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Our latest time-wasting device is Watching 24. For those who haven't had the luxury, the premise of the show is roughly: Heroic Sexy Terror-Fighting Americans variously foil, uncover further, or watch in horror the success of, parts of the Wicked Terrorist Plot, while things blow up in satisfying ways and people do Clever Things with Technology.
The first season, I might say, was really quite good. The plot wibbled all over the place in a very satisfying way.
We are presently watching the fourth season on DVD, and I'm afraid I have two serious complaints.
Whoever writes the geekish parts of the script ought to be spanked; it is astronomically improbable that the first three pages of ASCII characters from a large encrypted file could be made to yield a name and address. Many other howlers. I can suspend my disbelief a pretty long way, but when the terrorist leaves his designs for nuclear warheads in his MS Windows Recycle Bin TM, I become reluctant to suspend it any further.
Second, there is a new plot device. The Heroic Sexy Terror-Fighting Americans advance the plot by discovering a Terrorist Who Won't Talk. Then they torture them. Then they talk, and on the strength of this another Terrorist Who Won't Talk is eventually discovered. Or perhaps not. Either way, the torture is invariably introduced thus:
HST-FA: I need to use physical methods...
Pencil-Pusher Who Doesn't Understand How These Things Work: You mean...torture?
HST-FA: I mean I need to do whatever it takes to save as many of our people as possible.
[Later, after unpleasantness and screaming]
HST-FA (racing off to next location): It worked, they talked.
I don't need to talk about how fallacious this is - at least, I hope I don't - but it does rather bother me that this massive moral fallacy seems to be taken perfectly seriously, not only by the characters we aren't supposed to like (the slimy president, the bitchy boss), but by the ones we are (the Heroic Sexy Terror-Fighting Americans), and apparently by the show's producers, since nothing ironic ever happens as a result of torturing people (and the plot always advances really fast once the torture kicks in, hence it is a Good Thing).
Torture is Bad.
Using torture as a plot device is also Bad.
Using torture as a plot device which always yields really accurate information really fast is Really Amazingly Incredibly Bad. Never mind the political message, what kind of impression is this giving to the world's scriptwriters?
The first season, I might say, was really quite good. The plot wibbled all over the place in a very satisfying way.
We are presently watching the fourth season on DVD, and I'm afraid I have two serious complaints.
Whoever writes the geekish parts of the script ought to be spanked; it is astronomically improbable that the first three pages of ASCII characters from a large encrypted file could be made to yield a name and address. Many other howlers. I can suspend my disbelief a pretty long way, but when the terrorist leaves his designs for nuclear warheads in his MS Windows Recycle Bin TM, I become reluctant to suspend it any further.
Second, there is a new plot device. The Heroic Sexy Terror-Fighting Americans advance the plot by discovering a Terrorist Who Won't Talk. Then they torture them. Then they talk, and on the strength of this another Terrorist Who Won't Talk is eventually discovered. Or perhaps not. Either way, the torture is invariably introduced thus:
HST-FA: I need to use physical methods...
Pencil-Pusher Who Doesn't Understand How These Things Work: You mean...torture?
HST-FA: I mean I need to do whatever it takes to save as many of our people as possible.
[Later, after unpleasantness and screaming]
HST-FA (racing off to next location): It worked, they talked.
I don't need to talk about how fallacious this is - at least, I hope I don't - but it does rather bother me that this massive moral fallacy seems to be taken perfectly seriously, not only by the characters we aren't supposed to like (the slimy president, the bitchy boss), but by the ones we are (the Heroic Sexy Terror-Fighting Americans), and apparently by the show's producers, since nothing ironic ever happens as a result of torturing people (and the plot always advances really fast once the torture kicks in, hence it is a Good Thing).
Torture is Bad.
Using torture as a plot device is also Bad.
Using torture as a plot device which always yields really accurate information really fast is Really Amazingly Incredibly Bad. Never mind the political message, what kind of impression is this giving to the world's scriptwriters?
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