair, Rex is trained in that sort of thing and Ester isn't.
* IdiotBall: Esther, [[spoiler: whilst being chased by the CIA, goes to visit her sister. Since her sister is now a paranoid shut-in and has boarded all her windows up, she phones child services, saying that they are in danger. She is then shocked to find out the children have been taken into foster care. Visiting her sister also leads a hitman to their new hideout, nearly getting Jack and Gwen killed/would-be-killed.]] She later redeems herself, in spades.

* KillTheOnesYouLove: Gwen ''technically'' kills [[spoiler: her father, Esther and (temporarily) Jack and Rex]], as the Families are quick to point out to her.

-->'''Stuart Owens:''' You think I'm the epitome of evil. The devil in a three-piece suit.
-->'''Captain Jack:''' [[TaughtByExperience In my experience, that's how it normally works.]]

* ANaziByAnyOtherName: Basically what every government in the world utilising overflow camps becomes, [[spoiler: since Category 1 inmates are sent into 'the module', death chambers where they are incinerated alive.]]

** Although she's not mentioned by name, the ''entire'' Miracle was indirectly caused by [[spoiler: Rose resurrecting Jack and making him immortal]].

** A more literal example from Shapiro and his CIA buddies when they realise TheMole is [[spoiler: Charlotte]]... and has left them [[SomebodySetUpUsTheBomb a package.]]
-->'''Shapiro:''' ''[stares at computer screen, then looks up to see the bag right next to him.]'' "Oh '''fuck'''!"

-->Officer #1: "No hits to the face. Gotta keep him pretty for the cameras."
-->Officer #2: "[[IronicEcho Should've run faster, Oswald!]]"

--> Lyn: If you're the best England has to offer, then God help you.
--> Gwen: I'm Welsh.
* PreMortemOneLiner: "Hey, guess what? ''[[spoiler: [[PrepareToDie Death came back.]]'']]"

* RedemptionEqualsDeath: [[spoiler: Averted with Oswald Danes. Sure, he DIES at the end, and takes a leader of the conspirators with him, but that's because he's angry with them for using him and planning to literally incinerate him while alive (and UNABLE TO DIE). Made even worse because he wanted to embrace death so he could continue to molest his victim.]]

* SequelHook: [[spoiler: Jilly gets an invite to work for the Families directly, the Blue-Eyed Man says they have a Plan B, and Rex is now immortal]].

* TakingYouWithMe: [[spoiler: Oswald]].

* TooDumbToLive: Noah tells Charlotte that he can find TheMole. [[spoiler: ''She's'' the mole.]]

** Plus, Jack's speech at [[spoiler: Angelo's deathbed]] makes it pretty clear he still loves [[spoiler: Ianto, and isn't over his death at all.]]