The dark side of deathless TV worlds

A prisoner is strapped to a bed in a concrete room then connected to a lethal injection machine; the solution flows but he doesn’t die.

A man driving on the highway at night in the rain is tailgating a truck that stops short; a sharp metal pole flies from the truck, crashes through the man’s windshield and plunges into his chest. He too lives. “I had a pole through my chest!” he exclaims incredulously, “I was dead, then I wasn’t.” What on the earth is happening? People have stopped dying and no one seems to know why. This is the premise for the new television show, “Torchwood: Miracle Day”, whose season finale airs Friday September 9th, on Starz.

Of course, you can’t have too much of a good thing and Torchwood is rife with catastrophe as well. Scientists predict that with no one dying the world will become unsustainable because of overpopulation within four months. The global stock market tumbles and a wild plot begins to unfold, involving the CIA, an errant pharmaceutical company, unknown mercenaries, a trio of mafia families led by a mysterious man named Angelo and a strange sci-fi device kept under a bed which generates something called a null field. The drama crisscrosses the globe, with characters traveling back and forth between California, Washington D.C., Whales, Shanghai, Buenos Aires and New York City’s Little Italy neighborhood, all the time moving toward an imminent supernatural event called The Blessing which just might save humanity, or destroy it. Torchwood: Miracle Day is very much a contemporary series but the theme is a sci-fi staple: a society that has somehow managed to defy death and create a dream world, which upon closer inspection is more like a nightmare.

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Another example of such a world comes from the late 1990s TV show, “Sliders”, which follows a quirky group of San Franciscans from parallel universe to parallel universe as they slide across space and time in search of the original earth where their journey began. They do this by using a device that looks like a TV remote control which can open wormholes in the space-time continuum and was developed by Quinn, a genius graduate student studying string theory. Along for the slide are his best friend and sometimes lover Wade, his professor and mentor, Maximillian Arturo and a jazz singer named Rembrandt “Cryin’ Man” Brown, who just happens to be driving by Quinn’s house when the initial wormhole opens up. In “Luck of the Draw,” season two’s final episode, the gang has slid into what seems like a perfect world. Thanks to universal birth control the population is one-tenth of what it is on the earth we know. The city is tranquil, people are calm, food is cheap, taxis are free and when Arturo loses his wallet a teenager happily returns it. Best yet, corner lotto kiosks distribute as much cash as you want. When Wade wins the lotto she gets a white card which allows her to buy anything she wants (she gets a BMW and diamond rings), but winners also receive a very different sort of prize: death.

The episode is reminiscent of the cult 1970s sci-fi film, “Logan’s Run”, in which a post-apocalyptic society lives blissfully inside a domed city. Everyone is young, beautiful, smiley and promiscuous. A machine reminiscent of “Star Trek’s” famous transporter allows those interested in a sexual partner for the evening to instantly beam a like minded person of the desired sex right into their home. The Catch-22 is everyone has a crystal embedded in their palm that changes color as they age. Upon reaching age 30 it goes black, indicating it’s time to play a game called carousal. People with black crystals try to float out of a large arena without being zapped by electric bolts that vaporize them. The audience laughs and cheers. Everyone seems to think carousal provides a chance at eternal life, although it really means certain death.

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Logan’s Run, Sliders and Torchwood: Miracle Day all offer the same lesson, it’s better to be mortal. “Miracle Day…is not a good thing for the psyche of the world’s population, not to mention the world itself,” reads a Hollywood Reporter review of the show. “If you can’t die, why be good? And what will that mean for your retirement plan?”