Lab Notes
Men in Black Tweed

How is Torchwood different from Men in Black?

Well, the most obvious difference is the British accents, owing to the fact that Torchwood is a TV show produced by the BBC. Secondly, there are no spaceships or flying cars. Thirdly, the series boasts at least three homosexual characters, whose romantic lives are treated matter-of-factly and without a great deal of fuss. Also, the tone is darker, the body count is higher, and there isn't quite so much BFG (Big Freaking Gun) syndrome. Like any other government spooks, the agents of Torchwood carry handguns and shotguns, badges and plastic evidence baggies. In this sense, the series pays homage to The X-Files, though without the paranoid antigovernment spin, and to investigative crime shows like CSI and, for geeks of a certain age, Quincy.

Still, the underlying scenario is distinctly MIBesque, centering around an extra-secret extra-governmental agency tasked with rounding up and deporting alien invaders. "The 21st century is when everything changes," we're told, "and you have to be ready."

In literal meaning, the word "torchwood" refers to the body of any tree of the genus Amyrus. Found throughout the American tropics, these trees bear cherrylike fruits and have extremely resinous wood that causes them to burn really well, and thus be suitable for the production of torches. The casual viewer could be forgiven for seeing something metaphorical in this title: a flaming torch represents not only light against darkness, but also peasant against master, raider against peasant, and of course man against nature. Think of the Olympic torch, thrust high in defiance of the very gods from whom it was stolen!

Igniting Torchwood

However, Torchwood the TV show is a spinoff from the Doctor Who franchise, and the letters are simply an anagram of the good doctor's name. It seems that after a bit of a scuffle in which you-know-Who intervened, Queen Victoria founded the clandestine "Torchwood House" (later Torchwood Institute) in the mid-19th century to prepare the world (well, the Commonwealth) for upcoming waves of alien interference. I have to confess here that I've never been a Doctor Who fan. The latest incarnation, viewable on both BBC and SCI FI, has better special effects and more hard science content than previous versions of the show, but the overall package is still not technically credible and so holds little interest for me. Which is why there's never been a Lab Notes column about Doctor Who, and probably never will be.

But anyway, Torchwood takes place in Cardiff, Wales, where a rift has opened up in time and space, allowing creatures to tumble through into our world from other planets—or other times, or other dimensions, or something like that. This kind of thing isn't ruled out by the laws of physics as they're presently understood, but the stately town of Cardiff hardly seems the place for it. Honestly, if there were a rift in spacetime spilling out ugly, smelly, antisocial monsters, surely it would be in Swansea?

But aside from that, the show offers a lot of interesting sci-tech details that are more than worthy of analysis here. The first and most obvious of these is "retcon," a drug that the Torchwood agents administer to wipe the memories of people who get too close. Like the MIB "neuralyzer," yeah, except it's a chemical rather than a flashy light. And that's interesting, because such a chemical already exists: propranolol, a blood pressure reducer that has been implicated in memory problems. Recently, researchers have actually found ways to use this drug to delete specific unwanted memories. (Dutiful Lab Notes readers may recall that I've used this factoid in each of my last three columns, but it's just too cool, too science-fictional, and too universally applicable to leave alone. But if you don't recall it, then forget I said anything. Heh.)

Retcon was invented by 21st-century humans, though, and tailored by Torchwood specialists to suit their own particular needs. Most of the other interesting technology has come through the rift and is alien in both design and function. We see a device that can scan and digitize the text of an entire book without opening it and feed the result into a computer whose interfaces and file formats are surely unfamiliar to it. We see an irresistible pheromone that completely seizes the consciousness of everyone who sniffs it, driving their minds into a sexually receptive (indeed demanding) state. We see a field generator that gets into people's heads and forcibly diverts their attention, making a small area both invisible and inaudible to passersby.

These things are certainly possible—again, there's nothing in the laws of physics to forbid it—but each of them involves a huge amount of computing power, as well as the ability to scan the pathways of an alien device or brain, decode its exact functioning and inject false data into the stream to alter its output. Worse still, in the case of the pheromone these capabilities have to be packed into something soluble and microscopically small. We're talking serious technology here, at least a hundred years ahead of anything the Cardiff cops can deploy in 2007. What makes it even more interesting is that the Torchwood experts don't really understand the technology themselves. Like dogs chewing on a TV remote, they can pull certain tricks without having any idea how or why they work, or what the actual purpose of these alien devices might be. They also succumb—not occasionally but chronically—to the temptation to misuse the toys for their own sordid purposes. Torchwood has power—political, economic and technological, as well as the raw power of secrecy itself—and we're never allowed to forget just how corrupting that can be, even for people with the best of intentions.

Bring out your dead!

The show also presents us with at least three separate means of raising the dead. First there's a metal gauntlet (called simply "the glove") that has the ability to resurrect an intact body—but only for two minutes. This is sometimes long enough for the dearly departed to provide vital information about how or why they died, but more often they spend their precious moments screaming for help. It's quite horrific to watch, actually, proving once again that half-understood alien technology is a mixed blessing at best. The team does eventually find a way to extend the two-minute deadline, but as with any black magic, there's a terrible price to pay that ultimately isn't worth it. The only really implausible thing here is that they sometimes resurrect people who died of traumatic brain injury, who are then lucid in conversation despite having no gray matter behind their foreheads. (If you're interested, I addressed some similar issues in "So You've Decided to Raise the Dead," Oct. 2005).

There is also a glass eye (cryptically referred to as a "sixth eye") that, if swallowed before the moment of death, turns the deceased into a sort of out-of-body ghost for as long as the eye remains in contact with the nervous system. It's a little harder to figure out how that one would work—you'd have to scan and simulate the entire living body, as well as capturing sensory data from a "ghost" that wanders tens of miles from the corpse and occasionally projecting a semi-solid hologram ... Even by alien standards, that's some really advanced technology.

And then there is Torchwood's leader, Cap'n Jack Harkness. An American pilot of World War II vintage, he has undergone some mysterious process or event that's rendered him immortal. Even a bullet to the head is just a momentary inconvenience for this guy, so clearly he's got some sort of nanoimmune system running inside his skin that not only repairs damage with unnatural speed but keeps a detailed map of all his neural connections and whatnot so his memories don't get scrambled. Still, it doesn't seem to be a pleasant process, and since he claims repeatedly that it's more of a curse than a blessing, we can only assume that his nanoengineered flesh disagrees with him in some deeply fundamental way. Is he in constant pain? Constant nausea? Is it harder for him to feel or smell or taste? Nothing comes without a price, and in the world of Torchwood you don't usually get to decide whether you're willing to pay it!

For me, the only truly implausible thing about the show is the organizational and hierarchical status of the Torchwood Institute itself. According to Harkness, it's "outside the government, beyond the police, above the U.N.," and I have a hard time believing that the government, the police or the U.N. would put up with that for very long, especially since Torchwood agents have a habit of going insane, turning into monsters, getting innocent people killed and embroiling the Earth in grievous interplanetary incidents. We don't tolerate that kind of behavior from AARP or the Sierra Club, so I don't see why the men and women of Torchwood should get away with it. Still, it's a fun show, and one that doesn't require the laws of physics to bend and break for its plots to work out. And that's an alien technology we can all use.

Sources:
The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com): Torchwood
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org): "Torchwood"
Encyclopedia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite: "Torchwood," "Victoria"
Gray, Richard: "Scientists find drug to banish bad memories," The Telegraph, 07 January 2007