Miracle Day (Torchwood)

[rickgriffin]

http://sfdebris.com/videos/tv/miracleday.php

Since I'm doing a rewatch I had a thought about the worst misstep of the series: going back on the concept that those who can't die are conscious through all of it.

I have a story series I've been developing where the principal characters cannot die through any mortal means, and it touches on a lot of what Miracle Day does re: having to invent death. The main difference is that since the characters are lycanthropes, they have extremely efficient regeneration so that's a whole thing. BUT . . . so long as their body is INTACT, it reacts to stimulus just the same as a normal body. They can be drugged, in other words (and one simple solution to removing a drug from their system is to bleed it out and let their bodies regenerate fresh blood)

Bringing it back to Torchwood, for whatever reason halfway through the series they decided a certain kind of trauma results in unconsciousness which undermines the story because it creates a state of "dead enough". But I think this could have been worked with. After all, people still sleep. It was established that painkiller drugs still work. If you really, really need some people to become "effectively dead" as a step before the incineration plot, all you'd need to say is that, so long as their circulatory system is still present, drugs still work, including drugs that knock a patient out.

Which brings back the horror re: total incineration. Being unconscious via drugs only works up until your blood is gone, and then the drug no workie. You're now conscious as a pile of ash and a greasy smear.

This could have tied into the suicide subplot as well: without death, the only real alternative WOULD BE to lose consciousness permanently, and so the "suicide club" could actually be a club that illicitly acquires vast amounts of sufficient knock-out drugs to keep people under permanently, which may result in a market shortage.

[SlackerinDeNile]

Your story series sounds interesting, I'd be up for hearing more about it if you're okay with that.

I'm not a fan of Torchwood to be honest, it's enjoyable in some ways, but I found it mostly very stupid and gratuitous, it seemed like an excuse to make 'Doctor Who meets Kiss Kiss Bang Bang', there was a lot of evident self-indulgence on the part of Russell T Davies throughout it.

You've raised a good point regarding the concept of immortality which Miracle Day tried to explore. However I think that this is the point where Torchwood truly jumped the shark, global-scale immortality where no-one can die no matter what is extremely silly, it's like something out of a cartoon and all it does is remind me of that Halloween episode of The Simpsons where Homer is forced to become the Grim Reaper. Admittedly suspending disbelief with Torchwood was pretty hard to begin with, here it's just impossible.

Do I have a better idea of how to handle it? I guess you could have it so that immortality only happened to certain people and it worked the same way it does for Captain Jack (did he lose it? I forget.) so that the characters were forced to hunt down and trap these people who would be going mad in different ways, maybe even abusing their new power.

[Arkle]

As a joke, on my Fan Fiction.net account, I listed a thing called "Power Rnagers: Miracle Day" as a gag. Nobody caught it though. Or at least nobody messaged me about it. It was just a gag though. I mean, if I were to try and re-tell Miracle Day but with a Power Rangers team instead of the Torchwood team... Well, let's face it, it would almost by default be better than Torchwood Miracle Day, but the hard part really would be deciding what team to use.