Torchwood: Miracle Day is one of the most intensely political things I’ve ever seen on television. Through two episodes, everything from health care, to extraordinary rendition, to the death penalty, to drug stockpiling, to the ethics of abortion and contraception in a world where the population’s exploding. What’s exceptional about Miracle Day, though, is not just that it’s tackling the issues of the day, but the way it’s using science fictional conceits and our affection for existing characters to reframe key issues rather than simply to pose the same questions again.

Charlie Jane Anders has a wonderful outline of the show’s core dilemma: what happens to every aspect of health care, from management to chronic conditions, to disease control, to organ donation, in a world where no one dies? Miracle Day isn’t throwing out the world of politics — people are still opposed to abortion and contraception, and with swamped emergency rooms, there are still questions about health care rationing. But rather than fighting over death panels and mandates to purchase insurance, the events of Miracle Day totally upset the rules, making the question not about how we’re going to pay for health care, but how we’re going to deliver it at all when there aren’t enough beds, enough drugs, enough doctors. In the real world, of course, the payment question’s still there, and still important. But shifting the framework and the questions we ask about the issues, even temporarily, is the kind of thought experiment science fiction’s made for.

And on a smaller scale, I thought the rendition scenes were more effective than Charlie Jane did. It’s one thing to show the impact of extraordinary rendition on a family we’ve just met a couple of minutes ago, like in Rendition. It’s entirely another to see character’s we’ve gotten to know over three or more years torn away from their kids on a tarmac, dragged limp up a set of moveable steps and into a plane. It’s easy to abstract experiences we haven’t had, and that no one we know have had or are likely to have. Art can provide an emotional connection to those kinds of issues, things we oppose in principal but not out of an actual visceral objection to them.

When Torchwood: Miracle Day returns to television tonight, Gwen Cooper will have to come out of retirement from Torchwood to save the world—and the health care system—when everyone on Earth suddenly becomes unable to die. I talked to Eve Myles, the actress who plays Gwen, about what this season of Torchwood has to say about leadership and David Cameron, what it’s like to play an action star who’s also a mother, and why Gwen and Captain Jack Harkness should never get together (though she previews a big scene between the two later this season).

I’ll be recapping Miracle Day for the rest of this season, but this post will function as an open thread for tonight’s episode. A fuller review of the show, with particular attention to its healthcare implications is here. And I’ll be curious to hear what y’all think about Torchwood‘s move to America, and the health care storyline that forms the core of this season.

Obviously transporting Torchwood from Wales to the U.S. is a big shift. How did it change your experience of the show? What about the experience of having a team that’s a blend of old Torchwood members and American intelligence officers?

Well, I mean, initially, I’m playing the same character, so that’s always a help. So I didn’t have to delve into a different pair of shoes. It’s just the surroundings and the situation have changed. The way it’s written is Gwen is finding it all quite awkward…It was just something that we had to do with the series this year. If we’re going to top Children of Earth, we have to make it bigger and better, and the only way to do that was to bring it to the United States. We wanted to make it a blockbuster, and hopefully, that’s what we did.

You’ve got all these individuals with very strong personalities. We’ve been asked constantly about us having a bigger budget and it beging more of an explosive series, because it is aesthetically better, no doubt. But the most engrossing part of the drama is when you’ve got all the individuals under one roof sitting around a table talking to each other.

The main story in Miracle Day’s also quite explicitly political—at least, coming off of health care reform, it’s going to seem that way to American audiences. Do you think it’ll resonate in the UK in the same way?

Well, I think there’s all sorts of resonances in there. There’s so much politics being written into this story…Obviously, with us having a new PM, and David Cameron being so young, it’s all about decision-making. And what the humans do to each other to get by, and it’s disgrace.

Well, and even sex is political. I was particularly struck by that scene in the third episode where Jack and the guy from the bar talk about whether you have to use protection if no one’s going to die.

