Torture: Buffy, Angel, 24, The Guardian & The What If Man

This article first appeared in the Age on April 26, 2003

Torture, it seems, is the new black. Just everyone is doing it. Perhaps it might just feel like good old-fashioned entertainment if it weren't for distressing images of the American soldiers, who have clearly been tortured, being paraded on television, or the recent debate about whether or not we should 'permit' the American government to torture Al Quaeda members.
Poor old Spike is being tortured on a fairly regular basis in Buffy (Tuesdays, Channel 7, 10.30pm), in that show's ironic but fairly explicit style. And it's just a frenzy of torture on 24 (Mondays, Channel 7, 8.30pm), what with the President watching a short circuit television so he can see Yulin, formerly the head of National Security, being electrocuted while his feet sit in a bucket of water. (Tips galore really, for those who want to set up a chamber at home). Jack has got Syed Ali tied to a chair in front of a close circuit television so he can watch his wife and two sons be tied down while men with bags over their heads hold a gun to their heads. As those who watched will know, the President rang Jack to say he can't allow that kind of thing (I don't know whether he still had his TV on at this point) but Jack goes ahead and kills one of the boys anyway, thus prising a confession out of Ali. Then you find out in the next scene the boy's death was faked, meaning Jack is nice after all, thus paving the way for the development of sexual tension between him and Cate. (The suggestion is she'd be less keen if he actually shot young boys. Go figure.) She was tortured and had her ear sliced open only the week before.

Perhaps Father-son relationships are the new grey? They fuel The Guardian (Channel 10) and Angel (Wednesdays, Channel 7, 10.30pm). Angel, (a show that also loves a good torture scene) cuts straight to the point when Angel's son, Connor, has sex with his father's almost girlfriend. It's a creepy scene, given that, in real time, Connor is about a year old. However, due to hell dimensions and space-time continuums, he is now about 16. The Guardian is subtler. Nick Fallin (played by the terrific Australian actor, Simon Baker) is a young attorney with a drug problem. He works in a firm with his father, Burton Fallin (Dabney Coleman) and the tenuous bond between them is tested by Burton's insensitivity and Nick's hypersensitivity. In each episode they lurch from one misunderstanding to the next. It makes for strong television even if there are so many addiction and behavioural problems among the cast that it's hard to believe that a) they are meant to be on the right side of the law and b) they ever get any work done.

My love of Buffy and Angel, and the way those shows pick up on societies free floating angst, is a talking point between me and my father - he's a big Buffy fan. He's also a science fiction critic, and the subject of The What If Man: The Science Fictional Life of Peter Nicholls (Friday, SBS, 8.30pm). He has been hailed as the world's foremost authority on science fiction, partly because he edited the award-winning The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction. In this documentary he draws on parallels between science fiction and the "real world". "Science fiction is at once so entertaining and so silly on the one hand, and so deeply serious on the other, and you cannot separate the two," he says. My point exactly.

Posted by Sophie at 02:52 PM