Breathing deeply

Don't ask me why, but I was seduced by a recent episode of one of those law and order shows...I don't know which one, and it doesn't really matter. The plot was a regular roller coaster: I missed the first part of the show, but when I began watching, a young woman, whose mother was in jail for dealing pot and other sundry drugs, was raped. The young woman did not see the man’s face, but she knows that it is a guard from the prison where her mother is incarcerated. The guard had been raping the mother (as well as other women), and I believe she had somehow been supplying him with drugs (or he was supplying her--the plot was quite convoluted). When the mother cut off his drug supply, he took his revenge by tracking down the daughter and raping her. Like a true Nancy Drew mystery, he lets the young woman in on this information.

So the show continues to loop the loop--one of the cops tries to ferret out the unidentified rapist by going undercover as a prison inmate. But the climax of the show depends on this medical detail: the young woman comes down with a case of multi-drug resistant TB. The police know that MDR TB is endemic to the prison (and, like, a lot of prisons--one point for Law and Order) and they suspect that she got it from the rapist. The prison goes on lock down because of the health threat, and all the officers are given tests to see who might test positive. This puts our undercover heroine at a grave risk: another cop has gone undercover as a prison guard, but he looses track of her during the lock down, and the rapist takes advantage of this isolation and attempts to rape her. (Of course, she isn't raped, although the show took plenty of time to act out our nation's penal sex fantasies, billy club and all. Don't ask). But the story isn’t over yet. It turns out that the rapist doesn’t have TB—there is no evidence linking him to the young woman. She contracted it from a group home a few months earlier (oh, those filthy, infectious group homes. Accessible health care, anyone?)

You don’t really need to know the rest of the plot, but I’ll humor you—the rapist makes the mistake of revealing certain body parts, parts which sport a noticeable mole. The young woman remembers this, and is able to provide enough evidence to book the prison guard. (Perhaps this is a lesson on the corrupting influence of our overeager and ineffective penal system?)

So why my tirade? (Despite the chance to slip in those annoying, left leaning critiques)? Ahem. Physiology, my dear sirs and madams. Thanks to contagious lawyers who honeymoon in Greece, and fly on multiple airplanes, MDR TB is indeed slipping into the American consciousness (thanks to antibiotics, Americans stopped being so worried about TB in the 20th century. It is curable--if treated). TB is a very frightening disease, and over a million die from it every year. Over a quarter of the world's population harbors TB bacilli in their lungs. But. The immune system is a lovely thing, and one does not generally contract TB from a single encounter, especially a swift one that occurs out of doors. It makes sense, then, that the unfortunate young woman (did I mention her mother gets murdered?) would contract it at the group home, and not during a rape.

Perhaps we should applaud the nation’s networks for bulking up their plot lines with medicine and science (since ER and Grey’s Anatomy are primarily interested in only reproduction). But bad science is just silly. We pride ourselves on our scientific advances, and giggle at the silliness of those old-fashioned quacks who entertained the bumpkins of the 19th century. Shows like Law and Order, or Eli Stone, a wretched waste of an hour which began its season by inflaming the debate over the dubious link between childhood vaccines and autism, demonstrate that while we have more knowledge, we choose to ignore it for the sake of a narrative. But narratives require a deep commitment to fact, or at least to consistency—if your characters fly, I’ll believe you, but if half your characters can’t fly, and you don’t give me a reason why, I won’t trust you. It’s dishonest and fraudulent. One hundred years ago, we may have listened too often to the quacks, but now it is the hacks who have our ears.