#Cdnpoli #Uspoli #Caligula #UK #MoralDecadence #EleventhHour

In the last days of the decaying Roman Empire the moral decadence was so extreme that Caligula put a horse in the Senate.

Don't laugh ,don't turn away as America made a Horse's Arse President . & Boris was put in Downing Street while Pierre Poilievre , an election cheating Fascist is the PM ascendant

Same problem ,same people .

Re watching New Who and just got to Eleventh Hour. Forgot just how good it was.

#doctorwho #EleventhHour

Is there room for miracles in Dr. Ian Hood, Scientist’s worldview?  No.  Simon and Eugene discuss Miracle.

Episode Synopsis

In Clayton, the police, acting on behalf of social services, take a child, Alfie, away from his father and proceed with emergency tumor removal surgery against the father’s wishes.  He’s been treating the boy with magic spring water and that should be good enough.  One minor setback, after cracking the boy open, no tumor can be found.  It’s a miracle.

At the Ministry, Hood is called into a meeting with MI6 by his superior (and perhaps friend) Alistair Drake.  They’ve got intel that a middle eastern country is building nuclear missile silos.  Hood takes one look and completely debunks their ludicrous “evidence” making no friends of the boys with licenses to kill; however, this is exactly why Drake called him into the meeting.

Debunking done, Hood got more debunking to be done.  He’s off to Clayton where dangerous rumors about a magical cancer-curing spring is in the news.

In an interview, much to management’s chagrin, Dr. Williams, the attending physician won’t categorically rule out that the water might have caused the remission.  Hood thinks she’s a quack, and he’s got to shut this nonsense down people will lose their lives pursuing nonsense instead of getting evidence-based medical treatment.  When they arrive at the spring, it is a madhouse, overrun with cancer patients hoping for a cure.  The father isn’t interested in what Hood has to say, and won’t let him investigate; however, Hood gets Rachel to surreptitiously obtain a bottle of the spring water for analysis – which she proceeds to drink, because they don’t hire cops for their brains, apparently.

Hood checks the pH level of the nearby stream and declares the water clean and pure, so… it’s all just bunk.  He doesn’t even bother to test the water sample from the spring itself.  They check the water near the local fertilizer plant, and the local reservoir.  pH checks out, so… pure and clean, obviously.  That night, Rachel has a bad night, puking and such.  Hood attributes it to a dodgy Shepard’s pie and not the same spring water Rachel continues to quaff down.  Still without testing it, apparently.

Hood visits Dr. Williams and determines that she’s not the quack he though she was.  She’s skeptical of the results, certain she didn’t misdiagnose, and simply won’t rule out the water because… it’s the only variable in the formula.  Further, the hospital’s cancer wards are being swamped by chemotherapy patients who’ve come to drink the spring water and have gotten sicker.  So that’s weird.

New tests of the water show that it’s got organophosphates in it, which is a by-product of fertilizer manufacturing.  Problem solved, but what caused Alfie’s tumor to disappear?

At a press conference, Dr. Williams draws attention to Dr. Hood, which makes all the papers.  Soon Drake arrives.  The public know where Hood is, and they’re received credible threats from teenage militants vegetarians are out to harm him.  He orders Rachel to take him home.

Dr. Williams is fired because she’s a liability to the credibility of the hospital.

— and the story is only halfway over —

Hood and Williams have a dinner date, and they decide that it would be possible to confirm that Alfie really did have a tumor because cancer markers will still be in his blood stream for another two weeks… and, apparently, they didn’t bother to run this test before or after they had Alfie removed from his father and operated upon.  Nor as part of their post-operation investigation – but just roll with it.

Drake puts more pressure on Rachel to get Hood out of there immediately by threatening her career.

Hood and Williams also decide that the problem might be radiation, and Williams even has a radiation detector, but, no joy.  It’s not radiation, so there’s no point checking the blood.

That night, Dr. Williams kills herself.  Hood changes his mind about the blood tests and asks Drake to have one run.  He hopes that the findings will help forestall conspiracy theories that Williams might have been killed to keep the miracle of the spring water quiet.

At a press conference, Daniel, Alfie’s dad, tells the world that it was all a fake.  He was paid by Dr. Williams to perpetrate the hoax.  When Hood confronts him, Daniel says people kidnapped Alfie and plan to keep him two weeks – or kill him, if Daniel didn’t claim it was all a fake.

Suspicion falls on the hydroelectric dam, but when they investigate, they’re intercepted by Drake’s men.

Hood gets an idea (and continues to resist going home) He finally does something with the spring water Rachel collected – he freezes it, and when the ice cubes sink in tap water, he knows the truth – it’s heavy water.  The answer must be at the disused fertilizer factory, so he (with Rachel) returns their to investigate, but there’s nothing.  He suspects someone is manufacturing heavy water, but the factory just doesn’t have the water capacity to produce it efficiently.

