Torchwood: Miracle Day Episode 10

Well thank heaven that’s over.

There is, blessedly, little to comment on as far as legal machinations go. One thing that does bear comment is whether tracing a call is the same thing as a wiretap. There’s a good argument to be made that here is, provided law enforcement isn’t on one end of the line. The reason is that even detecting a call, without recording it, involves a breach of people’s privacy, particularly if you’re also figuring out who they’re calling. This was actually a significant plot point in a third season episode of The Wire, where McNulty and Freamon use equipment to track cell phone numbers based on calls made on a particular tower. They can do this because they’ve already got a warrant for a wiretap. But it’d technically be illegal for the CIA to trace a call they weren’t a part of like they do in this episode.

There’s also a little wrangling about whether the Argentinian military is allowed to help the CIA in a mission on their own soil. The writers are probably correct that most countries have some rules about domestic military operations, but probably also correct that most countries also have ways of bending those rules when they really want to.

But the whole thing really comes down to what the Families were after. It seems like they were somehow going to use the Blessing–which is… a hole in the ground? or a vertical crack coming from said hole? We’re fuzzy on the details here–to somehow hold the power of life and death. Exactly why they needed to mess with mortality to accomplish this isn’t entirely clear. As one of the characters points out, it’s not as if the poor, disadvantaged, and sick exert all that much control over the world as it is. And exactly what they were going to do with said control isn’t all that clear either. Impose some version of utopia, presumably. Again, fuzzy on the details. One would think that an organization sophisticated enough to pull off this long a con with this level of success could probably just rule the world anyway, yes?

Still, as it turns out, it probably isn’t illegal to send Death on a little vacation, nor to bring him back afterward. Nor is it illegal to turn your friend into another unkillable immortal either. Because if one Jack Harkness is awesome, certainly two is more awesome, right? Right?

Geez.