Hm, I thought you were talking about the flashback, not the main plotline. The person who was "moved to stop it" was actually pretty adamant about saying "what if he's innocent?" and tried pretty hard to get it to stop. I really don't think you're supposed to feel sympathetic to the pro-torture side. (Especially the "I know he's guilty because I didn't feel guilty" speech at the end—I think that was supposed to sound as monstrous as it did.) (Actually I don't think you're supposed to feel sympathetic to any character on the show—they're all anti-heros in one or more ways. Which also answers the "everyone's a selfish liar" question—this is not supposed to be a representative sampling of the population as a whole. In fact there's a lot of speculation that someone arranged for these particular people to end up on that plane, but that's another whole topic...)
About the flashback, I somewhat agree with kahuna's point that torture always works in fiction, just like prophecy always comes true, so I can kind of write it off as they're just playing by the standard rules. But also, as I pointed out last night, it's not entirely clear that the information was useful—it's not even clear that the torture actually happened, though it was strongly implied. Clearly this show is all about "things are not as they seem". Anyway, the main point of the flashback was more that the Americans turned him into a torturer, for no good reason. (Or specifically, that guy who looks like Reverend Justin did... this is actually sort of an important distinction, but that's kind of spoilerish.)
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Date: 2006-09-25 03:54 pm (UTC)About the flashback, I somewhat agree with kahuna's point that torture always works in fiction, just like prophecy always comes true, so I can kind of write it off as they're just playing by the standard rules. But also, as I pointed out last night, it's not entirely clear that the information was useful—it's not even clear that the torture actually happened, though it was strongly implied. Clearly this show is all about "things are not as they seem". Anyway, the main point of the flashback was more that the Americans turned him into a torturer, for no good reason. (Or specifically, that guy who looks like Reverend Justin did... this is actually sort of an important distinction, but that's kind of spoilerish.)