If you ask people, if the universe is going to end in 24 hours, so many people would say I’d get drunk, and I’d have sex, and I’d do crazy things, and I’d have a wonderful time. But the reality of it is, is if you do get hurt, if you catch a dreadful disease, you have to live with it for eternity. It doesn’t go away. They don’t stop hurting, or being in a terrible kind of state. If you’re involved in something that happens to you because of something you’ve done to yourself, or you’ve had that one-night stand, actually there is a consequence to everything you do. It’s highlighting you have to take care of yourself, because these things do last forever.

Initially, you think it’s a good thing. But you start scratching the surface on it and it’s a curse.
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Torchwood: Miracle Day premieres on Starz tonight at 10pm, asking what would happen to sex, religion, politics, and the health care system in a world where no one can die—but everyone can feel pain and continue to suffer from disease. As the action moves to the United States, I talked to veteran TV writer Jane Espenson about what it was like to come on to the famous franchise, what she’s learned about writing political science fiction from her work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica, and writing a scene where the immortal Captain Jack Harkness and policewoman-turned-alien investigator Gwen Cooper lay it all on the table. I’ll have an interview with Eve Myles, the wonderful Welsh actress who plays Cooper, up in a couple of hours.

What were some of the challenges of bringing Torchwood to the U.S.? Were there things that you thought it was possible to do on Starz that weren’t possible on the BBC? Certainly, the show is somewhat more sexually explicit in a way I think that really works, but I don’t know if there were other things that airing on a different channel made possible. One thing Eve Myles mentioned when we talked to her is the way Torchwood‘s sort of found its stride when it’s able to fit long arcs into a number of episodes appropriate to it: do you think it’s worth it for other American shows to explore shorter seasons, or seasons of variable length on purpose?

I never wrote for the show when it was on the BBC, but I think the freedoms there in terms of language and sexuality are much more on a par with the rules at Starz they would be with a major US broadcast network. I think writers who had worked for the BBC writing Torchwood would have probably felt pretty constrained by some of the network restrictions. Being limited to only the mildest of epithets and making everyone keep all their clothes on—that’s no way to tell a tense and sexy thriller! And yes, I love the idea of developing stories with an eye toward the number of episodes that fit the story. It’s not often that something is both obvious and revolutionary, but that is. Yes, it would be fantastic if that became something that was implemented here.

How did you settle on the health care plot arc? How do you think it’ll resonate in the U.S. and the U.K., which are in very different stages on the road to universal health care?

Russell had the story seed already planted in his brain when I was brought on board, and he’d already thought through a lot of the implications. Then, as a group, we discussed it all at even greater length. Then we brought in a doctor and discussed it all again, and every time it just felt better and deeper and more important. I think it will resonate with US audiences in particular since the warring opinions on health care are so remarkably far apart. I’m less familiar with the UK system, but I knew that Russell obviously had an instinct for what would resonate there.
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I’ve been watching my screeners for the second half of Eureka‘s fourth season (thanks, Syfy!), and I think it’s crystallized something I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of weeks. While I know that science fiction inevitably contains elements of magic and fantasy when it ventures ahead of things we can reasonably extrapolate or predict from existing scientific knowledge, I think it’s time we do away with — or at least take a break from — time travel stories in science fiction with an exception for Doctor Who.

My irritation stemmed from my attempt to get through all of Torchwood before Miracle Day launches on July 8 (I’m almost done with season two and on my way to Children of Earth). The show’s tagline, in all of its variations, lays out an interesting premise: “Torchwood: outside the government, beyond the police. Tracking down alien life on Earth, arming the human race against the future. The twenty-first century is when everything changes. And you’ve got to be ready.” The problem is, despite that stated premise, Torchwood’s theoretically located over a rift in time, which means that the show spends at least as much time dealing with time travel stories as it does with any major changes in human society as a result of contact with aliens. And frankly, those time travel stories are exhaustingly repetitive.

