BADD: Bloody Torchwood
May. 1st, 2009 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trouble
If you haven't seen Torchwood, I'm not entirely sure how to describe it. It's a Doctor Who spinoff where Captain Jack Harkness and his band of misfits battle to keep the Earth safe from aliens arriving in Cardiff, Wales. There is a Rift in Time and Space that is the Plot Device when needed - aliens pop out of it and, sometimes, people get sucked into it.It's also a show where sex and flirtation are part of the plot. Episodes have revolved entirely around sex, such as the one with "sex pollen", but sexuality, flirtations, and explicit sexual relationships - both same sex and opposite sex - have all been main or side plots. One throw-away line that's often quoted 'round the fandom is recurring guest star (and ex-lover of Jack's) Captain John Hart's comments about how attractive he finds a poodle.
But of course no one in Torchwood would ever flirt with someone with a disability. They've never had the chance - no one with a visible disability has ever been on the show.
Oh wait! I tell a lie! Of course someone who has a disability and is deformed has been on the show! I totally forgot. Let me tell you about it.
In Adrift, an episode in late Season 2, Gwen Cooper realises that several people have gone missing in Cardiff, and slowly starts to piece together that they've been "taken by the Rift". The episode focuses on the story of one mother, Nikki Bevan, whose son had gone missing seven months earlier. It shows her grief, and her obsession with finding out what happened to her son. She's loving and emotionally invested in the search, in contrast to the growing hardness of viewer-standin Gwen.
I'll skip a lot of summary, which you can read at Wikipedia should you wish.
Guess what! They find Nikki's son! He comes back disfigured, having seen into the heart of a dark star, and has aged 40 years, but he's still her son. However, Jack has been keeping him in an underground lair with no windows and concrete, unpainted walls. All the doors are locked from the outside, so the inmates can't possibly get out. They're even transported to the dungeon with bags over their heads so they can't see where they're going, and no one can see them. And they're left there, locked away from the world. For their own good.
Against Jack's orders, Gwen brings Nikki to see her son. Nikki is at first horrified at what remains of the boy she knew, but quickly starts insisting that she wants to care for him. That she loves him. That she's the best person to be with him as he recovers. He's her son, after all, and even if she has to keep him away from the windows, she'll love him and take care of him.
Until the screaming starts, of course. Then she can't cope. She can't ever cope with someone who screams like that. She runs out of the room, and the next time we see her she's putting away all of his things. Now, he's not her son anymore. There's no turning back. He screams, because he's seen horrors, and she can't imagine this thing is her son.
In her final scene, she makes Gwen promise not to tell anyone else what happened to their children, because not knowing is better than knowing your child will spend the rest of hir natural life with a disability.
You may have noticed throughout my write-up I haven't referred to Nikki's child by name. That's because the story isn't about him. He's a prop to tell us about Gwen, about Jack, about Nikki. Once he's revealed as being discardable, we never see him again.
I wrote about my first, gutted reaction to this episode when I watched it, but have never been able to get over it. I want to participate in the general fandom-related squee and enjoyment, but all I can think of is this show thinks having a child with a disability, even a severe one, is worse than having a child disappear. All I can think of is the complete ignorance of the experiences of families with disabilities, whose children do scream and scream and scream, or do some other harming activity, because of their disability, and their parents love them anyway. I think about how this is another episode of television that's used a person with a disability as a way for the non-disabled to learn something about themselves.
I think about how they decided disability and deformity would be their stand-in for horrible and unimaginable.
That's what ablism is. It's implying that a mother is making a huge sacrifice by choosing to interact with her son who has a disability. It's saying that having a disability is the worst thing that can happen to someone, that it makes them so horrible they should be locked away. It's not even thinking to add a ten second scene where Gwen, the so-called heart of the show, tells Jack that he will buy some bloody paint for the walls, that he'll put some carpet down, that he'll move these people (they are still people, Jack) to a better place, because they don't deserve to be locked away from fresh air and sky.
His name was Jonah.
Even showing her unnerved but determined, would have been a good follow up.
But what you describe?
