Torchwood: Miracle Day/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

**** Being charitable, as of episode 6 it seems that Davies might have simply ported the idea of parliamentary supremacy (the idea that Congressional authorization makes everything alright, for example) into the US (never mind that the ECHR and the Law Lords/UK Supreme Court can still interfere at times). That said, the fact that the news stories mention outrage but no lawsuits seems suspect. After all, even FDR got sued over the Japanese internment camps (Korematsu) and the execution of Nazi spies.

**** Theoretically, the act of Congress that authorized the camps could also have indemnified the operators of the camps from any suits alleging misconduct or mismanagement. It's been done before - for example, you can't sue a gun manufacturer if a weapon they made is used to commit a crime. That being said, look at how many lawsuits have been made after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and how many wildly differing court rulings have ensued so far - it's a safe bet that nothing short of outright amending the Constitution would be sufficient to block a civil rights challenge, and that's just not the sort of thing that can be accomplished offscreen in a couple days time.

***** On the piles of lawsuits, Categoty Zero seems to open up all sorts of secondary headaches: Its basis requires the underlying category system to be valid (questionable at best) ''and'' for the new category not to qualify as an ex post facto law. Even if that is allowed to stand, the ''years'' of fighting over this as things snake through the courts would be impressive. On top of that, even assuming that it ''is'' allowable as such, putting people in the ovens for "moral reasons" wouldn't stand up to any sort of legal scrutiny unless it is ''very'' well-defined.

* During Miracle Day, what would happen to someone if a person ate them completely, bones and all?

*** 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.

** Dunno, go ask Owen? This troper is hoping that gets addressed tho, it'd be cool.

** The most likely explanation for this form of immortality is that cells cannot undergo necrosis. AFAIK necrosis occurs because a cell cannot maintain its cell wall, or the cell walls of its lysosomes (full of acid). Part of being unable to undergo necrosis means that the cells are given free energy to convert carbon dioxide back into oxygen, and reversing any other usually one way chemical reactions. Programmed cell death (apoptosis) can still occur otherwise everyone would have all sorts of issues (fetal development would not work right). I believe that cells can still undergo forceful destruction. If I throw a cell into a plasma furnace or into the sun, the molecules making it up would break apart. Also a person's consciousness can die, even if every cell making up the person is still alive. If I take every one of your cells and spread them out across a field, are you still alive? I can't reconstruct your brain, even if I had every cell back again. Some characters act differently though, like being crushed in a car and still conscious. The neurons in the brain would not be able to communicate properly, thus she would be at least, braindead.

* I'm [[Not That Kind of Doctor]], but they keep talking about how no dying means that everyone will get the plague and we'll all be disease ridden forever. Wouldn't immune systems for at least some of the diseases, since they're all forced alive, eventually fight it, like it fights a cold, only taken [[Up to Eleven]]?

** There's a reason the immune system can't fight off some viruses. No matter how much time passes, some viruses are just better at evading the immune system than it is at stopping them.

*** Danes' voice early on seems to be somewhat softer than later on. I suspect he took at least some time recovering from the effects of the chemicals. That said, even with Danes not dying, what happened to him seems to be in line with descriptions of bungled lethal injections, only taken up to eleven.

*** It's also possible that his convulsions kept him from getting the entire dose of poison...I mean, he pulled the arm off the gurney almost right off.

***** 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.

* Is Torchwood still in-canon with the mainline Whoniverse at this point? Handwaving aside, ''the entire human race suddenly becoming unable to die'' seems like something the Doctor would involve himself with, and it's scarcely something that his companions wouldn't take notice of.

** The Doctor does not interfere with every situation that bothers Earth. He travels on a whim. His companions may not be able to contact him.

*** If the Doctor learned about it from a history book or a fellow companion, then interfering would potentially create a paradox. Look at what happened when he willfully interfered by deposing Harriet Jones rather than letting her Golden Age come to past. The Doctor can only interfere if events are vague enough that he doesn't personally and accurately know the results.

** The Doctor can't be there for everything. He wasn't there for the Miracle the same way he wasn't there for the Holocaust, the witch trials, JFK's assassination, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the burning of Rome, etc etc.

*** The first episode of the new series suggested that the 9th Doctor WAS at JFK's assasssination.

** Alternatively, the Doctor may be too busy trying to fix the event from behind the scenes to show himself.

** This messed with the world so much (they averted [[No Global Consequences]], without actually inventing a way to maintain continuity here), that they may just pop a [[Reset Button]] so it never happened, thus encapsulating the whole plot outside the continuity. Now I see why [[No Global Consequences]] is so very necessary.

