As much as I love sci-fi, and was a fan of the show Torchwood, they get added to the 'should be in jail' list. For those unfamiliar, the basic summary of the show is a team of specialist protect the world from both Alien invasions and the finding/misuse of Alien artifacts.
In one of their first shows in season1 the medical Dr in the team 'borrows' an alien perfume (pheromones?) which on humans makes you sexually irresistible to others. He spritzes himself with this that evening to pick up a couple at a bar. Because it's okay to use chemical enhancements to influence others' choices of sex partners. No need to be concerned that the girl had already turned you down (and that shortly thereafter her boyfriend shows up and also wasn't impressed), you can still use these chemicals to change their minds, as long as these chemicals hadn't originate from earth.
I never could really sympathize with that Dr after that.
I'm pretty sure Owen (the doctor in question) was intended to be a selfish sleazeball. I don't think the audience was supposed to think that was ok; I think it was supposed to convey what type of person he was (an unethical, nasty jerk who didn't see any issue with date-rape as long as he got what he wanted). As I recall, Owen's slow,
slow transition into a fairly decent person who actually cared about other people was kind of his character arc throughout the first two seasons. Actually, I think that whole sequence, where we see every single person on the team (aside from the team leader) take home pieces of alien technology to play with (which the team leader had just explained was strictly forbidden), was intended as an establishing moment for all the members of the team and the team's overall culture. Torchwood runs on people who like to skirt rules they find inconvenient, even their own rules. They justify that because they're protecting their planet from the alien menace. Their people are routinely rewarded for results (capturing aliens, saving the Earth, etc.) even as they break laws, ethical codes, etc., right and left. They are forgiven or outright rewarded for their behavior even when they break Torchwood's internal rules. In such an environment, it's no wonder that individual members are held in check only by the limits of their own consciences, and people with insufficiently developed consciences (*cough cough*Owen*cough cough*) are kept around and tolerated anyway as long as they are sufficiently brilliant and useful.
I think including characters like Owen actually highlighted the fundamental problems with Torchwood--it's much easier to forgive the "good," self-sacrificing characters for using the end to justify the means, because we can see that their intentions are noble and they beat themselves up over the bad things they have to do to achieve the goal. Then there are characters like Owen, and it gets much harder to tell yourself that it's ok for the heroes to operate this way. So he was definitely on the "should be in jail" list, but I think that was intentional on the part of the writers.
Topic: s/o things in movies/books that would lead to a restraining order in RL (Read 68856 times)