And he’s intercepted by Drake’s men again.  They’ve had this place under surveillance from months, suspecting an illegal heavy water operation and Hood is jeopardizing the investigation.  Go home already, Hood!

At their monitoring command center, Hood catches Drake in a lie.  Dr. Williams left him her Geiger counter in her suicide note, but she was very adverse to calling it a Geiger counter because Geiger was a rotten, filthy Nazi and she refused to dignify his memory by using that name.  She was murdered to keep her quiet.

Pretending to go home, Hood and Rachel head to the hydroelectric dam, where they discover a secret government heavy water plant.  Just the kind of place you could manufacture evidence to be used against rogue states that may not actually be pursuing nuclear weapons, but politically they really want people to believe they are.

So, Hood, trapped yet again by Drake’s armed men, deep inside a secret government installation, where no one knows he is, blackmails Drake into letting the boy go in exchange for his silence about this black government operation.

Drake and his men kill him and Rachel on the spot, then drop their bodies in the sea, 5,000 miles out.  No, sorry, strike that, Drake let’s them go.

Father and son are reunited.  Hood explains to the father that it’s all science, not eastern mystic bull crap.  Heavy water was killing Alfie, but, just like chemotherapy, it managed to kill the cancer cells first, hence his “miraculous” recovery.  The chemo patients that came to sample the spring water, were already in a dangerously weakened state and the heavy water was just killing them even faster.  Rachel will be fine because she didn’t drink enough heavy water to do permanent damage.

And so, Dr. Hood and Rachel ride off into the sunset.

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Climate Change and cryptography go hand in hand like seashells and fractals, and Dr. Ian Hood, Government Scientist soon finds out.

Simon and Eugene discuss Kryptos.

Episode Synopsis

Richard Adams is a man who likes to walk on the beach, study shells, talk to himself, and run away from would-be assassins.  He also happens to be, formerly, one of Ian Hood’s best friends.  They fell out over Adams stealing Hood’s girlfriend, Gillian.

Adams is a brilliant climate scientist or paranoid crank, depending on to whom you listen.  He believes that he has damning evidence of global warming, he also believes that his former employer, Paul Destrano of the Environment Institute, wants to discredit his work and have him killed, because if published, Americans will have to give up their cars.  Unfortunately, that work is locked up on a computer back at the Environment Institute.

Hood visits Destrano, who explains about Adams breakdown.  He also speaks with his former colleague at the Environment institute, Martin Godley, who dismisses Adams’ work as mostly a rant.  On the down low, he slips Hood a note, asking for a clandestine meeting.  He claims to have only dismissed Adams’ work in the hopes that he’d take some time off, relax and get better.  It is; however, clear that Martin lives in fear.

Adams tries to get his work published at Baxter Scientific, but without the key data, Baxter must refuse.  After a refusal from another journal, Adams kills himself.

He leaves puzzles behind for Hood and when he starts to crack them, he gets a call from Martin, who is willing to give Hood the data.  When he goes to meet him, Destrano is there instead, warning Hood that he’ll prosecute to the fullest extent of the law if Hood comes into possession of Environment Institutes proprietary data.  Also, Martin has been fired.  Later, Martin is murdered in such a way to make it look like an accident.

Rachel breaks into the Environment Institute and steals the data – but it’s encrypted!  Curses, foiled again!

Someone has broken into Hood’s home and left a cryptic clue.  Rachel chases this up while Hood cracks the encryption password.  Rachel finds that Adams staged his own death, and that Hood shouldn’t run the computer program because the environment Institute will immediately be able to track him down and know what he’s doing.  Unfortunately, that warning comes too late, and Destrano’s goons are after him.

When Hood sees the data, it’s devastating.  Global warming is going to cause sea level rise and lots of people are going to get their feet wet.  This is the proof the world needs to get real climate action now!  If only Hood can survive to get the data published.

He sets up some real secret agent stuff by handing off the data to Baxter on a bus and then Destrano confronts Hood.  Things look like there might be another dead scientist, but Rachel shows up and stares them down.

The data is published, Destrano and the Environment Institute are embarrassed, and the world, confronted with the heretofore completely unexpected revelation about global warming immediately leaps into action, saving the planet for generations to come.

Or, you know, they just talk about it on the news.

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The UK is on the verge of a pandemic which could killed 100s of thousands of people.  Government pandemic preparedness is abysmal, and the citizen’s compliance with necessary health directives is a joke.  Can Government Scientist Ian Hood save the day single-handedly?  Also, zombies?

Simon and Eugene discuss Containment.