* So if "The Glove" from the series was introduced into Miracle Day, would it permanently bring people back?

*** 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.

* At some point in the past, Phicorp got "Bigger on the Inside" technology, and they're using it store bottles of pills? Why would anyone with technology that revolutionary not start selling it? Forget pain pills, they've got Time Lord technology here!

** I wouldn't take that scene literally. From the positioning, it may very well be an underground area.

** He did come close to make an romatic confession to Gwen at the beginning of the series. And considering [[But Not Too Bi|that it used to be the other way around]], I think this brings back the balance a bit.

* Jack's personal timeline seems kinda screwed up.

*** 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?

** When he says '700 years since my last confession' I think he's probably talking about 'from your point of view'. Remember, he's travelled in time and space. The last time he popped into an alien convent on a distant asteroid for a quick confession probably ''was'' 700 years in Earth's past. How he can keep track of that kind of thing in Earth-based years is another question.

** As for how he knows how long he was buried for, that's not difficult. He was buried shortly before the settlement that would be Cardiff was built and dug up in 1901. A glance at a history of Cardiff will give him at least a rough idea.

* So Oswald Danes, most hated man in America, a raping, murdering paedophile, cries on TV then the world decides he's a good guy because people use the hashtag #forgive so much it trends and now he's a messiah? Um, right.

** Watch the latest episode, or most others. People do not like Danes, they like his television image.

** Someone whose relationship with their obsessive ex ended badly due to betrayal and repeated torture and murder who is still secretly bitter?

* They want Oswald Danes to talk about deregulation, so they give him essays by John Maynard Keynes, the big heavyweight of government intervention in the economy, and not Milton Friedman or someone from one of the free market schools. Is Davies not even trying here?

* I'm just not getting the writers' intents here. Are we SUPPOSED to be horrified that they're burning vegetable dead people? I think most of the audience was saying "ah, see, I told you they'd be truly gone if you just burn them". But they're making this extended Soylent Green thing "people- they're burning PEOPLE!!!" over a pretty much no-brainer solution, it was both obvious and not all that morally repugnant. I guess it's a Tomato Surprise that failed? But they keep dragging it on and on with Gwen hiding her dad, even though he wasn't well introduced as a character and she has little tangible relationship with him, being dead and all. Yet nobody SAYS she's being batshit crazy, which seems to be the situation.

** Gwen's father ''isn't'' a vegetable - he's in severe pain, but he's conscious and aware of his surroundings, and moreover he's being kept and taken care of by his family in his own home where he's not leeching off the state or consuming any significant resources. And yet, the government has launched a Gestapo-esque campaign to root out, arrest, and ''incinerate'' him and people like him, without the wishes of the subject or anyone who would reasonably have power of attorney over him. Essentially, the British government (and presumably every other government in the world) has declared that it holds power of attorney over every person under its jurisdiction, and that anyone deemed Category One must be executed as soon as possible in the name of healthcare rationing - basically, it's every right-wing pundit's predictions about "death panels" turned [[Up to Eleven]] and slathered liberally with Hitler-sauce. It's the government that's gone crazy, not the Cooper family.

**** Gwen has been risking her life and the safety of her family pulling smash-and-grabs to steal painkillers. Why? Because her father is ''in pain''. Ability to experience pain indicates at least some level of awareness - pain is a function of the nervous system, and a person who was fully braindead, or in a PVS, wouldn't have the functions necessarily to feel pain, or discomfort, or ''anything else''. He may or may not have suffered brain damage as the result of his heart attacks, but he's not a Terri Schiavo or a Sunny von Bulow.

*** They are burning anyone that they feel ''should'' be dead. And whether or not they should be dead or there are far too many people for the space and resources available and so something must be done, burning people who are conscious and alive just because you've decided that they should be dead ''is'' monstrous. When Vera created these categories, she wanted them to only be the brain-dead but it's clearly not and all the Category Two people are also at risk of being next. Then there's the people on there for moral reasons. Sure some people may say that people like Oswald Danes deserve it but once you start burning people alive for "moral reasons" then you're opening up Pandora's Box. What other moral reasons will they be able to find? Stealing medicine like Gwen did in the beginning? Hiding your conscious relatives so they won't get burned alive? Protesting the government? Not voting for the right political party?

