Damned Heroes: A Christian Interpretation of Torchwood

The British TV show Torchwood was created by Russel T Davies in 2006 as a spinoff to Doctor Who. It follows the story of Gwen Cooper, a Cardiff police officer who accidentally discovers a secret semi government organization called Torchwood. Torchwood is led by a man who calls himself Captain Jack Harkness. Harkness is hundreds of years old because of a small problem he has; when he dies he comes back to life.

In the very first episode of Torchwood, Harkness brings a man back from the dead for a minute. After being asked what he saw when he died the man replies “Nothing. I saw nothing. Oh my god, there’s nothing.” And then he dies again. This immediately sets a tone for the show. It will be darker than its parent show, more adult, and it isn’t afraid of a nihilistic worldview. Or at least that’s what it seemed to be trying to do. Ultimately the first season fails at being adult. Yes, it is inappropriate for children, but it is awfully hokey and juvenile despite that. What it fails at even more-so is its nihilistic theme. I would argue that it makes more sense to interpret Torchwood season one as  being set in a world where there is a Hell, and most likely a Heaven.

                The most important episode for this topic is They Keep Killing Suzie. Suzie was a member of Torchwood who became a serial killer, and was ultimately killed. In this episode she’s been brought back from the dead and isn't very keen about dying again. She kidnaps Gwen Cooper and has a couple conversations with her about death.

Gwen: So what's out there?
Suzie: Nothing. Just nothing.
Gwen: But if there's nothing, what's the point of it all?
Suzie: This is. Driving through the dark. All this stupid tiny stuff. We're just animals howling in the night. 'Cause it's better than silence.

This is a fairly standard nihilistic conversation and there isn’t anything that actually contradicts that here. I'ts also a fairly standard theme in season one of Torchwood; There is nothing after death and therefore nothing matters. We are just animals pretending we're something more. The problem comes the next time the two talk about the lack of afterlife that Suzie is avoiding. It starts with Gwen asking a completely irrational question;

Gwen: So when you die, it's just—
Suzie: Darkness.
Gwen: And you're all alone, there's no one else?

If someone told me that there is nothing after death I would not immediately ask them if they were alone. Why? Because you have to be somewhere to be alone. The whole  idea that there is no life after death is that we no longer exist. Your soul or mind does not go anywhere after you die because you don’t have one, and whatever you did have died with the brain. But these people are not describing oblivion; they are describing an experience. The clear distinction here is that they remember nothing. It's not that they have no memories after death, because they distinctly remember nothingness. And more importantly, they remember being within this nothingness; They remember being along in the dark. Suzie makes this more obvious when she answers Gwen’s ridiculous question;

Gwen: And you're all alone, there's no one else?
Suzie: I didn't say that.
Gwen: What d'you mean?
Suzie: Why do you think I'm so desperate to come back? There's something out there... in the dark. And it's moving.

And then later she says the following to Jack right before she dies again; 

“Captain, my Captain. Do you want to know a secret? There’s something moving in the dark and it's coming, Jack Harkness. It’s coming for you.”

Suzie explaining her lack of understanding of metaphysics. 

Not only do they remember being nowhere but they remember something being there with them. And not only is it a something they can feel moving in the dark, but they are also afraid of it. The whole idea of oblivion is non-existence or nothingness. According to any sort of atheism people cease to be after they die, they don’t float alone in the dark. That is not nothingness, rather it is clearly an afterlife of a sort. No one has ever said afterlife has to be fun, it just has to be a continuing existence of the mind/soul/you.  This is also an afterlife most Christians wouldn't have a problem believing in. In fact it sounds an awful lot like one that the vast majority of Christians do believe in; Hell. I’m going to use the Catholic definition of Hell; According to that definition Hell is "a state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed." So essentially Hell is being alone, separated from God and from those who were saved, forever. I guarantee you that if you told most Christians that you had a near death experience which was eternal loneliness in the dark surrounded by an evil presence, they would not have an existential crisis. They would most likely tell you that what you experienced was Hell.

