Numbers
I've been watching the program, "Touch," on Hulu.com. It's an hour-long drama documenting the life of the father of an autistic boy who serves as a touchstone for the lives of many. The 11-year old, Jake, is a messenger, an Indigo Child, who relates to the world through numbers. He sends messages to his father (Martin) through patterns of numbers, which sets off, through Martin's subsequent response to chasing down the meaning of these numbers, a series of events, all seemingly related to one another.
The premise one must buy into before watching Touch is that we are all - and I mean ALL - interconnected through threads of energy. Although the boy and his father are based in the USA, the stories told in this program are global. The producers borrow heavily from the news for the effect of each person's thoughts, words and actions upon the rest of us. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine seem to be the favorite trans-global hotspots this season. Next season, depending on the the world's economic and energy issues, I trust the alternate global locations will change.
The jury is still out for me on this show. I live my life in the context of Mitakuye Oyasin. This Lakota phrase means, "We are all related." The popularization and somewhat over-broadening of this cosmology of reality is a bit too much for even me. In other words, there's a lot overdoing being done to get the point across.
Each episode begins and ends with a voice-over narrative by the boy (much like Grey's Anatomy tells us what to think). This is very formulaic and somewhat dumbing-down to the audience. The connections made within the stories can get far-fetched. For example, the father, Martin, follows Jake, his son, to the apartment of a man who did not rescue Martin's wife before Tower II had fallen on 9/11. Jake, "knowing" the man's guilt, (the man even named his daughter after Martin's wife) gives the man an opportunity to "balance the scales" by crawling out a window onto the fire escape at the man's apartment. Jake starts climbing, but because Jake is mute, Martin has to interpret Jake's behavior and refusal to come down, even though they are several stories up and Jake is precariously perched on the ladder aside of the building. Martin sends up the man to get Jake, and when he brings him safely down, Martin announces, "You have now evened the score by saving my son." I didn't laugh, but I felt incredibly sorry for the Kiefer Sutherland, who had to deliver that crappy line.
Although the show is trying to do something good for the world through uniting spirituality and science with the message of how everything we do has consequence and significance, even if we are unaware of it, it remains to be seen if they can do this freshly for any more than a season or two. The dreaded "been there, done that" is way too close for comfort.
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