*** Hmm...so if Davies deliberately tried to get people to invoke Hitler, does that mean that he broke Godwin's Law and has already lost the argument he was trying to make (whatever it happened to be)?

** Consider that by the metric the government is using - that a Category One is a person who "should be dead", Rex qualifies as a Cat-1. He was impaled through the chest, and by Vera's judgment would have been D.O.A. if not for the Miracle. And yet, he's not braindead, or a vegetable, or catatonic, or unable to experience life meaningfully, like the suicide bomber in episode 1 - he's a fully aware, fully ambulatory, from-all-appearances healthy person who happens to be having some issues with hemmoraghing and chronic pain. Should Rex, or a person in a similar situtation to him, be arrested and executed without trial for the crime of existing in light of a metric which for the foreseeable future is ''no longer relevant''? What about a person with locked-in syndrome, or a quadripalegic who is otherwise mentally sound?

**** Most of what we're seeing on the screen is arguably the dumbed-down version of what is probably rather technical language in the actual legislation/executive orders/formal proposals/whatever.

**** Another point that sort of hid in the dialogue: Gwen's father is specifically referred to as an "unsupported Category 1" by Inspector Javert. This would seem to imply that, at ''least'' in the UK, if you have the money to keep someone going indefinitely (such as would have been the case in the US with Angelo), nobody was going to complain. The hangup is that, in Gwen's case for example, she was knocking over pharmacies to get drugs.

** Maybe the Miracle only exists in the rebooted universe. Which is why neither Jack or the Doctor know about it.

* Is Barack Obama still president in this timeline? Davies established back in ''The End of Time'' that Obama is president in the present-day Whoniverse. I just can't ''envisage'' Obama signing off on something as monstrous as the category scheme, the overflow camps, and the incinerators, and the Tea Party and the Republicans ''going along with it'' - it's monstrously out of character for him, and it implies a level of bipartisan cooperation that's just plain unheard of in the US government these days.

* So, Oswald Dane says, "You can't set me free, or I'll spill all your secrets." Hello? ''Retcon'' anyone? You literally used it a scene ago.

** They played that card when they had to use it on the guy watching them. Danes wouldn't let them use it. More importantly, it wouldn't change the fact that they took Danes because Rhys would have killed him. That wouldn't have changed with Retcon.

*** Danes wouldn't let them, but they could force him; and they could easily have left him somewhere Rhys wasn't after retconning, maybe turned him in to the police.

** Except Jack's immortality is connected to being a "fixed point in time," not based on being on the opposite end from humanity on the immortality/mortality scale. The Blessing's morphic field influence shouldn't mess with him anymore than it did when it wasn't blasting immortality waves.

** Sure it would. They feed it Jack's blood. The field calibrates to Jack, recreating the same effect which keeps him immortal except on a worldwide scale. In one man, it works perfectly. The whole world only gets a fraction of it, and Jack's own power is canceled out.

** Think of it this way. Jack is immortal. Whatever quirk of spacetime keeping him alive is calibrated to him. Then you have the Blessing, a massive morphic field which is now tuned to Jack. Unless what Rose did is sentient, there's suddenly two identical signatures, one of which is a lot bigger. Jack's own power gets shut off by a similar effect of far greater magnitude.

