Torchwood: Miracle Day/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

*** Presumably the bomber's intention was to blow himself into so many bits that not even the miracle could save him. Which brings up another question: why ''wasn't'' he blown to bits?

**** Yeah that was incendiary damage, not high explosive as depicted. Incendiary makes no sense, then again, all explosions are inexplicably slow-moving fireballs in almost all all TV/movie. But it all falls under [[Rule of Cool]]. The vivisectionautopsy was one of the most awesome parts of the series here, and it required this, so I can let it go. The part which confuses me is how you "pay" any Henchmen Mook to be a suicide bomber. You can't! Henchmen Mooks don't DO that. Only fanatic cultist-type Mooks would do that, you can't hire a person to gleefully blow himself up, he was shot but he knew it wouldn't be fatal. Will that ever be a part of the story, or just a broken premise in the writing?

* When they meet at Gwen's house, Rex recognizes Jack as the man who sat next to him on the flight from DC. Why didn't he recognize him as the man flashing a badge during the "autopsy" he watched over the hospital surveillance cam?

** I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Jack was just out of view of the camera for the entire duration of the, erm... autopsy.

***** Even properly reinforced equipment has a breaking point, and it seems possible that Danes (on account of his body not wanting to die) simply tipped the breaking point. Granted, it probably ''should'' be stronger (those sorts of convulsions aren't unheard of in lethal injections where the paralytic chemicals simply fail to work, though they're rarely that strong)...either the State of Kentucky or Russel Davies had a cut budget on that equipment, it seems.

* So, what ''is'' the timescale of the series? I can't tell if it's set over a two weeks or two months; there are some cases of obvious time passage (driving across the US or the rally being "in a week"), but the general timescale is uncertain.

** OK, get this. The START of each episode displays the world population statistic increasing out of control. I thought "hey we could take today's population (or wasn't there a figure in Episode 1 or 2?) and the statistic for birth rates and estimate time". But I'm freeze-framing on Episode 9's opening and I see "6,928,198,344". Well, in real life, the world population today is 6,960,048,912. It's supposed to be set in present-day, but there's FEWER people than there really are, not more.

** The scrolling number in the opening sequence is the same in every episode.

*** While Vera said that she designed category one to mean brain-dead, it's really being defined as anyone who loses consciousness or should otherwise be dead. And even IF more space was needed, burning people who "should" have died but didn't - and so are perfectly alive and conscious - is going to be a horrible, horrible thing. And most of the category one people aren't the ones who have lost brain function, as that only seems to come from wounds that would hurt brain function in the real world.

*** The thing is, the very reason they are against this in-story - the 'vague' and extra Categories - are being DELIBERATELY MANIPULATED by people who expressly WANT to control life and death. If the Families weren't in control, there's no in-story reason to believe that the original categories as defined by Vera and her colleagues wouldn't have been used - the one that explicitly states that Category 1's must be brain dead and unconscious - and that Category 0 would exist solely to continue the death penalty. As the OP stated, there's no reason to object to people who are brain-dead, unconscious, AND beyond recovery being burned given their condition and the danger they pose. And it would be redundant to be against the burning of death row inmates (except maybe as cruel and unusual punishment). As for people like Maloney, you can't stop murder, ovens or no ovens.

*** Part of the problem with the writers is, as far as I can tell, they push this to an extreme to the point that it breaks a willing suspension of disbelief. Yes, I can accept that a lot of people will go along with orders...but sooner or later you're going to get a spate of suicides and/or fraggings as a result of this sort of a setup. In short, the problem is that apparently ''nobody'' objects, blows the whistle, or even gets irritated enough with a supervisor to try and humiliate them...something that I can't quite buy. Humans, being bastards, will do this sort of thing when it only serves their own interests even if the overall program they're objecting to seems to serve the public good. Moreover, it would seem that Torchwood could get farther if Captain Jack actually put some energy into hitting on a bored civil rights lawyer with some experience in forum-shopping than smacking the ass of every waiter or cabin attendant he came across. It would ''not'' be hard to bottle up most of the categorizations in reams and reams of legal challenges (particularly after the leak). Frankly, that would have made for far better plotting than the last episode...

**** Hindering the camps, the burning, etc. doesn't address the problem, only its symptoms. The Miracle is what they need to get rid of. They investigated the camps because they needed info on what Phicorp was up to. Now they know, so they move on to the next lead.

*** Regarding how he knows how long he was buried, he was actually told the date just before being put in the hole. He then woke up in the present, so he could do the maths.

** I'm mostly confused at his 'about 700 years' comment; either

*** The coat question is interesting. Jack ''didn't'' have the coat when he first ended up in the 19th century (as he was in black leather when the Daleks killed him in the future), nor did he have it when Torchwood first recruited him in 1892, or when he was in India in 1911, so he picked it up sometime between 1911 and 1927. The US Army Air Corps had only been established in 1926 and I don't believe they'd started issuing trenchcoats in that style yet, so it's likely that Jack had his coat custom-made. This ''could'' explain why it didn't decay when he was buried alive for 2000 years - perhaps it's made from super-secret Torchwood cloth?

**** Why would he be wearing a USAAC uniform when he's been posing as an RAF officer?

* Why didn't it occur to anyone in-story that Jack's blood might have lasting effects on Rex? They all just seem way too surprised at a very obvious plot twist.

** Jack has been quite insistent that his blood has ''nothing to do'' with his immortality, which it doesn't. Jack is immortal because a teenage chavette turned herself into a god of time and imbued him with energies that turned him into a fixed point in time, and under normal circumstances this is ''not'' a communicable condition. None of the non-Family characters know enough about the Blessing to surmise that the fact that Rex had mortal blood in him at the time the Miracle ended would result in him gaining Jack's immortality. In any event, how would you ''test'' the proposition that someone has become immortal, without killing them in the event that you're wrong?

*** His blood wasn't SUPPOSED to be "special", but then blood taken in 1927 should be long dried-up by now! If it WAS immortal blood that didn't spoil, then it would have turned mortal and spoiled once The Miracle depowered Jack. The blood Rex used was what Esther was taking from Jack post-miracle- which would need to be carefully refrigerated, and the odd thing is, while de-immortalized, Jack wouldn't be able to PRODUCE more than one or two pints in a reasonable timeframe without being weakened. They've got an entire suitcase full, and Rex seems to have gallons of it in the climax.

**** Esther had been taking Jack's blood for the whole six-month period time jump a few episodes back, that's why they had a truckload of it.