Phill Sacre often writes reviews of the episodes of the sci-fi TV show Torchwood. While we have had some fantastic Sci-fi programmes in Britain, most hi-budget science fiction programmes seem to be American these days, so I too was excited to see a new British science-fiction series.

The original premise was not too bad - in post-industrial, urban-regenerated Cardiff, a small group of experts were tasked with researching and utilising alien technology: a policewoman, a doctor, a computer geek and a shadowy clean-up man, are lead by a swashbuckling hero from the future dressed as a World War II Air Force pilot.

The pilot 'Everything Changes' was pretty good, the second in command Suzy, got over-obsessed with a "resurrection glove" and started a killing spree to provide more subjects.

Eastenders crowds out the X-Files

Over time, the focus on alien technology seemed to drop out of the series somewhat, and for me, the series became overly-concentrated on identity politics; it became a soap opera rather than a sci-fi series.

The Next Generation episode The Host, was the first time that Star Trek attempted to deal with bisexuality. Beverley fell in love with Odan, a Trill diplomat. When Odan's male host body suddenly died and was quickly replaced with a new host body that happened to be female, Odan wanted to continue the relationship, leaving Beverley with conflicted emotions. It was a subtle and thoughtful way of gently introducing the issue. Call me prude, but I find Torchwood's repeated in-your-face treatment of alternative sexualities slightly over-egged.

So anyway, Phill says something about many of the episodes, he hasn't done the last episode yet, so I pip in there first and give my 2p.

Torchwood: Adrift

We can perhaps ignore the fact that in Out of Time, three plane passengers went into the rift and came out 50 years later unharmed and unaged.

Jonah was taken into the Cardiff rift (a wormhole leading to more-or-less anywhere in time or space) at aged 15, and came out at some point, dramatically aged, burned and psychologically troubled. The episode is set 7 months after his initial disappearance.

While on the other side of the the rift he found himself stranded on a "burning planet" and was taken into a rescue craft by an unidentified alien race. He looked into a "Dark Star", the result of which he screams for 20 hours per day, and has 4 relatively well hours per day.

Jonah is kept, with 16 other travellers through the rift, in an abandoned military bunker, each are kept in separate rooms behind bulkheads with swipe- card locks; where medical staff do their best to tend to them.

However, these victims of the rift, would have received far better care within the National Health Service. Not only might Jonah have received reconstructive plastic surgery on his burned cheek, but the idea of keeping mental patients completely segregated from society went of fashion in the 1980s.

It generated scare stories in the media at the time, however, when properly supported, both in funds and in understanding, community care has been a success, people with some quite extreme problems can lead something approximating a normal life; the human spirit can win out, despite the darkness.

During the 4 hours per day when he was not screaming and suffering from his severe post-traumatic stress disorder, Jonah was lucid, caring and thoughtful. With the correct treatment and stimuli, Jonah may have improved and found a life worth living.

Were Torchwood even trying counselling or group therapy? Jonah was left to confront his distressing trauma-related memories alone underground in a metal cell.

People are put through some horrendous situations, such as children who are forced into prostitution and are raped constantly throughout their childhood; women who have seen their whole village hacked to death in the Rwandan Genocide, men forced to participate in the death of their own people in the Holocaust. Yet sometimes, somehow, people rebuild their lives, the human spirit wins out.

Is a "dark star" really worse than child prostitution, really worse than genocide, worse than the Holocaust? I seriously doubt it. The "dark star" is a MacGuffin, the writers just didn't really think it though enough.

Likewise, his mother Nikki has been looking constantly for Jonah in the seventh month period and has kept his bedroom more-or-less the same as before he went missing. When the heroine of the show, Gwen, reunites Nikki with Jonah, she initially does not recognise him as her son. However, Jonah retells shared memories with his mother that only he could have known. They share a brief embrace before Jonah's screaming resumes.

Many families of mentally ill patients are able to build a fruitful relationship that makes the patient's suffering more bearable or even in some cases aids recovery. Nikki though, superficially rejects Jonah and begins packing his possessions into boxes. In a more ideal world, Nikki could have been given counselling, training and support about how to cope and love her son through his suffering. Nikki perhaps could have talked through and gotten over her initial panic to rebuild a meaningful relationship. The human spirit might win out, given a chance.

With their advanced technology and information about alien species, the fictional Torchwood world is worse rather than better than real life, why?

Torchwood VS Star Trek

In May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced that America would get to the moon: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

At the time of Kennedy's 1961 speech, many dismissed it as merely political hyperbole, America was years behind Russia and the Moon was too big a challenge for anyone in that decade. However, when the whole society gets involved, Humanity's engineering skill and hard work won out, and on July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon's surface making one giant leap for mankind. The human spirit won out.

The same acknowledgment of the human spirit was brought into fiction in the TV series Star Trek, where the human race built spaceships out of both human engineering and through the friendly acquisition of alien technology.

Where in the Apollo program, humanity got as far as the moon using just liquid hydrogen; the aspirational premise of Star Trek was that if were just given a more advanced engine, humanity could get to the stars and beyond. Both the Apollo programme and the fictional Star Trek shared the same vision, "to boldly go where no man has gone before".

Meanwhile, in the Torchwood world, the various Torchwood Institutes have amassed a great amount of alien technology, but to no end. Instead of applying society's engineering and hard work using the open model of research that has served humanity so well in the Apollo programme and elsewhere; in the Torchwood world, humanity seems to have given up, humans are just helpless victims, primitive animals whose ecological environment has been disturbed. The human spirit is missing.

The Torchwood team are also plain incompetent, they are certainly not taking control of their own technology and they have not grasped the open source and open access movement. For their archive of alien technology, where is the web front end? Where is the XML-based publishing system? Where is the open API? Where are the seminars and pan-European colloquiums?

Academics, librarians, archivists and anthropologists, do not research and catalogue their artifacts and works of art to hide them, out of a mistrust for humanity and a desire to be secretive; they catalogue them because they realise the importance of the objects and want to make them easily available for the rest of humanity to use - to add to the artistic, cultural and scientific resources that are used by the human spirit to produce greatness.

Greatness can be many things, it is a beautiful poem and a better algorithm for text processing, a new recipe for carrot cake and the proclamation of a new marriage, it is restoring a family after a genocide and putting a man on the moon. All are small steps while at the same time giant leaps.

In short, Captain Kirk beats Captain Jack for my vision of the future.

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