She can love him and advocate for him, but when he starts screaming she suddenly can't? She can't even demand visiting rights and that the place he's in be more comforting to help him heal, even if she realizes she can't take him home? That is definitely throwing a human being away.
Granted, my impression of Torchwood has been it's the show ABOUT throwing human beings under the bus of THESE GUYS HAVE MIGHT & ARE RIGHT. And that they're less compassionate than the Doctor.
I remember your first post. Looking back at it now, I didn't even understand in THIS post that the child was still the size of a child but aged. There are REAL LIFE CHILDREN who age quickly because of a disease and their parents don't abandon them.
Even Star Trek's THE CAGE believed the disabled and disfigured should be allowed to be happy (even if doing so had to be done via illusion). WTF?
Although I've described it poorly - Jonah was 17 when he disappeared, and when he returns he's even played by a different actor.
I think this pathetic excitement on my part is a real demonstration of the issues with disability in the media that I get excited just to see a background character.
Who has a history of wheelchair-using baddies which has been as bad or worse in new Who: the industrialist baddie Max Capricorn in Voyage of the Damned, the industrialist Cyber-inventor John Lumic in Rise of the Cybermen, does the skin-woman Cassandra from End of the World and New Earth count? And, of course, Davros (inherited from old Who). Ouch. Because that's 6 episodes out of only 56 with wheelie baddies and no major bewheeled goodies rolling immediately to my mind.
/SPOILERS for wheeled baddies in new Who
*sigh*
My impression of Dr Who's wheeled baddies has been that part of their horror is that they dare to consider themselves worthy (or even great) in spite of the fact that they are only there with the help of technology. There is always the climactic scene where their life support systems stop working and we see the weak being that we always knew they were.
I have taken it to mean that their is something wrong with needing external help to function.
::glomphs splodgenoodles but very gently::
They are not 'robots' as many people think, they are meant to be living beings, inside a robotic body, they were genetically mutated in the dim and distant past, and have evolved into a genetic blob really, and require the dalek style outer casing in order to move and do their evil.
So really, the big baddies are disabled mutants...
But its sci-fi, and not meant to be taken seriously...
I have only watched a bit of Torchwood, but I remember watching this episode and being unable to articulate my rage. It was so awful. I tried to explain to my brother something about how writers create their fictional worlds around certain assumptions, and how this ep was created around the assumption that a traumatized, mentally ill man could never interact with his family, ever. I don't think he got that.
Torchwood and Doctor Who both left a bad taste in my mouth with regards to ability and how it's treated. There was a humorous episode of DW where a woman sank into the ground and remained as a mobile stone face with no body. I was really struck by the parallels, physically, to quadriplegia and how the man who supposedly loved this woman didn't make any effort to provide her with mobility. He didn't even turn her face to the camcorder he was talking to.
I don't really know how to frame how that disturbed me, or what it means. I don't really understand it, I just know that it made me queasy.
Your post made me think. Thanks. With all my experience of disability and disablism, I still didn't see that episode as a disability story. I will watch it again, and reconsider. If we don't acknowledge these things, they keep happening.
I didn't get round to doing a BADD post this year, but I've been reading lots, and I've really enjoyed what I've read.
Really? Knowing you that surprises me.
WRT the OP, an excellent analysis of the episode. I'm doing an MA in Cult Film & TV and I simply don't have enough hours in the day to rant about all the negative disability imagery I see. As it is all my coursemates think I have a one-track mind for talking about disability so much. But I feel like I have to on account of the fact that no-one else does.
Attila the Mom
I once wrote an essay on Images of Handicap - it was a looooong time ago, handicap was in general use then - in such situations. I could find references to loads of disabled villains...but only a handful of good guys (e.g. DareDevil, Professor Xavier, Thor (see the recurring theme - yeah, comics). My favourite was Quasimodo...essentially he saved Esmerelda's life)
Anyways, terrific post for BADD 2009; thanks for sharing your thoughts and emotions!
BTW...The aforementioned lecturer who said "Eugenics doesn't happen anymore" needs to get his head out of the clouds and wake up to the world!