Utterly Absurd

OK, OK, but like I said, it's fantasy. It's TV. That which is bollocks in reality can make for fun and interesting stories on television. :)

As for the actual properties of heavy water, I'm no scientist, so I apologize for misspeaking and misinforming. I just know that heavy water is not the same as drinking water. It contains deuterium, and it is used in various nuclear applications. I wrongly assumed that meant it was radioactive.

Apparently, you can drink it without getting sick from it, but drinking enough of it would eventually lead to poisoning, so generally, it's just not meant for consumption. And that was my point... that the character's cancer was not cured by mere water, but by a very particular type of water.

We aren't meant to drink it as a beverage, but in a fantastical TV plot, it's fun to think that such an unusual substance could cure a character's cancer in a particular situation.



Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.

I enjoyed the series as a whole, although it did get very wobbly in places. The episode "Kryptos" was all over the place from stem to stern and should have had a full rewrite or been scrapped. The episode Bondbrain is having conniptions about, "Miracle," was pretty intriguing up until the denouement. Then Roy Marsden leapt out of the shadows, metaphorically twirling his moustache, and the wheels fell off the plot.

That said, I was under the impression that Marsden's character Drake represented a cabal within MI6 that was very keen on not looking like idiots the next time WMD failed to turn up where they were supposed to be. I don't recall anything suggesting that the government was complicit beyond Drake's firm belief that they would approve in principle if they knew although, paradoxically, the government would have no choice but to close down the operation if they _did_ find out.

Intelligence and security agencies _do_ commit villainous anti-democratic actions behind the back of government; the recently revealed papers released under the forty year rule show that Harold Wilson actually wasn't being paranoid -- MI5 really was out to bring down his government. With a more certain hand ("Edge of Darkness" leaps to mind) such scenarios can make compulsive fiction. A climax that pretty much involves a double-dyed villain popping up in a sulphurous cloud to sneer at the protagonists, however, falls short.

In parting, I would also suggest that it is not only perfectly permissible to question the actions and motivations of one's government and allies in a democracy, but a civic duty. To regard such questioning as unpatriotic, to subscribe to the moral bankruptcies of "my country, right or wrong" and "you're either with us or against us," is to sleepwalk your way into tyranny. The episode "Miracle" may have been staggeringly inept in its third act, but the point it was attempting to make was, is, and will always be valid. Who watches the watchmen?

Bond, you're right, of course. Not only about how gullible Europeans seem to be (they are vying with the Islamics on the gullibility scale), but how they think that entertainment means feeding their lazy brains with the same kind of tripe they already believe. The most popular book in France is a book that proves that there was no airliner that crashed into the Pentagon. Then the conflating of several things like a TV show's idea of reality with their own view and the views of people who want so desperately to believe the worst about the West (an idea reserved essentially for the bored middle-class children of bored middle-class parents whose families now have been living in relative comfort for at least three or four generations and most especially in Britain and Sweden, where they live so deep in the womb of the Mother State that all realities are mixed together and muffled by the sound of Big Mummy's beating heart), and you have people buying into ideas that are too far-fetched to make a good TV show. To work, conspiracy tales have to make the conspiracy at least plausible. For most of us whose bulls*** meters still work, it's a little harder to get us to that magic tipping point where we can willingly suspend disbelief. Hence, we think shows like this are idiotic. They don't work dramatically because they are too ridiculous. Better that we watch a great show like Farscape than this fatuous swill.

"Technically, a foetus is medical waste; there's no murder here." Patrick Stewart's character says. The Inspector doesn't bat an eye. Then Stewart pins it down for the D.I. "Planting an embryo into a woman by any other means than in vitro fertilisation is a very serious crime indeed!" By God, sir! You're absolutely right! Killing the foetus (if anyone of the lazy-minded Mummy's boys who wrote this crap would look up the word "foetus," they would find that in English it means "offspring." That makes it a good deal more than medical waste) is nothing compared to the illegal implantation of a foetus into a woman.

In the novel 1984, the most powerful implement of coercion was torture and public disgrace followed, after a certain interval of relative ease, by death and disappearance not only of the body but of the memory as well. But the most powerful implement of inertia was the Ministry of Truth where anything but Truth was honored and truth was created anew every day as history was burned and dropped down a shaft. The grease that made this possible was Newspeak in which things were called their opposites. This plot here in 11th Hour is a classic Newspeak plot. Boys, I gotta say this: Slowly but surely, the culture is crumbling, not under the heel of American fascism as is so popularly thought by the Mummy's Boys, but under the layers and layers of soft blankets that are laid on top of the average European citizen gratis by the all-powerful EU Socialist State until full-blown totalitarianism - in this oddly muted form - is a fait accompli. I would say God Bless you to the Swedes but I am certain that God has fled Sweden before the New Realists of Greater Scandinavia burned him at the stake. And while he may yet reside in England, it is in an uneasy repose with an archbishop who would glady sell him down the Thames for one thumbs-up and a "Way to go, Canterbury!" from an important member of the Muslim Council of Britain.