Suzie stays dead this time but the subject of afterlife does not die with her. Throughout the remainder of the season people tell Jack that there is something in the dark coming for him. This goes on, mainly because of Russel T. Davies's penchant for foreshadowing. The nihilistic themes also continue. In one episode near the end of the season, Jack meets a man who wants to die and they have the following conversation;

Captain Jack Harkness: I can't leave you here.
John Ellis: Then we'll wait. The sun will rise, we'll have some breakfast, take a walk...
Captain Jack Harkness: Yes. A new day.
John Ellis: And I'll suffer it all and smile and wag my tail and then, as soon as your back is turned, I'll make sure I do it properly. Because I want to die.
Captain Jack Harkness: You don't get reunited, John. It just goes black.
John Ellis: How do you know?
Captain Jack Harkness: I died once.
John Ellis: Who are you?
Captain Jack Harkness: A man, like you, out of his time, alone and scared.
John Ellis: How do you cope?
Captain Jack Harkness: It's just bearable. It has to be. I don't have a choice.
John Ellis: But I do. If you want to help me, then let me go with some dignity. Don't condemn me to live.

Again Jack describes it as going black. This could just mean that he remembers nothing but the wording seems to fit Suzie’s description better. Its interesting though that it never occurs to the characters that this could be anything other than simple nothingness even though they know it isn’t. They know there is something in the dark with you afterlife and that is not nothingness. That’s something!  It reminds me of a passage from G.K. Chesterton’s essay “The Red Angel”;

For the devils, alas, we have always believed in. The hopeful element in
the universe has in modern times continually been denied and reasserted;
but the hopeless element has never for a moment been denied.
As I told "H. N. B." (whom I pause to wish a Happy Christmas in its
most superstitious sense), the one thing modern people really do
believe in is damnation. The greatest of purely modern poets summed
up the really modern attitude in that fine Agnostic line--

"There may be Heaven; there must be Hell."

The gloomy view of the universe has been a continuous tradition;
and the new types of spiritual investigation or conjecture all begin
by being gloomy.

This is very clearly exemplified in Torchwood. The characters discover that Hell is real and barely bat an eye, because they always believed in it. It is Heaven’s existence that would shock them, not Hell’s.  At the end of the season this gets further confounded when Abaddon rises from the Abyss;

Bilis: From out of the darkness, he is come.
Gwen: What is he talking about?
Bilis: Son of the Great Beast. Cast out before time, chained in rock and imprisoned beneath the rift.
Gwen: What?!
Bilis: All hail Abaddon, the Great Devourer. Come to feast on life! The whole world shall die beneath his shadow.

So Jack fights Abaddon and kills him, with a lot of Christian symbolism but that’s a whole other matter that I may or may not write about another day. And then they all go about business as usual. Why? Because their hearts are hardened to the truth. There is the explanation that Abbadon was chained below Cardiff in the Rift in space and time but there are two questions that that does not answer. First is who chained hi;. It seems to be fitting that the Beast who was cast into the Pit would be chained there, so I really have no problem with that one. The second question is why do we go to the rift when we die? We know that the dead people were in the same place as Abaddon. They felt him moving in the dark. So if Abaddon was beneath the rift than people must have been going beneath the rift when they died. Maybe below the rift is just another way of describing Hell since I can think of no explanation of oblivion that includes an afterlife underneath of Cardiff.

I know! Let's have Jack kill the Devil in the first season. Then he can fight his little brother in season 2, and maybe some junkies in season 3. That will be cool.

