Pragmatism, Torchwood Friday, April 2, 2010

Great moment from the fourth episode in the five-part Torchwood: Children of Earth. Spoilers ahead.

During the credits, the immortal but all-too-human character Captain Jack Harkness used to repeat the very X-Files-y mission statement of the Torchwood organization: it goes something like, "we're joining together to fight the future." I'm apprehensive about the future, sure, but I consider myself on the side of those trying to pry it out with the Jaws of Life, not kick its face while it's stuck in the overturned car. Yet! It's refreshing to hear someone express their anti-modernism so plainly. As Cindy Adams says, only in science fiction, kids. At some point, someone thought that was a little too on-the-nose and cut it, but the sentiment remains crucial to the show.

Torchwood futures are to be fought, for sure--they are sticky and drooling and overpowered and weird-- but they're also terribly seductive. In the first few episodes of Torchwood's run it featured an elixir to control the minds of the opposite sex, a game controller that could talk to ghosts and a lovingly murderous robotic ex-girlfriend. In fact, sex comes up a lot. Alien technology is fun in Torchwood's world, even if it may blow up the world, or the galactic center, or what have you. Normally I dislike the just-for-laffs yardstick most reviewers use to judge SF (the best hilarity is performed with a straight face), but Torchwood seemed to do a great job of mixing seriousness and playfulness in a way that reminded me of Buffy.

Then the third season's Children of Earth came along, and things got grim, grim, grim. No more fun with toys.

Fortunately, things aren't Battlestar Galactica grim. No one is yoinking at their hair and doing actorly jazz hands while crying. The scene I'm thinking of in particular features a group of pressed-shirt government middle managers who've been given an ultimatum by a collection of literally multiheaded intergalactic businessmen whose principle export is children, which children are in turn hooked up to giant plungers and sold as a type of drug. The ultimatum is: give us ten per cent of your children or we'll gas the Earth and everyone on it.

The pressed shirts very calmly weigh their options. Do we fight? We're not sure how. So we give them the children. How do we choose them? By lottery, someone suggests. And so they begin the process of organizing the drawing of straws. Someone pipes up, softly at first, then more assertively: she says, not my children. Every mother and father around the table seconds the notion. Of course, there will be provisions made for our families, of that there can be no doubt, says the round-table leader. There's a clearing of throats, and everyone gets back to the drawing of straws. the woman who was quiet at first speaks up again. She says, let's just say it. Given that we're protecting our own children, how can we not protect those children who are most useful to society? Shouldn't we take from that portion of society that will grow up in unemployment and poverty, that'll tax the state disproportionately? There's more clearing of throats, a few weak protests, but the motion is passed.

Nothing I've read in the Critical Theory section of the bookstore has shaken my faith in pragmatism more than this quiet, tense little performance.