carrying torches

Sushi last night from a place I found while trawling around the website for the Leeds Food Festival (which I missed completely) - Sesame. Lovely person who responded to my astonished email query over the promotional 50% discount on orders over 25quid was also the lovely person who turned up at my door last night, laden with fresh fishy goodness. Our (for us) huge platter (40 pieces) came to 17.50 - a steal - and was the freshest, most satisfying sushi we've had in England (I shan't speak for the rest of Britain - I reckon Scotland could do some fine fresh fish). And the crab in the california rolls was fresh from Whitby; none of this pollack-dressed-as-crab nonsense. It was a revelation. Namely, that pollack tastes nothing like crab. And wonderful thick slices of salmon, tuna, and seabass draped over the rice - not mean little strips of fish that could double as stained-glass pieces barely covering a too-big chunk of over-cooked rice (in my worst experience here, the rice had clearly been pre-rolled and cut to size by a machine...).

It was eaten with gusto while anticipating the final installment in the five-part, third series of Torchwood.

Which was exhilerating - if melodramatic in places ('The Doctor must turn from this planet in shame...' from Gwen being the most notable: a nice attempt to explain why the Doctor didn't show up and save the day in, say, 1945, or during Stalin's purges, or the Khmer Rouge, or Rwanda - but did manage to get here in time to ensure that the population of the UK would be safe while watching the coronation of Elizabeth II. This is becoming far too long for a parenthetical aside but anyway this seems to highlight for me the problem of bringing fantasy/sci-fi/fiction and 'realism' too close together - it's like matter and anti-matter (or so my inner nerd seems to recall): everything goes kablooie. Suggesting that the Doctor 'turns away in shame' at the most horrendous events in human history tries to bridge that chasm too glibly. The Doctor can't stop genocide cos he doesn't exist. Now the mutual reinforcement of fiction and 'fact' is a plank in my research (it may be the plank actually); 'realism' relies on fiction as much as fiction relies on 'the real'. So why not wonder why Superman didn't do something more worthy than save his girlfriend (for which he had to alter the lives of every single thing on the planet - oh sure, 'harmlessly') - or ask why Dumbledore couldn't, in his heart of hearts, see a use for time-travel beyond helping a nerd pass more than the required number of exams? Yes yes - because the narrative demanded these things occur in this way. Maybe its just me, but that 'willing suspension of disbelife' is broken when a writer starts trying this particular brand of rhetorical manipulation. [For a truly tasteless example, see the opening of Love, Actually - a film so self-righteously smug and so unbelievably self-obsessed that it actually attempted to compare the relationship issues of upper-middle-class Londoners with the final calls made by victims of 9/11.] Isn't it enough that we turn away in shame? Does the Doctor or whatever substitute for centralised moral authority is being touted have to 'turn away' for us? Or isn't 'turning away in shame' a rather hackneyed posture, a scripted gesture, empty of any affect? When do you stop the 'turning away' bit and get back to it? Did the Doctor watch the Holocaust, get all embarrassed, go off for a skip round the galaxy, and come back when everything was rosier??

I nearly forgot the closing parentheses: )

While the script lacked a certain ... something ... I thought the visual impact a bit more interesting, though no less rhetorically manipulative: the military in schools - taking British children (*ahem* London's children, actually) from the place we put them to keep them out of our way for most of the day - and doing Unspeakable Things (mainlining them, apparently!). The Sacred Right of Children to Go To School without being picked up and stuffed into the alien equivalent of dime-bags, traded on the international black market just for those 'good feelings'. Nice to know the biggest threats to earth are interstellar junkies. Cue shots of improbably well-behaved kids quietly going with well-meaning strangers, angelic children being selected for alien nose-candy by faceless (well, at least interchangeably greying male) governments. Cue the slightly worn 'ethical dilemma' of which children should go - if you asked anyone in our neighbourhood this question, I'd reckon the aliens would have a supply for the next 10 years - and the rather soggy 'criticism' that the government has selected the 10% they wanted to get rid of anyways ... But why? In this program, these 'undesireables' have the gormless awkwardness of baby bears and the irritation factor of a box of kittens: only monsters could see these children as future ASBOs. Look at their empty eyes! Waiting to be filled with middle-class aspirations, respect for the system, and a gentle love of fell-walking or some other worthy hobby!

Result: I'm left feeling queasily guilty for not thinking this was much of an 'ethical dilemma'. I mean, it ends with the old bar game: is one life worth millions? How about millions for millions more? (The alien quota is 10% - it's not clear if they mean 10% of British children or the world's). What percent of the world's children die every day because we turn away in boredom? The righteous indignation felt a little false. Sure there is the brief, flickering, interest in who gets to make that decision - no Doctor here, folks. But the next-best-thing is there: Jack and his toothy smile, which is getting a bit strained 5 hours in, and I'm not sure he can see straight as he's been on the verge of tears for the last hour at least. I'm not posting a spoiler: but the future is safe for the middle-class aspirations of Gwen and Rhys's undoubtedly charming offspring.

I'm glad that Steven Moffat is taking over for the next Doctor Who.

We then played two games of UpWords in which I was soundly defeated.