Torchwood: Miracle Day Episode 7

Not a whole lot to say this week either, other than the fact that if there remained any doubt about what the authors believe about homosexuality, there isn’t anymore.

No real spoilers this time either. And really, the only “legal” issue here is more a historical one: Ellis Island didn’t function as a major immigration center after 1924, when the Immigration Act drastically reduced the number of immigrants who were granted leave to enter the country. So having the characters in the scenes during 1928 going through Ellis Island is an anachronism.

More than that, the people who did show up to Ellis Island between 1900 and 1924 generally didn’t have visas when they left their home countries. They simply came. Immigrants at Ellis Island were asked a series of twenty-nine questions mostly intended to ensure that the potential immigrant was capable of supporting him or herself and wasn’t contagious or anything like that. Remember, at its busiest somewhere north of 1 million people a year—10,000 a day—were passing through Ellis Island. There wasn’t time for anyone to be a stickler about paperwork. Indeed, many families find that their genealogical projects dead-end at Ellis Island, because records can be so perfunctory and incomplete that though tracing one’s parentage to Ellis Island isn’t that difficult, tracing it through Ellis Island can be a real trick.

At this point, we’re all just waiting to see what, if anything, the writers intend to do to get themselves out of this one. We’ll just have to see.

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