Torchwood: Children of Earth

A few thoughts, after the link/jump (for strategic spoiler purposes)…

The thing that sticks out like a sore thumb to me is that in the last…well, let’s call it decade, just to be sure – in the last decade of the Who-niverse, the UK has been through no less than four heads of government. Think about it: first the Slitheen wiped out pretty much all of the cabinet. Then Harriet Jones, prime minister (yes, we !-ing know who you are, lady) is cast out of government shortly after the Sycorax incident. Then Harold Saxon wiped out the cabinet himself before being exposed as the Master. Now Brian Green has basically been tarred as compliant in a scheme to hand over a tenth of the children of Britain to what can only be described as an intergalactic crackhead.

Add up the public incidents, too: the Slitheen, the Sycorax, the Cybermen and Daleks, the Racnoss, the Titanic, the Sontaran invasion, the Daleks stealing the whole bloody planet, and now every kid on Earth pointing and chanting and screaming – aliens are real, they’re here, and they are solely responsible for toppling the last four British governments in a row. At this point, you have to start speculating about what this means for government in Great Britain, especially since the last two PMs were plainly Bad Dudes and complicit in dealings with extraterrestrials that only made things worse. Say what you like about the Ugly American General, but he was dead on: when you fuck up that badly, you don’t get to call the shots anymore, and you have to think that the incidents of the last decade will give weight to the idea that UNIT and the United Nations should be on point for any more alien activity, not national governments – and CERTAINLY not Britain.

You also have to wonder what it means for Torchwood, which seems to reside in a similar space in the UK to the “men in black” of modern American mythology – inasmuch as people are aware of Torchwood, their track record doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in their ability to cope with Really Big Shit. In the last five years or so alone, two entire units of Torchwood have been wiped out of existence to the point where the only Torchwood operatives known to still be alive on Earth are Gwen Cooper and the strange little man who inhabits Torchwood Four (or is it Two? I never remember). Too, Torchwood’s mandate was to protect the British Empire, which at the moment consists of the island of Britain, a reluctantly occupied bit of the next island over, and an assortment of sheep-infested rocks sprinkled around the Atlantic. If Torchwood couldn’t protect against any of the above-mentioned threats, it rather calls into question what Torchwood is for – and whether it’s worth putting back together.

Math it all up and never mind whether Torchwood can continue to exist; the question is can the British form of government, as currently constituted, continue to exist. You think a bunch of people who were already showing wariness about the surveillance state and CCTV and ID cards is going to believe that any government has their best interests at heart after this? You don’t think Scottish separatists won’t take the opportunity to demand that they cut ties with a government that wanted to turn their wee bairns into space heroin? At this point, it’s all coming apart for the UK, and it might be a good idea for Team Who to stay away from Britain for a while until they can sort out what things ought to look like in future. (Although it doesn’t look like that’s going to be the case for the two-part Christmas special…)

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