Some spoilers for Torchwood: Children of Earth and Torchwood: Miracle Day follow. I try to keep it minimal and thematic rather than plot-specific.
I have a new respect for Russell T. Davies. He won a lot of it back with Children of Earth, and honestly, it’s only going up with the strides made with Miracle Day.
Because I finally figured out who the monsters really are, and they’re a hell of a lot scarier than the Daleks. They’re scarier than the Weeping Angels. They’re scarier than the Silence.
I know quite a few people who don’t like Children of Earth, not because of the nominal plot arc, but instead because of the actions other people take during the course of the series. With that series, it was relatively easy to be distracted – the 456 are there, after all, center stage. And they’re pretty callously awful.
But they aren’t the monsters in Children of Earth.
There’s some shadowy organization, reminiscent of the Illuminati, that pervades the storyline of Miracle Day. They aren’t the monsters, no matter what eventually gets revealed.
And of course, there’s Oswald “she should have run faster” Danes. But for all his sociopathic evil, he isn’t the monster either.
We don’t need a monster for either series.
We already sacrifice the futures of millions of children every year. Best estimates are that 1 in 50 children live in homeless families. As many as 14% of children in Ohio live in extreme poverty. But we don’t provide for them. We make sure people with more than enough money to survive get more through tax loopholes and call them “job creators”.
We already wall our old into nursing homes with substandard care, and slash medical aid and benefits to those who need it. (Do I really need to cite this one?) We make them get out of the way, and claim that we have no choice.
I already see hospitals that construct facilities to keep outpatients from ever seeing inpatients. I see fake sanitized downtowns taking the place of real city centers. I see us shuffling the homeless and down-on-their-luck somewhere else – just Not In My Backyard.
Everything is in place. It already exists.
We don’t need an alien monster to show up for Torchwood to fight.
The monster is us.
And we’re already here.
Ah, I wasn't clear. The Greene (which I linked to) is not a cleaned-up city center. It is a mall, inaccessible by public transport, located on the edge of a bedroom community. It's a "pretend" downtown that strictly polices against any kind of … "those people". (Insert stereotype of your choice, you're probably right.)
I was agreeing with you right up to the sanitized city center. As someone who is working to save a dead and dying downtown, that looked pretty good to me. I seem to be missing your point on that one.
Did this replace something better?