Spoilers
So I finally got caught up on Torchwood a few weeks ago thanks to iTunes and I noticed something on one of the second season episodes that’s bothering me.
It’s in the episode in which Owen returns to life and ends up being a conduit for Death. As it begins to take him over, he has a couple of fits where his eyes get scary and he speaks a couple of phrases in a strange language. In spite of the heavy vocal effects, I’m certain that he’s using a phrase from Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series. “Melenkurion Abatha Duroc Minas Mil Khabaal”, to be specific.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, here’s a quick rundown.
A fairly recently recolonized chunk of the world is being threatened by the eons-old Big Bad that took down the previous (and superior) civilization. New civilization is in the equivalent of a magical dark ages and is only beginning to learn how to work with some of the forces that the previous civilization used. All power comes from the earth and the few words of the lost language that they’ve relearned allow them to draw strength from it, give strength to it or just establish some kind of balance in it. Any way you slice it, they’re used by the good guys.
Given that Torchwood translated that out to something along the lines of “I shall walk over the earth and my hunger will be limitless”, I’m finding it hard to believe that this is some sort of homage. So what do you think? Did I just catch a lazy scriptwriter?
LabRat