There’s seldom been an hour of television that brought up as many fascinating ideas about the nature of humanity as Torchwood: Miracle Day’s first episode, which just aired. Russell T. Davies may have hit on his most fertile premise yet.

The previous Torchwood miniseries, Children of Earth, had a darkly sardonic premise that could almost have worked as a non-science fiction story. You could imagine a story about a foreign country showing up with overwhelming weaponry, and demanding Britain’s children. But Miracle Day is a pure science fiction story about ideas.

Spoilers ahead …

After rewatching the first episode of Miracle Day, the whole thing seems more terrific than it already had. Davies is a first-rate hand at establishing characters and situations, and he does a fantastic job of intercutting between a few stories until we gradually realize how they’re connected.

In “The New World,” the state of Kentucky is about to execute Oswald Danes, a man who seems like he could be in the running for worst person alive. He was a schoolteacher who raped and murdered a 12-year-old girl, and told the police, “She shoulda run faster.” The scene where Oswald is executed, via lethal injection, is one of the most harrowing things I’ve seen in a while — he keeps thrashing around, over and over, until he wrecks the machine he’s strapped to, and still he won’t die. Oswald, the monster, is suddenly unkillable.

Bill Pullman manages to make Oswald twice as repugnant, with his weird squint and his slight smirk, and his inability to look anyone straight in the face. And his weird almost-lisp. When Oswald argues that the Constitution was practically written with him in mind, arguing that he should be released from prison, it’s enough to make your skin crawl.

But then Oswald’s non-death turns out to be the most high-profile sign of a larger issue. Nobody, anywhere on Earth, can die. As various characters point out, this is beyond anything that seems possible with our science. For one thing, every death is unique, and there are many ways that the processes that keep you alive can be stopped. For another, people are remaining alive even after they’re blown up and decapitated, which is insane. The phenomenon is restricted to humans, and it’s as if we’ve become a different species all of a sudden. We’ve been changed on some basic level.

The ideas that this brings up are fascinating, not least of them the notion that death is an essential part of life. If nobody dies, then hospitals quickly become overcrowded. People in horrific pain continue to suffer indefinitely. The entire world quickly becomes overpopulated and faces a kind of ultimate Malthusian nightmare in which there aren’t enough space or resources left for everyone. People will starve, without being able to die of starvation.

Some peoples will stop fighting — like the Somalians — because they can’t kill each other any more. But some conflicts will get worse than ever.

It’s another worldwide nightmare that’s perfect for Davies to expose his huge misanthropic streak — just like the idea of aliens demanding millions of our children. The perfect opportunity to show just how wretched and corrupt and selfish humans can be.

But this premise also gets to the heart of what it means to be human, something that a lot of great science fiction has dealt with. If we can’t die, are we still people? Is death the thing that makes us what we are? Is human dignity still a meaningful concept if we’re now this unkillable swarm of vermin?

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