'On Sf' Or 'Why I hate Torchwood'

Current research commitments have led me to revisit my old science fiction love Babylon 5. The show has its flaws – what show doesn’t, but overall it was one of the most well told stories on television. Reading about the series’ creator J. Michael Straczynski and his experiences of working in television has got me thinking about how far television sf has come since B5.

In creating Babylon 5, Stracyznski wished to address the dearth of intelligent television sf. Babylon 5 was the first major attempt at a science fiction series with an overall story arc, and which attempted to capture the genre’s defining ‘sense of wonder’, so familiar to science fiction readers.

B5 was the first multi-layered US TV sf tale with an overall narrative trajectory. More like a novel for the screen, it was complex, filled with foreshadowing and assumed an intelligent, engaged audience. Many of the show’s strengths lie in its unpredictability - during its 5 year run main characters are replaced (B5 has 3 captains as each takes on a different role in the narrative), and most of the characters change (dramatically in many cases) during the show’s course. Along with its richness of narrative and character, B5 deals with philosophical questions, issues of faith (in a technological universe) and a number of interesting sf concepts (such as time travel, morality, pre-destination and the nature of the self). It is Jungian, political, historical, philosophical and yes, a little over written at times. This, I personally, can forgive. I can also forgive its now dated CGI. Normally I’m not a fan of CGI when it’s used in large quantities (usually because it is a sign of style over substance) but in this case there simply wasn’t the budget to make something so epic for the small screen without the aid of a PC (or an Amiga to be more precise). The success of the show is that the narrative and the characters are so good that the CGI works as a facilitator to the story – more substance over style than style over substance. It is the strength of the story that also allows me to forgive its other flaws – as a whole B5 is as good as any sf novel.

Since B5 we have had some fantastic new TV science fiction. One example of this, (which appears to have been influenced by B5 directly in many ways) is the new Battlestar Galactica (BSG).

Like B5, BSG also has 3 dimensional characters changing as they respond to their circumstances, and it does not offer morally simplistic representations of events or people. Main characters who, on the one hand, are good people but are addicted to drugs, are alcoholics, who sometimes do terrible things in terrible circumstances and who are psychologically disturbed by catastrophic events are found in both B5 and BSG.

Battlestar also takes from B5 the notion that a happy resolution does not have to be reached every 45 minute episode (or even ever in the whole arc – those familiar with B5 will think of Londo here, and Sheridan’s departure in ‘Sleeping in Light’). I will never forget my shock at seeing the B5 episode ‘Believers’ in which a child’s parents will not let him have a lifesaving operation due to their religious beliefs. The doctor goes ahead with the operation anyway and the child is cured. That’s normally the end of the episode. But in this case, when they discover what the Dr has done the parents kill their son – since, in their eyes he is now an abomination. Similarly in ‘Confessions and Lamentations’, doctors search for a cure to a plague, only to discover it too late and an entire race is wiped out. At a time when Star Trek dominated TV sf this kind of plot resolution was powerful stuff. This type of narrative has only recently been matched by BSG, when, in season one, the ships that can escape the Cylons leave everyone else to die. No rescue mission, nothing. This kind of ‘un-cosy’ television marked a drastic movement away from the dominant Star Trek mould.

In Britain, the opposite of ‘the B5 effect’ appears to have taken place. We’ve gone from making series like Blake 7, the BBc’s Day of the Triffids and The Last Train et cetera to ‘New Who’ and Torchwood. New Dr Who is, it proclaims, for children so I won’t address that here. Torchwood, however, is Who’s adult spin off. Bearing in mind my above comments, imagine my amusement when I was reading this website about Torchwood and was offered this insight into how it is challenging TV sf:

‘Last season Gwen hopped into Owen's bed despite her devotion to her clueless live-in lover, Rhys (Kai Owen). "It was completely out of character for Gwen," Myles [who plays Gwen] said, "but that's what good drama is all about. You don't want to spoon-feed a sci-fi audience, you want to challenge them, so none of these characters are safe." In the future, Gwen "does the best she can" with monogamy, Myles said. "But it's a case of anything is possible with the Torchwood bunch."

Hard hitting stuff indeed. Torchwood's obsession with sex is the pinnacle of its intellectual feats. Clearly Farscape needn’t have spent its 4 seasons addressing questions on the nature of reality, or the madness that may accompany estrangement. BSG needn’t have spent the past 3 seasons questioning the nature of humanity and what happens if machines behave more humanely than organic beings; or making contemporary political comments, in which the main characters resort to suicide bombings to try to free themselves from their oppression. And Babylon 5 needn’t have bothered trying to formulate new myths and a sense of wonder so often missing from TV sf. If only we’d known that if we just make all the characters sleep with one another, no matter how unattractive/morally apprehensible they are, we’d have all been suitably challenged (presumably because all sf fans are so sex starved they crave seeing the ‘battle with monogamy’). If people think that this is sf that challenges its audience something is very wrong. It’s not even good escapism; it’s just utter rubbish.

Needless to say I’m not a fan of Torchwood. It has crap sf concepts and treats it’s audience as if it is stupid (examples that come to mind mainly involve unintelligent plot events that snap viewers out of their willing suspension of disbelief; or Owen date raping someone using alien technology; or the fact that all of the characters have only one dominant preoccupation – sleeping with one another. This kind of lack of emotional depth really annoys me). But I have developed an amusing drinking game which involves drinking every time a character makes a pass at someone. This results in anebriation very quickly and dulls the pain (before people say ‘just don’t watch it then’ – I don’t actually watch it now – I only watched it 1st in disbelief, then in the hopes it would get better, and then in disbelief again, as all media publications were telling us how great it is. This, I think, astounds me most of all).

It’s not that I demand all SF to be of a high standard – I just can’t bare this idea that all sf fans want is novelty (in this case sex) and gadgets. This coupled with the idea that you’re making challenging sf is just insulting.

Russell T. Davies’ concept of sf seem to derive from what a juvenile hormonal soap opera writer would think would be really cool in adult sf. British sf under Russell T. Davies has become style over substance, novelty over sense and sex over story. Quite frankly it’s vacuous and rubbish. I find this demise of the BBCs science fiction output infuriating.

It seems now, that to see the legacy of B5, eyes need to turn to the US or to shows like Life on Mars which they won’t label sf for fear of alienating audiences. Grrrr.