Numerology Porn

Tonight saw the debut of a new series on Fox, called “Touch”.    For this viewer, three features seemed promising:

(1)  It is in the tradition of the Paranoid Thriller, where there is a deeper significance to everything, where tout se tient -- ou se tiendrait, if only we could decipher what was going on.

(2)  It stars Jack Bauer.

(3)  It centers on Numbers.

Now, this last is in line with our theme of Our Friends the Integers, so we nursed a fragile hope, despite the precedent of the flat and mindless use of supposedly numinous numbers on “Lost” (along with the downspiral of that initially eye-pleasing series  into rank incoherence).   And despite the disappointment of last year’s Rubicon,  which shares some motifs, and showed a glimmer of promise;  but all eyes were dry when the series was canceled.

So, “Touch”… How is it?  (Or rather:  Was it;  for I shall not be watching again.)

First, I am pleased to report, the show once again exemplifies the sort of linguistic fidelity that would have been unimaginable on television during the years when I was growing up -- for them, no more than a fake/comedic ‘German’ accent, and an occasional ‘French’ ooh-la-la.  The scenes set in Iraq (which were the best, or least-worst, to my taste) were staged, not merely in Arabic, but in authentic Iraqi dialect.

For the rest, you may sift the rubble  without turning up any trinket of interest.

For one thing, there were incredibly many vastly annoying ads.  Does not Fox know that, for the Season Premiere,  you’re supposed to first sucker-in an audience, get them hooked, and only later melt their minds to the consistency of Twinkie-filling?

But the main thing:  There’s just nothing there.  Anyone can toss up a bunch of unlikely co-incidences and go Ooooooh.   As a rule, implausible coincidences count as a weakness of a plot.   To turn these into a strength  requires a very skilled hand indeed.  Thomas Pynchon did a decent job of it in The Crying of Lot 49 (though I enjoyed that book much more as an adolescent, than I did when I re-read it as an adult).   The shallow minds that put this mess together  show no such skill.

~

It is furthermore possible -- though I shall not be tracking this to see -- that the series may develop in the direction of Disability Porn.  There is a lengthy tradition of exploitative uplift, giving false hope to the suffering (whose cognitive faculties, understandably, are trumped by their emotions), e.g. “Lorenzo’s Oil.”  (I would link to Wikipedia, yet, remarkably, neither the English nor French nor German versions make any follow-up reference as to whether the stuff actually works.  Judge for yourself:

            adrenoleukodystrophy

The direction the series might take  is actually even more catagogic, suggesting that your autistic child may actually have nothing wrong with him at all, he is just “differently  abled”, in fact a geeenius, who can foil terrorist attacks  halfway around the globe  with a blink of his eyelids.