Often, they’re a way to reinforce the general angst of the series, whether it’s Jack going back to meet the man he stole his name from and making out with him in an act of sexual repentance and charity; Owen learning to love a woman who will inevitably leave him as payback for his aversion to attachment; Tosh falling for yet another person who is unavailable to her because he has to return to his own time. For a show that’s supposed to be more adult-oriented, in that the characters actually have sex and tell each other to fuck off on a fairly regular basis, there’s a general melancholia and pessimism about sex and relationships that has an oddly puritan streak to it.

And the focus on the time rift means the show doesn’t really grapple with a theoretical new order in the 21st century. Sure, there are episodes about whether an alien mist might cause someone to get promiscuous, or about whether a woman you start dating in a bar might turn out to be an alien with problematic intentions (more with the anxiety about sex), or about whether disaffected urban men might start a fight club pitting themselves against vicious aliens, or whether men might make a business out of harvesting alien meat. But there’s not a coherent analysis of a shift here, a sense of why the aliens are showing up—is Earth a convenient waystation? is there something uniquely attractive about humanity? something destabilizing happening elsewhere in the universe? — or whether humanity’s developing in a way that makes it more receptive to accepting the idea of a populated universe.
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I’m on a bit of a sprint to watch at least the core of Torchood so I can properly analyze Torchwood: Miracle Day when it premieres in July. Two things that are striking me about the show so far, other than the whole pansexual space pirate thing, which is the most obvious vector for analysis. First, both the Doctor Who and Torchwood universes do really nice work when they tell stories about fans. And second, Torchwood feels, at least in the early going, a little institutionally unmoored.

I’m not entirely caught up with the rebooted Doctor Who yet, but one of the episodes I’ve watched that touched me most was “Love & Monsters,” which is essentially about a fan-and-mild-conspiracies club of people who believe the Doctor exists, and what happens first when that belief becomes secondary to the members’ friendships, and then when they actually, desperately need him to be real. There is a monster, to be sure, but he’s not really the point. The episode’s a fairly tender story about how wonderful it is to discover you’re not alone in your interests and your passions, and how those interests can be a critically important icebreaker, particularly if you’re not great at the work of conventional socializing. In the first season of Torchwood, “Random Shoes” does takes a different approach to a similar theme. A young man who’s seen his early promise slip away, and who clings to an interest in and belief in aliens as the last thing that makes him special, finds that after his death, that love makes it possible for him to undertake one last heroic act. Obviously it makes sense for shows like these to write Valentines to their fans, but they’re a nice acknowledgement of the fact that it’s increasingly easy to have fandom as an organizing principal for your life, and as a result, it’s (at least anecdotally) increasingly common and increasingly important way to arrange your social life.

On a less positive note, though, one of the things I like least about Torchwood so far is the extent to which the organization is isolated. Obviously, Torchwood Three has some kind of relationship with the Cardiff police, which gets vexed with their supernatural counterparts. And there were multiple branches of Torchwood. But we don’t get a sense of any institutional tension between Torchwood and more conventional law enforcement: the team tends to be able to just waltz into crime scenes, and to turn human offenders like the murders in “Countrycide” over to the cops without any real need to conceal their existence. The relationship’s an irritant than a real constraint on Torchwood’s operations.

Similarly, the fact that Torchwood Three appears to be the only functional branch of the institute isn’t actually a good thing for the show. We don’t get a training montage that really introduced Gwen to Torchwood’s practices and traditions, which would be both a fun thing to do, a great way to introduce viewers to the world the creators are building, and a good way to establish the constraints Torchwood agents work under. Without constraints, it’s hard to know what it means to be a Torchwood agent. As is, they’re basically private dicks who know that aliens are out there. My understanding is that we get more context later for why Torchwood Three is what’s left. But even if, and especially if, they’re what remains of a tradition, that should be an interesting burden to carry out, a legacy to carry on, something that should be part of Gwen’s experience and ours.