Going Up To Eleven

The Eleventh Hour is a show that lost me from episode one. Whenever American TV remakes a show from another country, they almost always cast unrealistically good looking people in the roles which is why Patrick Stewart's Ian Hood is now Rufus Sewell's Jacob Hood and Ashley Jensen, an attractive woman who realistically could play a bodyguard, was replaced by waifish model Marley Shelton who realistically could not. What made me stay away from it though was in the fist ten minutes of the first episode, a remake of the British version's first episode, when a local policeman enters his own crime scene and is immediately and for no good reason subdued by Shelton's FBI character who then draws her gun on him. That bit of stupidity, which wasn't in the British version, immediately turned me off and I didn't bother watching the rest (I knew how it came out anyway so it wasn't that tough of a call). It was the least realistic part of a story about fictional advancements in human cloning.

So here we are, several months later, and Eleventh Hour has just wrapped up its season. Thanks to Big Hollywood, I discover that it's now considered to be ideological wanking material for right wingers. If you read the Big Hollywood link written by S.T. Karnick (I believe the S stands for "Douche" and the T stands for "Bag") you never once saw anything like this:

• The acting was wonderful.
• The dialogue was witty.
• The writing was engaging and intelligent.

Instead, the selling point of Eleventh Hour, at least for Karnick, is that it was politically correct from a right wing perspective.

As noted in my previous articles on the CBS TV mystery-drama series Eleventh Hour (here, here and here), the show consistently presents interesting, intelligent, and fair-minded discussions of science issues in a dramatic (if often far-fetched) context. In addition, the show doesn’t portray business as the catch-all villain, giving a much more balanced range of motives and miscreants.

To translate, rightwing myths aren't immediately dismissed simply because all evidence shows them not to be true. Let's see why Karnick thinks Jacob Hood could start writing for The Corner.

Thursday night’s episode, “Medea,” ended the program’s first season on a high note in terms of the ideas and attitudes it expressed. FBI science consultant Jacob Hood (Rufus Sewell) investigates the case of a woman who appears to be suffering from delusions caused by schizophrenia.

Naturally, given that this is a drama, there’s a good deal more to the story than that. The woman (Melissa Sagemiller) has had an affair with a very powerful married man who wants to keep it secret. She claims to have had a baby recently, fathered by him, but he denies it, and at his instigation she is institutionalized and put on an anti-schizophrenia drug regimen.

Two interesting angles arise. One is that the powerful man tried to talk her into having an abortion, but she refused. In the course of the drama we see a powerful depiction of the natural bond between a mother and her child, and the show refuses to make any obeisance to feminist notions that if men don’t show strong attachment to the children they father, women shouldn’t either.

Ok, so, a woman was pregnant and the man wanted her to have an abortion. The woman, of course, could not be coerced because the choice as to whether she would have an abortion was hers and hers alone. I think it would blow Karnick's mind if it actually occured to him that he is in agreement with feminists and pro-choice advocates. He'd probably think he had been infected with some sort of woman disease.

As for the second "interesting angle": Huh?! Which feminists are saying, "that if men don’t show strong attachment to the children they father, women shouldn’t either"? This is a conservative caricature of feminist thought that also makes men like Karnick think women want all men to be castrated in order for true equality to occur.

On the contrary, the episode makes a strong case for individual self-sacrifice for other people’s good, regardless of whether others are willing to fulfill their obligations. That certainly accords with religiously based moral codes and resonates strongly with Christian teachings in particular.

Ooh, not good, D.B. You have apparently forgotten that the great conservative dream these days is to emulate John Galt. Acting out of pure self interest is supposed to be good for society. If anything, you should be calling not only the makers of Eleventh Hour but all Christians liberal pussies.

His favorite part of the episode was that the villain was a powerful government employee who used his power to lock up his mistress.

This vivid depiction of the powerful temptation for people to abuse government power is a welcome cautionary tale noting, as many wise thinkers have pointed out over the years, that a government powerful enough to do you much good is a government powerful enough to do you much evil. And as this episode points out, governments, being run by human beings, naturally manifest all the sins to which the flesh is heir.

Nooooo! Really? I've been saying that for the past eight years when the Bush administration said they needed to read my emails and listen to my phone calls so they'd know what sort of recipes I was trading with my friend in Australia. For taking that position, I was called either a useful idiot of jihadists or an open advocate of Muslim theocracy. Oh my God, this must mean that S.T. Karnick is a fifth columnist dedicated to the establishment of a world wide caliphate.

But no, he's just another conservative who thinks the real world is liberally biased and must find confirmation of his world view in fiction, even if that fiction is mediocre television. He even finds that he has to twist and warp fiction until it is ideologically pure. I'm not sure if Eleventh Hour is coming back next season which means we may get to deal with future Karnick articles telling us how Barack Obama personally ordered its cancellation, an article that will, of course, be fiction.