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"forget about their kind"
2013-Oct-23, Wednesday 08:25 pmI was looking forward to the new remake of "The Tomorrow People" television series. It was originally an old BBC show about young people with special mental powers granted by an evolutionary mutation. Their abilities were limited mostly to telepathy but with some telekineses and teleportation (assisted with alien technology). Their inherently peaceful nature was a large part of their appeal to me, although I didn't learn about the show until I was already an adult and the show was long ago cancelled.
I worried that the American version of the story would weaponize them into dangerous opponents, and I was right. This new story is more like X-Men mutants, with dramatic and powerful abilities that anyone would be reasonable to fear. In the second episode, one guy was mentally possessing a security guard to use his weapon to demand money from a bank. In the background, on the floor near the bank door, I saw another security guard down on the floor with an apparent gunshot wound. These new telepaths are deadly, even though traditionally Tomorrow People are supposed to be constitutionally incapable of murder. Even the good guys stay well practiced in hand combat in this show. They're like humans fighting the agents in the Matrix movie series. It's that violent.
I could imagine in their fictional world that telepathy caused people to be so in tune with their environment that causing harm to others would be perceived in their own mind as harming themselves. In this new story, though, the Tomorrow People are explicitly described as "just one mutation away" from having all of these abilities along with the capacity to use them for murder. So the inability to kill is a flaw rather than a quality inherent with the gift, a responsibility that goes with the power.
It's not a story that I want in my own thoughts, but I decided to give it another episode or two in case it could redeem itself. Tonight's episode included a telepath overhearing a human girl thinking, "In 48 hours, I'll be dead." When he tried to seek help for the girl from another Tomorrow Person, she told him, "Forget about their kind. We'll be lucky if we can save ourselves."
So I deleted that recording without watching the rest of the episode, and I cancelled any future recordings. Homo superior, as Tomorrow People traditionally refer to themselves, were nothing of the sort in this very Americanized story. Instead, we see that superiority is proven through combat survival, not intellect. There's nothing superior about such a life. It's a story older than human history.
I'll wait for the next great evolutionary leap, thank you. I expect that morality will grow larger and more inclusive... not narrower.
I worried that the American version of the story would weaponize them into dangerous opponents, and I was right. This new story is more like X-Men mutants, with dramatic and powerful abilities that anyone would be reasonable to fear. In the second episode, one guy was mentally possessing a security guard to use his weapon to demand money from a bank. In the background, on the floor near the bank door, I saw another security guard down on the floor with an apparent gunshot wound. These new telepaths are deadly, even though traditionally Tomorrow People are supposed to be constitutionally incapable of murder. Even the good guys stay well practiced in hand combat in this show. They're like humans fighting the agents in the Matrix movie series. It's that violent.
I could imagine in their fictional world that telepathy caused people to be so in tune with their environment that causing harm to others would be perceived in their own mind as harming themselves. In this new story, though, the Tomorrow People are explicitly described as "just one mutation away" from having all of these abilities along with the capacity to use them for murder. So the inability to kill is a flaw rather than a quality inherent with the gift, a responsibility that goes with the power.
It's not a story that I want in my own thoughts, but I decided to give it another episode or two in case it could redeem itself. Tonight's episode included a telepath overhearing a human girl thinking, "In 48 hours, I'll be dead." When he tried to seek help for the girl from another Tomorrow Person, she told him, "Forget about their kind. We'll be lucky if we can save ourselves."
So I deleted that recording without watching the rest of the episode, and I cancelled any future recordings. Homo superior, as Tomorrow People traditionally refer to themselves, were nothing of the sort in this very Americanized story. Instead, we see that superiority is proven through combat survival, not intellect. There's nothing superior about such a life. It's a story older than human history.
I'll wait for the next great evolutionary leap, thank you. I expect that morality will grow larger and more inclusive... not narrower.