500YD S4E4: The War Between the Land and Denise (Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Four)

Thursday 9 July 2009

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Four

Tonight, John Frobisher’s relationship with the 456 turns from sour to ugly, while Captain Jack Harkness’s day starts with humiliation and ends in death. In contrast, the British PM and his advisors are being uncharacteristically dynamic and productive, which doesn’t bode well for anyone really.

The Trolley Problem is a well-known series of thought experiments used to test our moral intuitions about consequentialism, devised by the English moral philosopher Philippa Foot. In it, most people say that if a runaway train is going to kill five unsuspecting people on the track, it’s okay to flip a switch and divert the train onto a track with only one person on it. However, people tend to be less enthusiastic about stopping the train by pushing a person in front of it, even though the outcome is the same. Sometimes people are invited to imagine if it would make any difference if they knew the person to be sacrificed — a variation on the scenario which will become important later.

The film Contagion (2011), directed by Steven Soderbergh, concerns a highly transmissible and deadly pandemic outbreak which kills 25 million people worldwide. In early 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was getting going, the film enjoyed a surge in popularity, going viral, according to this story in The Guardian from January 2020.

Bury Your Gays (also known as Dead Lesbian Syndrome) is a trope in media — particularly television, although it predates television — denoting the tendency for gay characters in fiction to suffer tragic outcomes, including but not limited to death.

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

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You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched a top-tier episode of Star Trek: Voyager, its 100th episode — Timeless. And we’ve got a brilliant Deep Space Nine episode coming along next. So stay tuned.