Torchwood: Children of Earth
Jul. 12th, 2009 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkIt feels a little strange to be having thoughts on Torchwood. I gave up on the series about two episodes in and, because of the time it was on, only caught bits and scraps of the minisieries apart from Day 5. Still there are thoughts.
Children of Earth seemed to be aiming for dystopian science fiction but it felt more like a dark fairy tale with real world political allusions. Some quite hard hitting, the league tables reference in particular - the point is to allow middle class parents to identify and abandon the bottom 10% of schools (and the kids in them) to their hideous fate. The accusation that the British had started the children/drug trade also felt like a reference to our role in the opium business. So the arguments were real world but their execution fantastical, the idea that any government might think it could get away with no one noticing which schools the buses came for and the troops descended on and that none of those troops would have family in the targeted schools. Pure fairy tale. Most obviously a rewriting the Pied Piper of Hamilyn with the special frequency, the one note to call all the children being turned on the Piper to destroy him.
Fairy tales are rarely pure stories. They have messages, the contrivances are there to make a point and the point of this one is more that of myth. Fairy tales are old wives tales, myths are told by those with power. CoE was a story that sought to justify what men do, how they suffer for it. Frobisher killing his family was his tragedy, the voiceover explaining that he was a good man but no one to eulogise the wife and daughters. We saw Jack’s aftermath but never Alice’s, and Stephen had no say in what was done to him. What if Frobisher had been a woman? Good women never kill their own children. They die for them like Buffy in The Gift. The narrative finds a way for that to happen even if, as in Buffy’s case, it has to admit its own dichotomy was false to do so. That part I liked. These fictional dilemmas are always presented as so ‘either/or’ when any real life equivalents are more ‘maybe if’ and ‘the balance of probabilities suggests.’
Children of Earth seemed to be aiming for dystopian science fiction but it felt more like a dark fairy tale with real world political allusions. Some quite hard hitting, the league tables reference in particular - the point is to allow middle class parents to identify and abandon the bottom 10% of schools (and the kids in them) to their hideous fate. The accusation that the British had started the children/drug trade also felt like a reference to our role in the opium business. So the arguments were real world but their execution fantastical, the idea that any government might think it could get away with no one noticing which schools the buses came for and the troops descended on and that none of those troops would have family in the targeted schools. Pure fairy tale. Most obviously a rewriting the Pied Piper of Hamilyn with the special frequency, the one note to call all the children being turned on the Piper to destroy him.
Fairy tales are rarely pure stories. They have messages, the contrivances are there to make a point and the point of this one is more that of myth. Fairy tales are old wives tales, myths are told by those with power. CoE was a story that sought to justify what men do, how they suffer for it. Frobisher killing his family was his tragedy, the voiceover explaining that he was a good man but no one to eulogise the wife and daughters. We saw Jack’s aftermath but never Alice’s, and Stephen had no say in what was done to him. What if Frobisher had been a woman? Good women never kill their own children. They die for them like Buffy in The Gift. The narrative finds a way for that to happen even if, as in Buffy’s case, it has to admit its own dichotomy was false to do so. That part I liked. These fictional dilemmas are always presented as so ‘either/or’ when any real life equivalents are more ‘maybe if’ and ‘the balance of probabilities suggests.’