My theory is that there is a Hell in the Torchwood universe and there is also a Heaven. The characters don’t know about it because they assume their experience of after life is the only one, completely discounting the possibility that their experience is not universal.. As for the main characters going to Hell, well that’s not really a problem either. Suzie was a serial killer, and Jack is a hundreds of years old con man, murderer, and thief. He has been trying to redeem himself but during the show itself has done some pretty terrible things, including giving a school bus of children to an alien. But lets ignore that and say that he is a stand up guy. It still wouldn't matter from a Christian perspective. It is not morality that condemns or saves us, we humans are incapable of being good enough to be saved by works. Rather it is faith that saves us, it is our choice to accept God’s forgiveness that leads to our salvation. So a group of heroes can all be damned to Hell, simply because they do not accept the grace of God. I personally think this interpretation of Torchwood makes a lot more sense than the usual Nihilistic one. It also makes it an even more tragic tale; Captain Jack is a man fighting for his redemption but he does not realize that he cannot earn his forgiveness. Torchwood is not a story of heroes fighting in a Nihilistic universe, it is a tragic tale of heroes who fight desperately to save the universe while being unable to recognize their own need for salvation.

Katniss Everdeen + Hawkeye + Batman: A Review of Arrow: Because I have to do something with this blog...

In 1949, DC comics developed a Batman ripoff called the Green Arrow. Oliver Queen was a millionaire playboy with no superpowers who decides to take up crime fighting after a devastating accident. Basically he was what would have happened if Batman was obsessed with Robin Hood instead of Zorro (and bats). In 1969 Neal Adams decided the character was a poor man’s Batman substitute so he decided to change him. He took away Green Arrow’s fortune, gave him a goatee, and made him into an outspoken advocate for the poor as well as left wing politics in general. This made Green Arrow actually interesting, if not a bit preachy. But he still used trick arrows and refused to kill. In 1987 DC comics published Longbow hunters which saw an even darker Green Arrow. In this series Oliver murdered a group of people who kidnapped Black Canary. After this Green Arrow was the gritty street hero. Other DC heroes didn’t show up, Ollie stopped wearing a robin hood hat, and he killed people with his arrows. After this DC did the normal things that comic writers do. They killed Green Arrow and didn’t resurrect him until 2000 in which they brought him back in the weirdest way they could. The real problem was that someone let Kevin Smith write Green Arrow (a mistake DC keeps making despite the bad results). Basically it is discovered that Ollie is in Heaven and he likes being there so he sends back a soulless version of himself (I didn’t make that up) who doesn’t remember any events that happened after 1987 because Kevin Smith didn’t like that era. After that DC gave him back his fortune ('cause continuity sucks) and retconed pretty much everything they could from the last 20 years.


So I'm going to stop talking about mainstream comics since they make me sad, and instead fast forward to today. In 2012 there were three major hits; The Avengers, Hunger Games, and The Dark Knight Rises. None of these were surprising. The Avengers and Hunger Games both had non-superpowered superheroes who really like bows. And Dark Knight Rises had Batman. Not to mention that both TDKR and Avengers had really popular millionaire superheroes. Add to that the breakout character Green Arrow on CW’s Smallville and it becomes pretty clear why they made this show. But to prove that they are not Smallville they deliberately got things wrong. First of all Oliver Queen now has black hair (I know thats a petty complaint but I really do wonder if CW has some rule that all their leads have to look the same. I haven’t seen that many of their shows but, judging by commercials and posters, their lead actors could all be the same guy.) Also Green Arrow is just the Arrow. Why? I don’t know. But they even call him that in the show. I wonder if this is going to catch on and if we are now going to get the Bat, the Lantern, and Super. And finally Star City is now Starling City. Why? I don’t think they even know.

Clearly they are marketing this show based on its writing. Yes. 

Arrow starts with Ollie stranded on an island and shooting an arrow into some wood which cause them to explode. I wonder if he somehow had gasoline on the island. A boat rescues him and brings him back to society. This is all we see of the island but throughout the episode we do see flashbacks to him before his boat crashed. I can only assume that we will see flashbacks to the island throughout the first season. We then cut to a news station announcing Ollie's return to civilization. This is when we realize that this Oliver Queen is as much like Nolan’s Bruce Wayne as they could make him. He’s dark and brooding and seems almost psychotic sometimes. He doesn’t talk or show any emotion until he sees his sister at which point he tells her that she was with him the whole time he was on the island. Maybe that’s meant to be sweet but it really comes across as creepy. 

