Reading upside down

[beccaelizabeth]

When should one stop doing science?

Or, to put it another way, what precisely did Torchwood One do wrong?

Torchwood's job is to investigate unusual phenomena with an eye to understanding and using them. They poke at stars and magic until they get a patent out of it. There's also a side order of making sure nobody gets turned into a werewolf or blown up or something.

Most of the stuff I've read about the whole Cyberman invasion just assumes that Torchwood screwed up. And, okay, the result was *hugely* bad. But... when, precisely, was the screwup?

Torchwood had an unusual phenomenon, a rift. If it's anything like the Cardiff rift it was spitting out random junk off and on for as long as it had been there. They found it, located it precisely, because it was being weird. They didn't make it. They found this potentially dangerous definitely weird thing and they started to investigate.

So far, so good.

The investigation, many years after the tower went up, reached the point where they were going to poke it and see what happens.

Is this their job? Well, if their main priority is containing alien threats, putting stuff in boxes and making it go away, then no. But in that case they're not much of an institute. So, yeah, this is probably their job. It's certainly the job they've been doing. They pull stuff apart, figure it out, then invent.

So, they poke the rift.

A ball falls out.

They have no clue what it is, so they investigate with every tool available, and then start inventing more. They still have no clue when the Doctor turns up, but on the plus side it's been sitting there doing absolutely nothing for the whole time, so they haven't got any clues that suggest it is dangerous. It just kind of exists. This isn't really a reason to stop investigating, or even poking the rift more. Maybe another one will fall out. Never know until you try.

There were also the ghosts.

Now you might consider that a reason to stop doing what they're doing.

Why?

If you push a button and something blows up, that's a dangerous result that suggests you shouldn't push the button again.

If you push a button and get fuzzy shadowy things everywhere... Is that dangerous?

Well if they've been wandering around for months and everyone's treating them like some kind of amusing pop culture reference, probably not so much.

So should they have stopped investigating then?

No harm, no foul, keep going.

Right?

Especially since they're also getting a whole ton of good data and useful Stuff out of the experiment. They're getting masses of electricity. They're also, and this is pretty important, learning how to control the rift, in a crude sort of way. Open, close, open, close, wheee! Er, I mean, they've got a lever that can shut the rift. Isn't that kind of cool? They've got a machine that can, with a bit of reprogramming, make the thing permanently seal. Isn't that bloody impressive, given the tech level? They've done masses of research to get that far! And since stuff falls out of rifts even when you *don't* poke them, having a way of sealing it is veryvery useful.

Okay, possibly the London phenomenon had nothing much to do with the Cardiff one and would only have spat stuff out if poked.

How do you know?

Well, watch it for a long time (done) and then poke it (also done).

So far, what have they done wrong?

So then the Doctor turns up. They've been set up to arrest him, and when he turns up in their highly secure building they finally get around to doing so. Fair enough.

(really, fair. he doesn't *actually* have the right to wander around everywhere he pleases, he just acts like he does and often gets away with it. Sometimes people wouldn't want him in their place, actually, thanks very much.)

So they arrest him in a very polite way, show him lots of shiny stuff, and then when he gives advice they take it.

No, really, they did. He said stop, they stop.

And, yeah, it turns out to be too late and they're all dooooooomed.

But... which bit was a mistake?

Well they erred in their risk assessment of the ghosts. The cybermen infiltrated the tower without anyone noticing. Should they have been noticed? Really they should. Don't know how they weren't. So somebody in security made a mistake, some data was not available, and cybermen sneaked in their blind spot.

So Torchwood's mistake was not, in fact, to play with the big levers and shiny wall and all that. It was to have the builders in and put all that plastic up. Not enough CCTV, was the thing.



... yeah, you can pretty much tell where my fic has been wandering around in lately.


It's just... if you line up the Christmas Invasion and this with the Cybermen, and start trying to find precisely where the mistake was, it can come out looking like it was really 'being insufficiently worshipful of the Doctor', which is rather uncool. Because otherwise people were acting in logical ways, given their job responsibilities. It just went kind of wrong.

Sometimes things go wrong without anyone actually making a mistake.

Which is rather scarier than Daleks, really, when you think about it.