The FX cable networks ultra-creepy, disturbing and often disgusting series “The Strain” has begun raising ethics issues, as good science fiction (this is a horror-science fiction hybrid) is wont to do. The last episode, “It’s Not For Everyone” provided its characters with one ethical dilemma after another. [SPOILER ALERT!!] Arguably, all of them were botched.
Two of the dilemmas were in the well-worn category of loyalty to family above all else. In most movies and TV thrillers, when a hero is asked to choose between sacrificing his spouse or child (who has a gun pointed their heads) or preventing the deaths of millions, stopping the overthrow of the government, or foiling an alien invasion, he or she invariably chooses to save the loved ones. In these entertainments, the hero always saves everyone else anyway, but it is an ethically indefensible choice as well as a stupid one. (The bad guys never keep their promises.) Yet Hollywood writers seem to think that the audience won’t like heroes who make the right and ethical choice, which is to say, “No deal.”
In this episode of “The Strain,” a wife who discovers that her husband is mutating into a particularly nasty variety of vampire (these things shoot long, snake-like tentacles out of their mouths in addition to their blood-sucking habit) as a result of a rapidly spreading contagion shows her love for him by not alerting every government agency she can think of (he has chained himself into a shed to protect his wife from becoming lunch) and instead sending her clueless next door neighbor into the shed so hubby can have a snack. We also were shown the tortured soul of Jim Kent, a CDC worker who in order to try to save his desperately ill-wife from the ravages of cancer, places all of humanity, including his wife, at risk of extermination. “It’s my wife, don’t you understand?” he screams at his shocked colleagues when he admits that he has been working for the dark side—the really dark side. I understand…I understand that it’s a painful choice to make, like all Sophie’s Choices are, but it isn’t a hard choice, or shouldn’t be. Let’s see, my almost certainly fatally ill wife, or the human race…“I’m thinking! I’m thinking!” (Tangential pop culture quiz: And the reference is to which famous 20th Century comedian?)
The most alarming ethics moment, however, came when the two heroes, the CDC’s Ephraim Goodweather and his colleague, biochemist Nora Martinez, visited the home of what they thought was the youngest fatality of the airplane disaster that first spread the vampire contagion (and the vampire, but you should catch up on the plot yourself) .What they assumed was a dead little girl revealed herself to be a quite lively and hungry tentacle-vomiting vampire, and her father had been similarly infected. The two monsters attacked the scientists, only to be conveniently beheaded by the mysterious old vampire hunter arriving on the scene. Calmly, he announced that the bodies of the girl and her father had to be destroyed, and that this must be the fate of all the victims of the infection, if mankind is to survive.
Nora can’t handle the truth. She becomes emotional and hysterical, and refuses to accept that exterminating victims—albeit victims who are already been dead, have grown completely different organs than humans, attack normal people to eat and/or infect them, and—what am I missing? Oh, right—shoot anaconda-like hooked tubes of flesh out of their mouths with the accuracy of a Marine sniper!!!!!!-–is morally and ethically necessary. “I’d rather be infected than kill all those people,” she says, weeping, and abandons Ephraim to stop the vampire-plague without her.
Nora is a moral and ethical coward, just like pacifists during unavoidable wars, just like those who today condemn the deaths of Hamas civilians without dealing with the ethical realities of Gaza’s shelling of Israel, just like all those who equate virtue with running away from the duty to confront evil rather than getting their own hands dirty. There are some ends that justify, indeed, mandate means that would generally be regarded as inherently unethical. It is not ethical or rational to deny that these ends exist, when there is no question that they do. Nora has all the necessary data; she just resists the unavoidable conclusion.
It would be interesting to know how many in the FX audience applaud Nora’s betrayal of her species, and what their demographics are. In a rational world, feminists would object to such an unethical abdication being attributed to a female character as negative stereotyping. After all, the episode portrays women, or at least this woman, as too sensitive, too overcome by emotion, too empathetic, too non-violent, too kind and gentle to do what needs to be done. Is this fair to women? If so, I would conclude that it then suggests that a significant proportion of women are temperamentally and ethically unsuitable for leadership. Perhaps, however, many women, and some men as well, really think that Nora’s response is the right one, and that if more leaders were like Nora, it would be a better, more ethical world.
At least until everyone was shooting tentacles out of their mouths…
___________________________
Graphic: Screen Rant
Ethics Alarms 
The quickest one I can remember (and it is old) is “Fail Safe” or its knock off “By Dawns Early Light”. One of those two, in a self-destroying tit-for-tat to hold off escalating nuclear war, the US Air Force is ordered to nuke an American town. The pilot’s family happens to be in the targeted town. He still drops the bomb for the so-called “Good of Everyone”. Then he killed himself.
