I Never Liked Tintin

"A Day in the Death" (Torchwood S2 E8) discussion.  Please keep spoilers for future episodes out of this thread.

I found Tintin sort of weirdly fascinating myself when I was a kid and following it in strip form, though "liked" would be too strong a word.

This recent series of episodes is just ripping me apart.  Wasn't this supposed to be the fun, less angst-filled season?  Someone didn't get the memo. 

I liked the parallels of format in this one to the last two episodes of Dr. Who Series Two - details skipped to avoid Who spoilers, but it was the same sort of narration-by-dead-person (for whatever definition of dead).

There are some logical problems with Owen's current state.  Not breathing?  Then how is he talking?  Last I heard, that required breath.  The automatic breathing process is neither working nor necessary (since he doesn't drown), but he can obviously perform the mechanics of inhaling and exhaling.  And if he can expel air to make sounds, he should be able to expel it to do mouth-to-mouth.  When you read enough vampire novels you think about these things!  And the numbness doesn't make sense.  If he can't feel things, how on earth can he "chuck a scalpel about"?  How can he walk?  Ever try to walk when your foot has gone to sleep and you can't feel it hit the ground?  Maybe one could learn to function with total body numbness, but it wouldn't come naturally or instantaneously.  I wish they had left the details of Owen's condition vague and unexplained; this is breaking my suspension of disbelief.  And a so-convenient dilemma in which they need someone with no body heat?  Give me a break!  That was waaaaaay too pat.  Clumsy, clumsy.  They should have been setting that one up four episodes ago.

Jack: what an ass.  Hello, you brought Owen back to life, you could show a little compassion here.  In a lot of ways, this mess is your fault.  It's clear pretty quickly that Owen's condition is stable; why not put him to work in-house?  Let him use his brain?  His doctoring skills?

Also interesting - Gwen taking such an in-charge role at the team meeting while Jack sits back and says nothing.  It's like he's training her to take over.  Or is this just more leftover dynamics from Jack's absence?

I was thinking about the involuntary trade Owen has made: eternal(?) life and youthfulness in trade for the fragility of body and the inability to sleep or have functioning body systems.  I could almost see that as being worthwhile; I have such a sense of running out of time and not having enough life left to complete my research and learn everything that the idea of removing that time pressure is...enticing.  Think of all the reading I could get caught up on if I had all the time in the world!

But the body fragility is quite the downside: he doesn't heal, but he doesn't die.  If he had in fact wanted to jump, and done it, what would we have?  An Owen with his back broken and bones shattered who still wasn't dead and could never heal?  I was thinking the whole time that him wanting to jump made no sense because of that; I was glad that wasn't why he was up there.  (Though I hope he doesn't turn into a sort of wandering ministering angel: "I'm Dr. Owen Harper, and I'm here to help the suicidal."  Ick!)  If I were in that situation, I would be a lot more careful; getting hit by a car or shot in the head could really mess up your eternity.  And if Owen did want to die, how would he do it?  Would dismemberment work or would he then be a conscious detached head?  Either some mystical/alien means or complete body annihilation (nuclear explosion?) are the only things that occur to me.  I really have this feeling that we're going to have undead-Owen for the rest of the season (probably with increasingly bruised/cut/broken bits) and then have him do a Spock-like self-sacrifice at the end to save the team.  But I hope the writers surprise me with something totally different.

Speaking of getting shot, was that attitude toward a gun totally British or just insane bravado on Owen's part (not having thought through the implications of getting more bullet holes in an undying body)?  "You're a security guard - that gun's just for show"???  Maybe in a country where police are not routinely armed, but in America I surely would not assume that a security guard - or anyone else holding a gun - would be at all hesitant to shoot.

The persistent atheism of Torchwood is interesting to me - they've been so insistent throughout that there is no afterlife at all, no nothing, just darkness.  Awareness in the darkness with a sense of time passing forever?  That would be something like hell, I think.  Or just darkness with no consciousness?  I don't disapprove - it's pretty much what I believe - but it's startling to see it on television.

And will they stop hinting around that Jack and Ianto are not "like that" and tell us what they're like?

Comments

[Scott Wyngarden]

Owen's physical condition is stable, in the odd fragile, non-healing way, but his mental condition is unstable, in a fragile, damaged, but heal-able fashion. I think Jack was giving him the space for Owen to choose to be in Torchwood, not just being there because it's what he did before he died.

Gwen's being in charge is, I think, an effect of Jack both needing his own distance to deal with the Owen Situation, and a nod to his repeated asking if Gwen wanted to take the Meat episode off. Jack knows he's not in the best place to lead right then, and he's recused himself from being the one to officially order anyone about.