Episode Synopsis

Workers in a church are just busting things up and hauling old bodies around, as you do when you’re making Yuppie Flats, when one of the workers, a particularly curious chap named Ned who looks to stick his in everything he sees, finds a body.  That might not seem so weird, considering what they’re doing, but this emaciated, almost mummified body is wearing workman’s clothes and… he’s ALIVE!  But not long enough to make it though the opening credits.

Ian Hood is being taken to carpet for his budget excesses.  He argues that, since the work he must do is unknown until it happens, his budget cannot be predetermined, therefore he cannot overrun something that cannot be adequately estimated.  Also, Quantum physics!  QED!

He gets called out of that meeting because there’s a potentially disastrous pandemic event shaping up at that church.  Hood meets with Martin Callan, voluntary head of Britain’s ad hoc pandemic response team.  Voluntary because Britain doesn’t see the value of funding such a thing.   But he’s not bitter, just because the Americans spend a billion dollars on pandemic preparedness and will never have to worry a nightmare scenario like this.  Rachel expresses her doubts to Hood about Callan’s qualification to handle this crisis, but Hood assures her, he’s the best.

The worker was a mortician, who was working late on Friday at the church.  He was found Monday and must have collapsed and been unable to call for help.  It looks like some sort of a pox, possibly smallpox.

All the workers are voluntarily detained in quarantine, by force.  They’ll all be quarantined in a warehouse, together.  Hood is aghast.  If anyone is sick, they’ll all get sick in quarantine.  “The needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few,” says Callan.  Actually, what he says is considerable more brusk: “Yep, some will die to save the larger public.  Too bad, so sad.”

Curious Ned is also Ned the Dad, who’s got an important gift for his five-year old’s birthday party today.  He breaks quarantine, hacking, sneezing, and retching all over the place as he walks shoulder to shoulder with the people on the streets.  He’s not a complete idiot.  He’s realized that there is a serious outbreak, so it’s not about getting home for the birthday, it’s about getting home to his family so he can take them somewhere safe.

OK, maybe he is a complete idiot, just a different type of complete idiot.  A special kind of complete idiot.

Hood gets there first and convinces him to go quietly to hospital to die.  Which he does.

The pox has been identified, it’s some form of hybrid between smallpox and tanapox.  Which gives Callan pause.  Clearly an engineered variant that probably escaped from a lab overseas that doesn’t observe proper protocols.

Hood’s team also does contact tracing on the dead mortician, and discover that he did under-the-table embalming on the side.  From that, they identify all the bodies that he’s worked on recently and start investigating those deaths.

Callan is too busy pursuing his own plans to bother thinking this is a concern.  He’s insisting this came in from overseas, but in the interest of ticking all the boxes, Hood and Rachel follow up on the bodies.

Rachel discovers that one, Jack, worked in a cold-storage facility and died in an industrial accident, but when she realizes the facility utilizes illegal Asian immigrants, she calls in the hazmat team.  

That leads them to a recent arrival from China who lives in a flop house who has been exhibiting pox-like symptoms.  Rachel chases that lead, running through the streets until the suspect is hit and spattered by a car, getting blood all over Rachel.  Off to the quarantine death camp for her!

Callan is relieved, but his assistant Luke isn’t so sure and approaches Hood with his concerns.  The timing is wrong.  If the Chinese immigrant was patient zero, which didn’t he die before the mortician?  Callan dismisses this concern because “he’s an epidemiologist and Hood is not” also, “Asians are different from us, they probably just die slower.”

Hood does some not-by-the-books bloodwork and determines that the Chinese man had Chickenpox and that Rachel and the others can be freed from quarantine.

All roads lead back to the cold storage facility.  Callan first goes to investigate something and meets Ellis Gibson, assistant manager.  Ellis is blackmailing Callan.  He knows the smallpox was stored at his facility and wants money to return it.

Hood also concludes that somehow smallpox was stored at the facility, but when he gets there, there is nothing but an empty box.  Ellis has taken it, hacking, sneezing, retching his way around his family and busses and trains as he moves around waiting for Callan’s call.

Hood confronts Callan, who admits that, all those government cutbacks meant that someone must have stored the smallpox instead of destroying it like what was supposed to happen.  No crime though, so, Callan is free to go.  Hood goes to meet Ellis.

A confrontation ensues and Rachel is taken hostage.  The smallpox containers are shattered all over the Central Bus station, but eventually, Hood saves the day.  While he does, Callan swoops in, collects the package of smallpox, returns it to quarantine, where he overly-dramatically injects himself with it as penance to ease his conscience and lies down on the bed to die.

…or more likely to wait for his inoculated body to kill off the virus that he infected himself with.

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#EleventhHour #Podcast