I often disagree with the nuclear fear movies on several counts and don’t even think nuking our own country to be an effective solution to “accidentally” nuking a Soviet town either. But at least that’s one example of Hollywood showing an individual not saving his family to save more people…albeit he was under orders.
Well that formatting was fouled up. The top line quote was supposed to be bold.
Yes, thanks—I almost mentioned “Failsafe,” but I decided that since the film is 50 years old, it was just an exception that proves the rule.
“Fail Safe” was also both biased in its message, factually challenged in its content and idiotic in its execution. No wonder Jane Fonda turned communist after seeing her father lend his name to that pile of cinematic garbage.
I’m not a fan of the film, and I think the solution posed by the movie is useful only as an example of Bizarro World ethics—in matters like nuclear war, the concept of ethics is almost useless. The same message is made more cleverly in “Doctor Strangelove…”
In real world terms, Dr. Strangelove WAS actually more believable! I could write a small essay about everything they technically got wrong… alone. The ethics part was insane. Another essay there!
Jack Benny “your money or your life?”
Of course. Brava.
“i’m thinking, I’m thinking!!”
I happen to prefer the newer trend in at least SF games/fiction where the females are the kick-butt Mama bear trope that is for saving a larger group/humanity. The over-weepy, forgiving all horrors, passive women do not protect their other children, parents, siblings, etc. We need more Mu-lans and less Sleeping Beauties. It really is all media people’s responsibility to eliminate this lack of practicality or at minimum subvert it, and of consumers to call them on it. This abandoning reason just keeps popping up and women have had to make hard decisions throughout time to protect family and themselves. Jumping up and down and wailing is pointless and should wait into the emergency is over. Do they honestly think the original husband or grown child would want them to die too? It’s sloppy thinking and becoming too accepted, at least in the 1st world where survival isn’t a luxury that is discounted.
Well said. That was my immediate reaction to Nora’s meltdown. Getting upset about killing the snake-spewing dead girl made as much sense as the Governor on Walking Dead keeping his rotting zombie daughter around in a sack.
I’ve seen sufficient disdain for the kick-butt mama bear type from at least one subset of self-titled feminists. They happen to be tired of characters who are just “men with boobs”. When such characters cross over into the realm of shallow male fantasy, I can acknowledge the complaint, but you’d almost think some folks actually want to see more women who are empathetic to the point of weakness.
Sigh: “inter the realm”? Save me, Jack! My grammar is weak.
Fixed!
Sounds almost as bad as “Under the Dome”. Here is a treat for you, Jack: “The Killing”. The lead characters face constant ethical dilemmas and the consequences of their actions and ethical missteps mix chaotically and sometimes disastrously, but always logically. You are never left wondering why a character did what they did, even if you don’t know “who done it”
I have to say, “The Killing” bored me stiff…it was like “Twin Peaks” without the quirkiness.
Nothing is a boring as “Under the Dome,” though.
The logical and ethical lapses in television make me want to rent my clothes. By all means, feed your neighbor as a snack to your husband because you luuuuuve him. In sci-fi one of the most ethical scenes in the series Torchwood was when Cpt Jack actively sacrifices his own grandson to save Earth. There are emotional consequences for that choice.
Rent your clothes, or rend them? Either is fine; rent is funnier.
Damn auto-correct. It’s always better to rend your rented clothing.
It’s UNETHICAL to rend rented clothing, unless you plan on buying it. Even then it’s not fair.
Likewise it would be unethical to rent your rent clothing, unless of course you have disclosed the defect…
I think you are being unduly hard on the Jim Kent character. There is no indication he knew what was at stake when he made the deal. He was desperate to save his wife, and he seems to have thought it was a routine bit of smuggling. I mean, a rich guy asks you to smuggle something in, and you think antiquities or conflict diamonds or possibly drugs, not vampires. It’s not good ethics, but I don’t see where he knowingly “places all of humanity, including his wife, at risk of extermination.” And when he begins to realize what happened, he comes clean to his boss, even though he could lose his job or go to jail, and even though he knows that betraying the people who paid him will mean his wife doesn’t get the experimental treatments she’s been promised. He had an ethical failure, but he’s trying to make up for it.
Wasn’t it his boss who wanted any large vehicles stopped? You know, for quarantine reasons? Jim didn’t need to know anything about vampires or conspiracies to understand the risk he was taking by letting that van through. (I never thought I’d feel so satisfied seeing Sean Astin take a punch to the face.)
Even accepting your generous take on Jim, you are forgetting his subsequent deal with the villains to keep quiet in exchange for his wife getting into the the special cancer trials. First money, then access—and in the latter case, she was taking someone else’s place.