The other thing that bothered me about Children of Earth

[giandujakiss]

Apart from, you know, obvious things.



There was a disquieting strain of ... patriarchy ... running through the storyline. I mean, there's this very old patriarchal notion that children are literally the property of their fathers, rather than persons in their own right. And it's a very extreme form of that belief that leads fathers to, say, murder their wives and children - i.e., delusional people who buy into the notion that "These kids are mine, my wife is mine, I'll do what I want with them, I'll make choices for them, I've decided that since I lost my job, my children would be better off if I killed them," etc.

Here, we saw that explicitly when the government guy killed his kids and, I gather, his wife - he was making choices about what was best for all of them, as though they were, in fact, his own property to control.

And I could have handwaved that away if I thought, "Well, that was just the evil guy," except that the theme seemed to be that the sins of the fathers were visited on the children. He made a decision to sacrifice everyone's children, and the punishment wasn't that he got sacrificed, but that his kids were, as though they were merely an extension of himself. And then we saw that exact same theme play out with Jack - he had made a decision to sacrifice 12 children, and the punishment was to lose his own grandchild - again, the grandchild's personhood wasn't relevant to the story, the grandchild's role was to be an extension of Jack, or Jack's property, and thus something that existed only for Jack to "lose."

Comments

[twistedchick]

I realized that as the last episode came on, it was also a retelling of Abraham and Isaac, only this time there was no ram in the thicket to substitute for the beloved child, no angel, no Doctor, no god. Patriarchial? Oh, yeah. Very Old Testament in the wrong way.

[cathexys]

Well, I think the idea is that it is worse to see someone you love suffer than to suffer yourself. So while it was the man in this case who took the lives of his children, I really couldn't read it in any other way than his crazed attempt to save them from a life worse than death.

I'm not sure that's about property as much as it is about impossible choices. But then my subject position is probably very different from yours as a mother and someone who had serious flashbacks to my Holocaust work when watching the program. If anything, I wish they'd shown any of the mothers having to make impossible choices. In fact, one of the most chilling moments for me was the female in charge (no idea what her name was, sorry) making a eugenic argument so to speak. And one that wasn't for the most part rebutted at all (except in the case of Jack's daughter I guess). After all, in the end she was the one supposedly in charge and power...

[laurashapiro]

I definitely had the same thought when Frobisher murdered his family, particularly in contrast with Bridget's insistence that "he was a good man".

Through the whole thing I couldn't understand why no one would tell the children anything. Like Jack's grandson, for instance -- why not give him the chance to be the hero, to understand what his sacrifice meant? IMO, they owed him that.

[verrine]

I was deeply confused during the part where Frobisher murders his family during that monologue. Like, I couldn't entirely tell what they were going for. If I took it on it's own, without knowing anything about Torchwood or the rest of the episode I'd probably assume it was some kind of commentary on how these dudes can kill their whole families and still have people talk about how great they are, but as it is I'm not entirely sure they wanted us to see that particular action of his as wrong. It's more like we're supposed to see his other actions as wrong and this one as some weird form of redemption. Even though his kids would have been fine if he'd waited a few hours. Perhaps that's why killing them himself makes it redemption; he's not punished if they're all fine at the end!

The thing with Jack's grandson just made me want Jack's daughter to be the "villain" of the next season, on an (ideally successful) quest to off him permanently.

Bonus patriarchal moments in the same vein:
-The part where Gwen reassures Rhys she won't have an abortion because she "couldn't do that to [him]". Her pregnancy being all about him and his child, after all.
-The stuff about Jesus!Doctor not helping them because of how horrible they are. Who cares about the children and how they feel, he'll let them die to punish their parents. The actual doctor wasn't there and didn't say it himself, but Gwen did say it and it was clearly supposed to be Meaningful.