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"Jane Espenson is no stranger to the world of cult and sci-fi - the award-winning scribe has written for the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica and also co-created Syfy&amp;#039;s Warehouse 13. Jane&amp;#039;s latest assignment finds her working on ten-part drama Torchwood: Miracle Day - she wrote both the third and fifth episodes solo, and teamed up with Ryan Scott for episode eight, plus Torchwood creator Russell T Davies for the season finale. At this year&amp;#039;s Comic-Con in San Diego, Digital Spy caught up with Jane to ask her how it felt to enter the world of Torchwood. Were you a fan of Torchwood or did you have to catch up? &amp;quot;Both! I had watched the James Marsters episodes, cos he was Spike [on Buffy] and I had just started watching other episodes of it, and then I got the call. Then I watched everything, and wondered why I wasn&amp;#039;t watching everything from the beginning. It&amp;#039;s amazing, it&amp;#039;s the best.&amp;quot;  What was most exciting about writing in the Torchwood world? &amp;quot;The hugeness of it. The enormity of this story. We&amp;#039;re actual saying, &amp;#039;This isn&amp;#039;t an event that affects [just] our characters, this is an event that affects our characters and everyone else&amp;#039;. That&amp;#039;s huge. Normally you have characters moving through the world in a certain way. Now you have characters moving through the world, and the world is [also] moving! You&amp;#039;re on a conveyor belt that&amp;#039;s on top of a train - it&amp;#039;s moving fast, and then you&amp;#039;re moving faster on top of it. It&amp;#039;s very complicated! But that was so much fun - the complexity of it [and] the &amp;#039;bigness&amp;#039; of the ideas.&amp;quot; How was the experience of working with showrunner Russell T Davies? &amp;quot;He could not be more generous. You never had the sense of him being too protective of the product. He is one of the very few showrunners I&amp;#039;ve ever had who sends you to write and says, &amp;#039;Surprise me. If you find something better than what we came up with in the writers&amp;#039; room [or] if you have a better idea than the one I had, go for it&amp;#039;. And then he doesn&amp;#039;t punish you for it. When he comes in, he&amp;#039;s like &amp;#039;Oh this is great, this is better than what I had, you wrote this better than I could have&amp;#039;. It&amp;#039;s not true - I could never write it better than he could!&amp;quot;  Which ideas did you contribute? &amp;quot;In episode three, that middle-of-the-night Jack and Gwen phone call was down in the [plot breakdown], that was something I added. I was like, &amp;#039;They haven&amp;#039;t had a chance to really talk through all these resentments and fears and [the death of] Ianto [so] I want to put that in there&amp;#039;. Russell read it and was cool enough to say, &amp;#039;Yes, this belongs in this episode&amp;#039;.&amp;quot; How did you find writing for Welsh characters? &amp;quot;Writing the Welsh voices was the joy of my life! I was a linguist, I studied language, so to sit down and try a little Welsh sentence structure [was great]. Trying to write that down was so much fun. In the first script where I tried it, it was embarrassingly bad. Russell was like, &amp;#039;UK people don&amp;#039;t talk like that, that&amp;#039;s American&amp;#039; and I said, &amp;#039;No, it&amp;#039;s not American either&amp;#039; because that was me trying to write Welsh. I don&amp;#039;t know what I ended up with! But I found my way through it and I loved it. I loved all the culture clash stuff, a lot of which just came from the writers&amp;#039; room. I kept turning down snacks because my pants were getting tight, and I only found out afterwards that pants means underpants [in the UK]. So this whole time, they thought I was complaining about tight underpants! [The characters] were dealing with the same things we were dealing with.&amp;quot;  Which character did you enjoy writing the most? &amp;quot;Rex is fun, cos he&amp;#039;s so outrageous and he&amp;#039;s so often wrong. He&amp;#039;s confident and wrong, which is a fun combination. Anya [from Buffy] always had that. I liked Esther, because she was most like me. She&amp;#039;s a linguist, she has my exact education. We wrote up what her college experience would be, and we ended up just putting my college experience down! But Gwen is the most fun. Well\u2026 and Jack. But then, Oswald and Jilly. Jilly&amp;#039;s great. She&amp;#039;s a scene-stealer who uses her klutziness to both draw attention to herself and divert attention from her agenda. That&amp;#039;s good writing, and Lauren is unbeatable.&amp;quot; Will Jilly cross paths with the Torchwood team? &amp;quot;Those two storylines are on a collision course, and, yeah, they will meet. There&amp;#039;s a Gwen moment with her that you will enjoy!&amp;quot; Torchwood has become less outlandish - do you think the show will focus more on the supernatural, aliens and so on in the future? &amp;quot;Well, this could go supernatural, you don&amp;#039;t know. But I do think Torchwood is going to stay in the realm of the political thriller, in the way that Children of Earth established, and this is continuing. Yes, there&amp;#039;s supernatural causes [for the storyline] but the effect of those causes is to create a political thriller, on Earth. I like that a lot. In Children of Earth, you were going into the halls of power, and in Miracle Day, you go behind the scenes of the medical establishment. I love that. I don&amp;#039;t know what the next season will be, if there is one, but I think it will retain that same feeling. It&amp;#039;s a real world, it&amp;#039;s a political world, and it&amp;#039;s just that something supernatural has happened that&amp;#039;s making us look at those worlds with different eyes.&amp;quot;  You&amp;#039;ve written for so many great shows - will you be launching your own series? &amp;quot;Yes, I&amp;#039;m writing a web-series called Husbands that is my own. I financed it from my own pocket [and it&amp;#039;s] my own idea. I&amp;#039;ve got a co-writer but [it&amp;#039;s] my first project that I really feel is mine from the ground up. It&amp;#039;s got no genre element, unless gay marriage is genre! Wait, here&amp;#039;s the science-fiction aspect - Zoe from Caprica (actress Alessandra Torresani) is one of the stars.&amp;quot; And having written for Torchwood, would you consider writing for Doctor Who? &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m still learning Doctor Who, but what the heck, why not? I would love to. It&amp;#039;s a great show [and] what I&amp;#039;ve seen, I&amp;#039;ve loved. It&amp;#039;s classy, it&amp;#039;s beloved and why not collect them all? I would love it.&amp;quot; Torchwood: Miracle Day continues on Fridays at 9/8c on Starz in the US and on Thursdays at 9pm on BBC One in the UK. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/torchwood/interviews/a332311/torchwood-miracle-day-jane-espenson-interview-writing-welsh-voices-was-a-joy/>