Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 08:20 pm
Greeks Bearing Gifts is my favourite in terms of engaging with what it means to use your ability on your friends. This is ironic because Torchwood is my least favourite show in terms of character development, plot and myth-arc.

Torchwood 1x07 Greeks Bearing Gifts – On Telepathy

In which we see that people who do Bad Things hurt themselves as well.

Who is this character and what is she doing?

Toshiko Sato is a lonely geek who works in a small team. In Greeks Bearing Gifts Toshiko gets a pendent that gives her short-range telepathy. She is aware that using the pendent is wrong and originally intends to hand it over to her co-workers but succumbs to temptation and listens in to their thoughts. What she hears shakes her trust in them and she uses that as an excuse to keep doing it.

She also overhears some angry thoughts and stops a man from murdering his wife and child with a shotgun. Toshiko eventually acknowledges that the pendant’s abilities are actually making her even unhappier and damaging her friendships and destroys the pendent. She apologises to Gwen and Owen for violating their privacy and tries to rebuild the friendships.

How do we feel about her?

It’s easy to empathise with Toshiko. Her motivation is complex, balancing a need for reassurance (which she doesn’t get) with curiosity (which she has in abundance) and the heady thrill of having power (after being ignored). Toshiko also uses the pendent to save lives so that we can see the possibility of it being used for good (if in a Bad way).

We also respond sympathetically because Toshiko recognises what she is doing and acknowledges it. She speaks to Gwen and Owen and indicates that she understands what she has done to them.

What is she doing ethically?

  • She invaded Gwen and Owen’s privacy, then rejected and resented them for what she learned.
  • She invaded shotgun_man’s privacy then assaulted him.
  • She hurt herself, lowering her own self-respect and damaging her ability to trust others.
What are the implications here?

An inherent assumption that Torchwood makes is that using the pendant is ethically wrong. Toshiko knows this and her story is about how she uses it anyway and what the consequences are for her. Compare that with Heroes take on the subject

Greeks Bearing Gifts explores how hard it can be to behave ethically in the face of temptation. It looks at the pressures and justifications for why one might not do so and most importantly, it looks at the effect on the person when they fail to resist.

This isn’t specific to telepathy; we’ve all got places in our lives where we wield power. What we choose to do with this power says a lot about who we are.

In Toshiko’s case, there are two parties being damaged, the people being invaded and the person doing the invading. Gwen and Owen are being invaded and Toshiko is destroying her ability to have an honest relationship with them. Doing harm, even harm the recipient doesn’t know about, damages the doer as well.

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who said “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

Dodgy Ethics, Heroes 1x05 and 1x06, Torchwood 1x01, Supernatural 2x07

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