I finally got around to watching Torchwood: Children of Earth this weekend.
[MINOR SPOILER ALERT]
Wow. Bleak. Maybe I shouldn’t have watched all five episodes in one afternoon, but I haven’t been this depressed since Dark Knight. What happened to the randy, swashbuckling Captain Jack that we loved?
On the SciNoFi front though, Torchwood gives us the opportunity to revisit the topic of eyeball spy cameras, last seen in an episode of Dollhouse this spring. As Stephen noted in a post at that time, scientists have been working on plugging directly into the brain (in cats at least) to locate and interpret visual processing activity.
Interestingly, the Torchwood contact lenses appeared to be a much more basic technology: essentially small video cameras that could transmit images back to a laptop and also display text messages to the wearer.
Given how far we have to go in understanding the brain, a contact lens camera is probably a more straightforward and only marginally more detectable solution for this kind of surveillance. Eyeball sized cameras are already commercially available.
August 4th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
After watching this Torchwood miniseries I feel as cheated as the people fooled into watching Batllestar. Here’s my recommendation: DO NOT DO IT. Last episode is so stupid as to ruin all previous Torchwood episodes EVER. It’s so stupid, on so many levels, it would take pages to innumerate them all: bad plot, incredibly bad science, unrealistic in every way from characterization to politics to and on and on….
DO NOT DO IT as you’ll never think the same about Torchwood again.
August 5th, 2009 at 10:03 am
I actually wouldn’t go that far in panning it. I thought it had a lot of good sci-fi action and character development, particularly for Gwen. My objection was more around how they’ve morphed Captain Jack over the course of the three seasons into a very dark and depressing character. I was also uncomfortable with the use of violence against children as the key plot point.
In terms of the science on Doctor Who or Torchwood, we at the blog generally try to approach it as TV fans as opposed to science journalists. Both shows rely on a healthy amount of suspension of disbelief. Once you’ve accepted that one guy is a alien time traveler and the other exists as “a fixed point in space and time,” it’s hard to start criticizing the sonic screwdriver.
August 6th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
good read
August 10th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Sam: I appreciate your opinion and I *REALLY* wanted to like this mini-series. I’m willing to suspend a LOT of disbelief for Torchwood, which is what got me thru the first 4 episodes. It wasn’t the SF science that bothered me, it was the present-day type science. For instance, any number of presently available nerve agents will quickly kill a building full of trapped people, so that’s hardly evidence of a superior military technology and certainly nothing that ought to terrify an entire planet (much less Captain Jack) into committing an unspeakable atrocity. And calling the killing agent a virus is absurd. One can imagine bio-engineering really bad viruses (it’s been done, in fact) but NOT one that kills in seconds (and don’t forget the important “trapped” part of this scenario). That’s only one example and not even the best one, as the present day treatment of politics was just as absurd: getting ALL the world’s countries to even TRY to do the same thing in a couple of days? Please…… Even more-so when that thing would have caused riots with literally hundreds of thousands to millions of casualties. It’s that sort of thing: getting present day science and society wrong that bothers me much more than trying to do what science fiction was invented to do. (why would this set of aliens EVEN need the complicity of humans, other than to further the storyline?) Making these kinds of errors is what separates good intelligent SF (and writing in general) from the bad, in my opinion. Technobable in service of a good plot and good writing, a misdemeanor, at worst……..