** Just had a moment of fridge brilliance/fridge logic. There is that episode where Jack faces the [[Eldritch Abomination]] that feeds on life force. Now, Jack's immortality does not seem to be based on life force or any biological cause, but in a quality introduced into the Continuum by Rose that made Jack the fixed point in time he is; his healing factor and his full body regeneration may seem biological, but that is only because he is a biological entity, in reality it is the continuum reasserting him because he MUST exist, as part of this new quality or law Rose accidentally created. Now, in that episode of the original Torchwood, Jack seems to be a bottomless source of life force, this can only be explained as his body translating into a sort of biological language, the non biological cause of his immortality. It's not that he really has that much life force stored in him, it's that since the universe keeps recreating him after he should have disappeared -died-, his body gets/generates/comes with a new charge of life force, because it cannot live without that, in that episode it happened several times in a few minutes. Now, what the Blessing might have taken from Jack was the translated effect, not the cause of his immortality, but one of the consequences, just like the [[Eldritch Abomination]] in that other episode was overwhelmed by the amount of life force that Jack was generating each time the universe reasserted him. That would be why the immortality people got was flawed, they where not getting the fixed point in time deal, not even watered down -if that is even possible-, but the Blessing creating huge amounts of life force for the whole human population, in accordance with Jack's biological reaction to his temporal nature, in any case, a flawed process that may have not been sustainable for long. But in any case, this, although it could explain the reason one kind of immortality seemed to became another, still cannot explain the switch between mortal and immortal for Jack and later Rex, the Blessing would have been taking the consequence of Jack's immortality, not the cause, and broadcasting it as the new template for human life -as The Life of a Human Must Never Stop = The Life of All Humans Must Never Stop-. After all, the Blessing seems to be working in terms of a biological morphic field, according to the explanations about how the people near the Blessing, in the past, had been living the exact amount of time that was the average human life expectancy, and had been seeing their lives prolonged as humanity, trough biological means, got the life expectancy increased -in that there did was a switch in direction-. So the Blessing does not seem to be working on the same principle as Jack's immortality, which has been mentioned, is something that should not exist, but is just able to use the effect Jack's body, as a biological entity, generates because of his kind or immortality. So Jack should not have been affected by the Blessing in any way, since he cannot be robbed of his life force, given that the universe would simply recreate Jack, having his body get a fresh charge of life force every time as a consequence. In a way, Jack is a sort of Perpetual Motion Machine, probably one of the reasons he should not exist according to The Doctor.

* Why did The Families stockpile painkillers? They had no way of knowing what Jack's blood would do to the Blessing or even if it did make people immortal, they could have been given Jack-style regeneration and made painkillers obsolete altogether. Their plan depended on a very specific type of immortality that is very different from the source they're using. Even the masterminds admit they have no idea what's happening. For most of the series, the Families/Phi-Corp/whoever were portrayed as masters of the [[Xanatos Gambit]] but end up looking [[Xanatos Roulette|simply implausibly lucky in their predictions]]. And I'm still supposed to take them seriously as a threat for next series?

* Why is Shapiro so upfront and loud about his declarations to track down the mole without setting up ''any'' kind of lockdown when he ''knows'' the mole is inside enough to disrupt major operations? He's practically begging for sabotage!

* When Jack and co reverse the miracle, the Three Families representatives just stand there with their guns pointed at them ''calmly letting them undo all their work.'' Whilst this makes sense on the end of the Blessing with the bomb, the other side had literally ''nothing'' stopping them from bodily restraining Rex before he could tear off his bandage.

* 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.

** That bugged me too, maybe morphic fields do gravity as well as immortality.

** It took me a while to realize it, but it's a question of perception. We're thinking of the view from the platform as looking DOWN into the Blessing, which is reinforced by seeing Jack's blood flow towards it, as if gravity was a factor. We're not. It's a cross-section- remember, this is a long ways down into the earth- the "top" of the blessing is above the platform. The Blessing is running down below the platform and above it, so we're looking at it from the side.

* At the end of Episode 10, after Earth became mortal again, Oswald Danes decides to blow him, the facility, and the people in it sky high - while being badass about it. However, he decides to let Jack and Gwen get away from the facility first before blowing everything up. This is very out of character for a man who is pretty much a [[Complete Monster]]. Why would it matter to Danes that the heroes can get away safely before he blows everything up? Why not just blow them all up the moment death comes back?

** Apparently, Danes has a very twisted sense of noblesse oblige, and figured he owed Torchwood a favor for letting him die (what he wanted) in such an over the top way and getting revenge against those who were secretly manipulating him at the same time (which was bonus points).

* Why did the Families copy the "life unworthy of life" idea from the Nazis? If you want money for your Family, those wacky ideological stances usually just get in the way, and a decades-old global conspiracy should have figured that one out by 2011.

** I think the writers just plain forgot to add a motive. Hitler had reasons for wanting to build a master race extending beyond mere lust for power that were tied to his prejudices and his own sense of self-loathing, but the Mother doesn't really give Jilly any reasons for wanting to create a perfect world or how the original three got a good few generations of offspring to go along with the idea (assuming the Families are actually related). You'd think that after the Holocaust they'd call a meeting and say to each other "Maybe this whole thing wasn't such a good idea. If one of the most powerful leaders in the world couldn't pull this off, we're pretty much shit out of luck."

** The only motivation that he Families need is money and power. The only problem is that they have to be entirely sure that nobody who earns about it has any moral scruples at all.

* The Families are international, and everywhere, and there's seemingly quite a few members. How do you ever keep them all in check? Shouldn't there be leaks and inside power struggles?

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