I mostly just included this as proof that he actually wears clothes in the show, despite what the above picture wants you to think. Holy long Caption, Batman!

He then meets all his other old friends including his old girlfriend Dinah Laurel Lance, who goes by her middle name so that it can be shocking at the end when she says her full name. Also she is now a lawyer and working to take down the corruption in Starling City. As far as I could tell this was just so that she would be as much like Rachel Dawes as possible. Anyway, she doesn’t like Ollie because he cheated on her with her sister.

Shortly after all of Ollie’s fun reunions he is kidnapped along with his old friend Tommy Merlyn (who interestingly enough shares a name with a Green Arrow villain). The kidnappers, who are clearly Marvel fans since they are all wearing red skull masks, ask Ollie if his father told him about them. Ollie says “Yeah, he told me to kill you” and then kills them just to prove that he is a darker edgier kind of hero. I’m fine with Ollie killing if he has to but this show so far hasn’t given me much evidence that he isn’t some kind of psychopath who likes killing people. Merlyn clearly sees this but doesn’t tell anyone and Ollie tells everyone that some guy dressed as Robin Hood saved him.

Then we are told in a voiceover that he didn’t lie; there was a man dressed in a green hood and he will come again. Suddenly he creates a superhero identity and goes out doing vigilante stuff. This aspect of the episode felt really rushed to me, and I wish they could have spent more time on it. Also, oddly enough, he saves the day using computer skills rather than a bow and arrow. I can only assume that he was taught computer skills when he was on that deserted island. The episode then ends with three cliffhanger game changing moments because one is too traditional. And then it closes off with a shot of the island he was trapped on, showing us that that earlier Lost reference was meant as foreshadowing and that we will see flashbacks to this island throughout the season.  I’m guessing he will meet Ras Al Ghul there and be trained to fight corruption.

My problem with this show is how much of a Batman wannabe it was. Its as though the writers said “You think the original Green Arrow was a Batman ripoff...” and then proceeded to prove us wrong. That being said it does keep a lot of stuff from the Green Arrow comics and is a decent adaptation. It has that classic CW soapy melodrama to it but it also has a guy shooting criminals with a bow. But not nearly enough of it. Hopefully later episodes would make this more about Green Arrow and less about the Queens, the Lances, and rich people partying. My other complaint is that Oliver Queen is kind of like a psychopath in it. He’s really actually quite scary and doesn’t really seem all that much like the Green Arrow that I’m familiar with. I did like the idea of the voice overs, but they just didn't work somehow. They felt added on and lazy, like they couldn't think of another way to give us this information. Overall it was a mediocre pilot. But it was much better than any other pilot I’ve watched this year (which shows kind of how bad they all were). So its not terrible but it hasn’t really convinced me that its anything more than Batman with a bow. 

Twisted Mirror: The Accidental Creation of Evil Universes

Trevor told me that in order to have more people read my blog I need to be more controversial. He specified religious controversy, however I would argue that some people's love of bad movies is almost religious. So here I will be controversial by pointing out the only thing that can possibly make Star Trek (2009) make sense. It takes place in the mirror universe.

The mirror universe was first introduced in Star Trek's second season when Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura accidentally switched places with their evil counterparts. There they discovered a dark and twisted universe where the Federation of Planets has become the Terran Empire that commands an armada of ships whose main purpose is to do evil things (I assume). In this universe the characters we know have become twisted versions of themselves. Kirk is a self centered mass murderer. Spock is cold and prone to angry outbursts. Sulu is a thug. Uhura a seductress (since that's the evil role women always get) and the crew constantly torture each other with pain givers.