[Serge]

Tintin? As in Hergé's character? I think many francophones of my generation cut their science-fictional teeth on those stories, especially the two-parter story of a flight to the Moon. It's been a long time since I've looked at it, but I remember that it went for a serious approach, showing the whole thing as an international effort, among other things.

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

I don't know that "no afterlife" is a complete synonym for "atheism." Belief in a Deity doesn't require a belief in an afterlife--nor does belief in an afterlife require belief in a Deity. To think so is to mistake the shapes of certain religions for being universal to the very definition of "religion."

(I was quite irked once by an anthropological essay about some long-dead culture who, the reader was told, had no belief in the afterlife, which, the reader was assured, we can conclude from the lack of any evidence that they treated dead bodies with any sort of ceremony or respect. The illogic, or perhaps Christocentrism, of that was infuriating.)

That aside, I keep thinking that Jack's and Susie's and Owen's and the other resurrection subjects' insistence that "there's nothing, only darkness" cannot be considered objective truth. It's only their experience. I'm guessing that if, in the Torchwood universe, there is some form of afterlife, no one experiences it until after they are out of reach of bodily resurrection. Or maybe being resurrected involves a sip of Lethe, such that one cannot remember anything they experienced other than that outer darkness (and whatever's "moving" through it). Those are two possibilities I came up with right off the bat that allow there to be more than Jack & etc. know about what's beyond death. I'm sure there are others.

On another note, the twin themes of Owen and Maggie finding something to live for made me think the episode should possibly have been called "It's a Wonderful Death."

[Julia Jones]

The bit where he suddenly can't use his voluntary breathing control for that one specific item threw me *right* out of the story for a few minutes. :-(

He does have some sense of touch, as he says in the episode. From his description, it's a bit like when you have dental work done under a local -- you can still feel pressure, but not pain or temperature. Which doesn't really make sense from a "no electrical impulses" point of view, but then neither does being able to walk around or being able to see.

The attitude towards a gun is totally British. As one of the Brits pointed out on Making Light a few months back, even when private ownership of handguns was legal, people did not routinely carry them, and openly carrying a gun of any sort in a public area would have got you branded a dangerous nutter and quite likely at the wrong end of a police armed response unit. Owen was gambling, but on odds that were well in his favour. Anyone he faces is likely to be far less trained and far more hesitant in using a gun on an actual human than he is.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Scott: I think Owen's choice was clear - put him to work. I don't see a good reason for Jack to feel he needed to make that choice.

Serge: Yes, the Hergé character. It's a throwaway bit of team-bonding comedy in the episode.

Julia: (gun attitude) Yeah, that was what I was sort of guessing. People in the USA do notice the difference; it was the topic of much discussion early in S1.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Nicole:
I don't know that "no afterlife" is a complete synonym for "atheism." Belief in a Deity doesn't require a belief in an afterlife--nor does belief in an afterlife require belief in a Deity. To think so is to mistake the shapes of certain religions for being universal to the very definition of "religion."

I'll grant that belief in a deity doesn't require a belief in an afterlife, but I don't know how one can have an afterlife without some mystical concept that there is some existence of the self separate from the physical processes of the body, which I think requires some form of religious belief. Can you give me some examples of nonreligious afterlife beliefs? Or is the objection more to equating religion with having a deity/deities? I was not using atheism to literally mean "no god(s)", but more in the general sense of no mystical beliefs at all.

[Serge]

It's a throwaway bit of team-bonding comedy

Now, if I get money back from the IRS (on top of that small bonus I just got), I will buy a DVD player that can play the Season One episodes you sent me. (Thanks again for that.) At last I'll be able to truly join the conversation.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Serge: No computer with a DVD player? You can just download "VLC" or some other good media player and watch them on that.

[Serge]

Oh, I still have the link that you had provided me. It's just that my employer would be very unhappy with me if I loaded unauthorized software on what's their laptop. My wife has her own laptop, but its CD/DVD drive is kaput. And since we just found out that we owe the IRS quite a bit of money, we'll have to hold off a bit on a replacement. Or on a portable DVD player. Bleh and bummer on all fronts.

[Cy]

I find aspects of atheism to be really weird to me. Especially a belief in "consciousness in darkness, aware of passing time", who would choose to believe in something like that without a shred of evidence to support it?

If you cease to exist at death, whatever caused you to exist in the first place would eventually repeat itself, even if it takes eons of time. And, there would be no awareness of the time in-between. So, it would be like "instant reincarnation".

The other option is based on all the metaphysical lore, near death experiences, after death contact, etc. This is harder to swallow, but considering the volumes of information, there may be something to it.