Friday 10 July 2009

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Five

What the World Is Like

Unearthly Children, Episode 5
Sunday 12 April 2026

It’s the end of the week, and although some kids and a whole building full of public servants are dead, we all learn that even the ones who walk away from Omelas discover that the real Omelas was inside them all along.

Notes and links

We didn’t have a whole season of Doctor Who in 2009, because David Tennant took a year off to play Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2008/2009. In fact, it was during the interval of one of the performances in October 2008 that David Tennant appeared remotely at the National Television Awards to announce his departure from the show.

In the 1998 French and Saunders Christmas Special, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders played overly enthusiastic extras on James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), who ended up being repeatedly duplicated in a panicky crowd scene. (They also played Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet respectively.) Here’s the trailer.

Adam’s ridiculous theory podcast is Adam Richard Has a Theory, available daily wherever you get your podcasts.

Fridge logic is a plot element in TV or film that doesn’t actually make sense, but you only realise that when you go to the fridge to get something afterwards. Alfred Hitchcock coined the term icebox scene to describe a scene that “hits you after you’ve gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox”.

In 2009, there’s a general awareness of child abuse in care homes and in the church, and there are plenty of reports in the newspapers. However, Jimmy Savile’s history of abuse isn’t widely known until after his death in 2011 and an ITV documentary about his life in October 2012. A month before Children of Earth airs, the Plymouth child abuse ring was first reported to police. (Content warnings apply.)

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973) is a beautiful and harrowing short story by Ursula Le Guin about the discovery that our comfort and prosperity depend on the exploitation and immiseration of others. It won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1974. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds covers the same ground in its Season 1 episode Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach.

In 2025, one of the finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story was Isabel J Kim’s Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole, a satirical response to Le Guin’s story for the vastly more cynical world of 2024. (It did win the Nebula Award for Best Short Story for that year.)

We found Aimee Davies, who played Mica Davies in Children of Earth: she is now a Twitch streamer called Aimsey.

During the tag, Adam recommends two TV shows with actors from Children of Earth. Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo star as detectives in Apple TV’s Criminal Record. In ITV’s Gone, an alarmingly blonde Eve Myles investigates the disappearance of David Morrissey’s wife.

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And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched a top-tier episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, its 30th anniversary celebration — Trials and Tribble-ations, in which the crew of the USS Defiant wangle their way into a beloved episode of original Star Trek from 1967.