Mirror Spock attacks McCoy

Mirror Spock attacks Mirror Kirk

In Star Trek (2009) Spock and Nero went back in time thereby altering the time line and creating an alternate universe. In this alternate universe Kirk is a self centered jerk who only does things if they help him. He is arrogant and mean to his friends and fellow crew members. Spock is constantly having angry outbursts. Uhura makes out with other crew members while on duty. Scotty is a drunk, McCoy does medical experiments on his friends, and so on. The Federation commands an armada of warships and in the end promotes a cadet to captain merely because he has disposed of those above him. Clearly this is not a movie about the beginning of the Star Trek franchise. This is actually a movie about the creation of the mirror universe. Spock travels back in time altering the time line and leading to the creation of a dark and twisted universe.

I expect Spock to have a goatee in the next film.

UPDATE: Simon Pegg agrees with me. He recently said the following:

"I had this idea. I think that we might all be the mirror [universe] crew." Perhaps in the third movie, we'll see that "something's going to go to shit, we're all going to turn bad, Spock's going to grow a beard, and we're going to meet ourselves. That could happen."

http://io9.com/simon-peggs-startrek-reboot-theory-is-this-the-mirr-499064330

The Babes who didn't make it to Toyland.

Babes in Toyland, the 1961 adaptation of the 1903 operetta, is a dark and tragic movie about a destitute nursery rhyme character and her stolen children. I say stolen children since no explanation is supplied for where the children came from. I assume that the explanation was hidden because of the dark history, and in order to maintain the apparent innocence of the lead character. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

She looks awfully calm about the giant toy soldiers.

The main story of Babes in Toyland has to do with Mary Quite Contrary, a nursery rhyme character who is very bad at financial planning. Mary is coming into a huge inheritance but for some reason has no idea about it. The old miser Barnaby does know, I assume that this can only be because of his miser powers, and decides to marry Mary in order to get her money. The problem is that she is marrying Tom the Piper's son, but he fixes that by hiring some thugs to kill Tom.

I think people would respect me more if I dressed that way.

Its a well known fact that gypsies buy babies, and apparently grown men as well. So the thugs sell Tom and the gypsies train him to be one of them. In the space of a few hours he has learned all there is to know and goes to find Mary. But meanwhile Mary has realized that she can't support all the children she kidnapped over the years and so decides to marry Barnaby. The children run away trying to find the sheep that I forgot to mention were lost and pretty soon the children, Mary, and Tom all find themselves in the forest of no return.

The Trees explain that the name "Forest of No Return" is literal in meaning

And that's how the movie ends. Trapped in the forest of no return this small and strange family realize that they will have to live there forever.
Well okay its not the end, but it is the end of the copy I had recorded as a kid. It turns out there's a good forty minutes after that. They go to Toyland and discover that's its closed down. But Tom has a great idea!

Why not put the children to work, day and night, until the toys are ready? And so they do. The children work at an assembly line (seriously), but meanwhile Barnaby attacks and shrinks So, for those keeping score, Tom has now instituted child labour, and committed what I assume would be a war crime if it was possible.

The problem is that the second half of the movie is really boring while the first half is fun and quirky and has all of the rhyming couplets you could ever desire. So either nostalgia has hopelessly clouded my opinion of the first half of this movie or I liked it because it didn't have a second half.
And that is why I have decided that it didn't have a second half and rather it ends in the forest of no return. Creepy. But oddly satisfying.

The Forest of No Return (the real end of Babes in Toyland):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grLfr_GIeuU&feature=related

Vade retro Sathanas

Crux sancta sit mihi lux / Non draco sit mihi dux

Vade retro satana / Numquam suade mihi vana

Sunt mala quae libas / Ipse venena bibas

"Let the Holy Cross be my light / Let not the dragon be my guide

Step back Satan / Never tempt me with vain things

What you offer me is evil / You drink the poison yourself."

I've recently been reading A Case of Conscience by James Blish. It’s supposed to be the first science-fiction books to deal with religion. I don't really think that's true but who am I to disagree with the people who update Wikipedia. I'm only half way but for some reason I don't feel like that should stop me from talking about it. A Case of Conscience is about Father Ruiz-Sanchez, a Jesuit priest who is also a biologist. This is less surprising since science fiction has taught us that Jesuits are the only Christians to make it to space. I also have this problem that I always picture Jesuits as looking like Jeremy Irons, which becomes confusing if there is more than one of them.

