Torchwood...

[Lord Jim]

I have mixed feelings about Torchwood...

Some episodes seem interesting; others rather silly...

But Torchwood 3 raises very interesting philosophical questions...

The woman who argues that if we must sacrifice 10 per cent of the children on the planet in order to save the entire planet that we should provide the lowest 10%..

the 10% that are least likely to amount to any thing...

That approach would be very attractive to me, since the odds that my children would be in the bottom 10% would be very unlikely...

But that still wouldn't make it right...

[Gob]

What "bottom 10%"? Intellect? Physicality? Gene type?

[Lord Jim]

"The first responsibility is to protect the best interest of this country, right? Then let's say it: in a national emergency a country must plan for the future. And discriminate between those who are vital to continued stability and - those who are not. And now that we've established that our kids are exempt the whole principle of random selection is dead in the water anyway. - Let me finish!

Now look: on the one hand we've got the good schools and I don't just mean those producing graduates. I mean the people who will go on to staff our hospitals, our offices, our factories; the work force of the future. We need them. Accepted, yes? So: set against that, you got the failing schools, full of the less able, the less socially useful, those destined to spend a lifetime on benefits occupying places on the dole queue and, frankly, the prisons.

Now look, should we treat them equally? - God knows we've tried and we failed, and now the time has come to choose. And if we can't identify the lowest achieving ten percent of this country's children, then what are the school league tables for? "

[Daisy]

Ah Torchwood, no mixed feelings for me on this series, I loved it. Even the mental "Miracle Day" upon rewatching had it's brilliance ... it's a shame the cause and denoument were a bit lacking, but again that raised a bunch of interesting ethical questions.

But back to Children of Earth

There's no nice way of choosing 10% of the children but picking just the low achievers seems unfair.

So back to the ballot, which was dismissed by the politicians and civil servants because it might affect THEIR children, well boo fucking hoo, The 456 are going to wipe out humankind, everyone has to take their share of the burden.

However how about, the ballot should eliminate only children, and not take all the children of any family.

[Crackpot]

You mean you wouldn't use it as an excuse to rid the world of the Kardashians?

[Daisy]

The 456 would probably spit em out!

[Rick]

How hard could it be The 456 were druggies where would you start taking the 10%?

[liberty]

Didn’t this arise during the early days of Nazi Germany concerning the mentally ill and mentally handicapped.

[Big RR]

And the jews?

That's the problem, the least desirables can't be plotted out on a graph and selected without a lot of preconceived notions/prejudices coming into play. And so we would select our pet undesirables to "sacrifice" for the greater good. But even more to the point, what kind of humans would we be to serve up our children to appease the demands of something/someone in power (I haven't seen the show but I'm assuming that's what happened)? They did that in the Warsaw ghetto, and many say they lost their souls that day.

[Daisy]

The choice The 456 gave was 10% of your children to be used as recreational drugs or we wipe out the whole of mankind.

What would you choose, and if you chose to comply with the demands of The 456 how would you pick the 10%

[Gob]

465?

[Lord Jim]

That's what the aliens in that series are called.

ETA:

Actually it's "The 456"....

[MajGenl.Meade]

The choice The 456 gave was 10% of your children to be used as recreational drugs or we wipe out the whole of mankind.

The premise is ridiculous. As every fule no, children are just the gateway drug. Before long these 456 losers will be toking teenagers and then sniffing the homeless. Eventually it leads to synthetic substance abuse such as Crystal Manning (who admittedly was a bit smokin') and finally all would-be heroines are injected until there are no women left to have babies. Cold turkey for those off-worlders at that point, I'd say

[Rick]

I was going to post all that but I thought it banal...

[Lord Jim]

The final episode of Children of Earth has really got some dark and disturbing scenes...(though at the end they do stop the mass transport, but not before some really awful things happen...)

Yesterday we watched the first episode of Miracle Day...(It just started running this past weekend on BBC America)

Loved this quote:

Rex: And what the hell is this bridge? Severn Bridge?
Esther: It connects England to Wales.
Rex: What, you mean Wales is separate? It's like the British equivalent of New Jersey.

[Daisy]

Still not over them killing Ianto Jones off :'(

[Lord Jim]

That was pretty bad...

I also didn't like Jack's grand son dying at the end...(I was thinking that maybe since he was one quarter immortal person that he might be strong enough to survive)

Also the scenes where the military was rounding up the kids were chillingly realistic...(some of the best group scene child acting that I've seen since The Birds)

But the scene that got me the most was when Frobisher (Peter Capaldi, the next Dr. Who) killed his kids, his wife and himself. (Even though they didn't actually show it)

I did not see that coming...

I had guessed that what he had requisitioned was a gun, but I thought that what he might do was kill himself in front of the press at his house rather than turn over his kids...(what he should have done was take the gun and blow away that slimeball Prime Minister)

Obviously he did what he did to save them from a fate worse than death, but what made it doubly awful was that as it turned out, it was unnecessary....

When they killed off Jack's grandson and Frobisher's daughters they broke a television convention that is not often broken; that you don't kill off kids who you've given fully developed, likeable personalities to....

[Lord Jim]

The problem I have with Torchwood, is that the producers, writers and directors can't seem to decide whether they want it to be a dark Steven King type horror-drama or a campy wise cracking sci-fi show...(Unlike Dr. Who, which is clearly a campy wise cracking sci fi show with an occasional dark moment...)

So they've decided to try to make it both, and that really creates some cognitive dissonance issues for the viewer...

[Gob]

Only if you're daft enough to watch it.....

[Daisy]

It's one of the few programmes that has made me think "Cardiff, not such a shithole after all" except for that episode based in Splott