YMMV / Torchwood: Miracle Day

• Broken Base: Some Torchwood fans really dislike it, especially the US influence. Others feel the American characters are better-written than Jack, Gwen, and Rhys. Others feel it was a great idea that was stretched out too long and not handled well and lacked the dramatic strength of Torchwood: Children of Earth to keep the audience enthralled, as shown by the massive drop in ratings about half-way through.
• Complete Monster: Oswald Danes is a former teacher who secretly molested several of his students. He is first seen—saying his victim should have run faster—on death row for the murder of one of said students, who was 12 years old. When the execution fails, Danes, using legal loopholes to be released from prison, takes Jill's offer to be the face of Miracle Day, which he revels in the attention of. When Jill reveals they plan to abandon him when he is of no more use, Danes batters her, then runs away. Danes heads to Wales and joins up with Torchwood. His last moments are spent bragging about how he will chase his student in hell, while he blows himself up along with the Mother.
• Creepy Awesome: The assassin in episode 4 gets some nice snarking in-between his Just Between You and Me moments.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Shapiro.
  • The Mother of the Families is a definite example. A stylish, elegant older lady in a fine, grey tweed dress and high heels.
• Fan Nickname: "The Triangle", because of the revolving triangle that appears on the cellphones of their lackeys. Those who have read the brief Starz synopses for later episodes knew they were called the Three Families, however.
• Faux Symbolism: The last episode. Sacrificing yourself to save humanity? Check. The blood of Jack being spilled is the key? Check. Crucified Hero Shot? Check. Resurrection? Check. And, it's taken Up To Two.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The season presents death as being not only a natural part of life, but also an important one — and in some cases preferable to prolonging an existence mired in agony. Russell T Davies's partner was diagnosed with a brain tumor in the middle of production, placing his life in serious jeopardy and requiring Davies to abandon the series midway through.
• Mis-blamed: With Russell T Davies being a well-known proponent of Writing by the Seat of Your Pants, he ended up picking up a fair bit of heat for most of the season's plot developments either going nowhere or being wrapped up in a rushed and arbitrary fashion, along with accusations that he never bothered coming up with any sort of a plan for the season. This overlooks the Executive Meddling that saw the season end up being twice as long as Davies wanted it to be, and more pertinently, the fact that Davies wasn't actually showrunner for the whole season — he had to drop out halfway through after his partner was diagnosed with cancer, leading to Jane Espenson taking over the role for the remainder of the season. Whatever opinion one may have on how satisfactorily the season handled its plot arc, it's to the credit of both Davies and Espenson that it came to any form of coherent conclusion.
• Moral Event Horizon: Colin Maloney, the guy running one of the overflow camps in episode 5. He cuts corners to save money and leaving treatable people in pain simply because they don't have insurance is bad enough, but that's only enough to classify him as a corrupt Obstructive Bureaucrat. He crosses the line by shooting Dr. Juarez to keep her from ratting him out, and then sticking her in an incinerator with the Category 1s. Then Rex comes in and gets caught, threatening to do the same if arrested, so Maloney tries to jam a pen in his heart. Then he tries to kill Esther, but thankfully she got away thanks to his accomplice finally remembering his conscience.
• Padding: You can really tell at times that they didn't quite have enough story for ten episodes. The series was originally conceived as a 5 or 6 episodes long miniseries like Children of Earth, but the American Networks lobbied for 13-episodes so that the series can fill out the entire summer. In the end, ten episodes was settled on as a compromise. In particular, you could lose most of episode 3 with no problems.
• Seasonal Rot: Debatable but widely considered this for Torchwood, with dropping ratings and more mixed reviews than Children of Earth.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • Our heroes are horrified to discover that the governments are planning to warehouse "category 1s" and ultimately burn them, and go to extraordinary efforts to stop the process, but... what exactly is the correct response to the situation the world finds itself in? With an increasing number of increasingly decrepit non-dying bodies, acting as breeding grounds for disease, and the numbers of them will grow with literally no end in sight, what were the governments supposed to do? Something of this nature would have to be done eventually, there's just no way around it. (Well, unless someone stops the Miracle, of course, but there's not a shred of evidence that anyone other than our heroes has any leads on that. They only get their leads because people start trying to kill them! Nobody else would have had any starting place at all.)
  • The series makes fun of two groups of people while also unintentionally having the plot and mechanics of the world prove them right. One episode makes a jab at Catholic pro-life beliefs, but, at least according to the Miracle's rules for who isn't allowed to die, life does begin at conception. Meanwhile, a member of the tea party is depicted as a fringe lunatic, but later in the series the way the government-run hospitals take care of the would-be dead and dying reads almost exactly like the harshest right wing critiques of socialized medicine, including actual literal "death panels".
• Too Cool to Live: Probably a norm for Torchwood, but special mention can be given to Shapiro.
• Unfortunate Character Design: The Blessing is pinkish-red and vaguely muscular. Many fans thought it looked a lot like a vagina.

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