Jeremy Irons in The Mission

 

The main plot has to do with the unique inhabitants of the planet Lithia. Lithians are born in the sea and spend the beginning of their life as a fish. After a while they move to the shallows near the shore where they lose their tails and grow legs. At this point they move on to the shore and spend time in that area where they begin to lose all of their traits that made them survive in the sea, and then eventually become a jungle dwelling creature. Once they have lived and survived in every single type of habitat Lithia has to offer they then gain sentience and higher reasoning. So in one life time a Lithian goes through an entire evolutionary cycle even including the sudden addition of what appears to be a soul. Lithia is a paradise. The Lithians live in perfect harmony with their world and with each other. They have no greed, no jealousy, no anger, no murder, no rape, or any other such un-pleasantries. They live in a society that seems to be a perfect representation of Christian morality in an unfallen world. The problem with this is that the Lithians are also completely scientific and logical and atheistic. They have no concept of God and seemingly no ability to have any sort of religious faith.

Ruiz-Sanchez and a Lithian

Both these things together form a sort of trap for Christians. Here we have an alien race that single handedly disproves a lot of the things that Christians attest to. Ruiz-Sanchez himself describes the problems the planet presents;

Look at the premises. One: reason is always a sufficient guide. Two: The self-evident is always the real. Three: Good works are an end in themselves. Four: Faith is irrelevant to right action. Five: Right action can exist without love. Six: Peace need not pass understanding. Seven: Ethics can exist without evil alternatives. Eight: Morals can exist without conscience. Nine: Goodness can exist without God. Ten --- But do I really need to go on? We have heard all these propositions before and we know What proposes them.

Religion and science have been characterized by some as enemies and others as two sides of the same coin. Often the non-religious will say that to be a Christian one must abandon reason and science. The suggestion is that science has disproven religion to the point that if someone believes than they must be deliberately ignoring facts. But I have yet to hear this utterly convincing evidence, so either no one is presenting it or it isn’t there. Science has never presented anything that could not be reconciled with religion. And even when something presented from science has seemingly contradicted something from the Bible it still does not contradict the actual theology which the Bible teaches. St. Augustine had the following to say about religion and science.

With the scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures. In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation.

 But the Lithians actually disprove elements that are necessary for salvation. They show that they can have a perfectly moral and peaceful society without God. They are an atheist’s dream and a theist’s nightmare.                   

Richard Dawkins

Alister McGrath

In A Case of Conscience Ruiz-Sanchez declares Lithia to be a trap created by Satan to destroy the faith of the weak. If one actually seriously takes in what Lithia presents I would say they would have to either conclude that Christianity is a lie or that the planet is a lie. Now personally I do not believe that there will come a day that science could completely prove anything that contradicts Christianity. If I did I would not be a Christian. But there will be things presented that appear to contradict Christianity. What should a Christian do with this? To what extend should Christians defend themselves and to what extent should they allow Christianity to be about theology and Science about Science? To what extent should theology and science mix?

Obligatory Introductory Post: This feels like a whole new low...

Okay. I did it.  I started a blog. I've been told to do it on occasion, but I've always thought it was hopelessly conceited. I don't know how that stopped me. I never pretended not to be conceited. I guess boredom was enough to bring it on. Not that I haven't been bored enough before but apparently I'm getting weaker in my old age. I have heard that I should start a blog because I like ranting about stuff. Personally I think people are hoping I will get all my ranting out on the internet so they won't have to hear about it.

I mostly just think blogging is a bunch of lonely people yelling out into the blogosphere hoping desperately that someone will notice them and think they're cool. So I guess I'm one of them now.... Oh dear...

Oh, just in case you were curious; the blog title is me mocking Simon Guillebaud who wrote a memoir called Dangerously Alive. It had to be done.