House
We admit it; we think that this show is already sci-fi. We've had to resort to trusting the writers - and Polite Dissent's Dr. Scott - that everything they mention on the show is real, because our knowledge of medical science is practically non-existent. But House offers everything we want in a television show: snark, soap opera and screwed-up characters. It's only one small step for man away from being Battlestar Galactica! And that's before you get to the illnesses of the week and the curious, convoluted explanations behind them. Science fiction-ish, at least.

Bones
Put aside the same-quasi science that House employs (Seriously, they could be making up everything on this show and we wouldn't know) and there's still a compelling reason why this show should be classified as sci-fi: They have their own holodeck. We'll let Slate explain it:

Angela is responsible for designing the single goofiest piece of faux-scientific technology I've seen on TV: a 3D hologram program that projects not only the revolving image of a reconstructed victim, but the likely scenarios of the killing, onto an ultra-groovy light table in the soaringly modern digs of the Jeffersonian Institution. Why these renderings can't be done on a regular computer screen, or sketched on a cocktail napkin, is never clear, but they look cool as hell.

Yes. Yes, they do... And that one piece of equipment - combined with the ridiculous inventions and experiments occasionally carried out in the name of science, and wholescale embrace of nerditry in general - is enough for us to claim this as Stealth Sci-Fi.

Numb3rs
It's not enough that mathematical genius Charlie Eppes does work for NASA, or that characters disappear because they're going off to spend six months on a space station? Okay, maybe not - although, really, writing someone out because they're going to spend time on a space station is pretty awesome - but what other show employs real mathematicians to work out the complex number-crunching necessary to explain each episode's deus ex chalkboard? It may not be sexy, it may not have time-travel or giant monsters attacking Rob Morrow, but still; we're calling this one some kind of science fiction.

24
With nuclear bombs, weaponized viruses, computer hackers taking down the country's infrastructure and whatever else Jack Bauer finds himself involved in on an annual basis, 24's world is definitely a parallel Earth with more than its fair share of super-science going on. Add to that the seemingly superhuman Bauer himself - a man who can shake off a heroin addiction by will power alone, and who isn't afraid to bite out a man's jugular vein if necessary - and we're convinced that this show is at least as sci-fi as Jericho... and also needs to crossover with Fringe immediately.

Top Chef
Everytime someone talks about "molecular gastronomy," it's clear that Bravo's foodie companion to Project Runway has some hidden roots in science fiction. Admittedly, very hidden, but we all know it's there. Plus, come on. Padma's definitely a Terminator. You can see it in her cold, steely stare whenever she tells someone to pack their knives and leave.

The answer is obviously complicated. For some people, torture puts any story beyond the pale: a couple of weeks ago, scifi writer Karen Joy Fowler told me in an interview that she refuses to watch Battlestar Galactica because there's too much torture in it. But millions of movie fans have turned near-future flick Hostel, about an imaginary Eastern European country that houses a torture-entertainment center for the rich, into a cult hit and franchise. And the TV series 24, which is also a near-future dystopia, also has millions of drooling fans who don't seem to mind that superspy Jack, our main character, is constantly torturing people with everything from ugly lamps to fists.

Enough has been said about torture porn that I don't need to repeat the arguments too much here. They all boil down to one question: Does watching torture make us more likely to tolerate it in real life?

I had a brilliant professor in college who always answered that question with a roll of her eyes. "Look," she would say, "If it were true that we always did what the media told us, then every single advertisement would work. We'd buy everything we see advertised." Because she's right about that, we know it's not the case that everything we see in the media leads to behaviors in real life. The question of torture then boils down to whether it's necessary for a given story.

Let's look at one of the most famous examples of torture in scifi. Canadian flick Cube, which came out in the late 1990s, was your classic, Saw-style "a bunch of strangers trapped in a weird place have to solve puzzles to escape horrible grody death" kind of flick. For people raised with videogames, a form of entertainment where you solve puzzles to avoid dying, the scenario was familiar. And the puzzle was even pretty cool: the characters have to figure out a sequence of prime numbers in order to escape from a giant cube building full of rooms that move around all the time. As they're figuring out the prime number sequence, they venture into rooms that stab them, poison them, chop them up into little cubes, and generally spew gore everywhere. Do we need the torture along with the cool math game? I'd say yes. The entire movie depends on the audience understanding the characters' urgency, but at the same time the scenario is surreal enough that bringing in the torture enhances our sense of bizarre otherworldliness.

But how about Wes "Scream" Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, a classic cult movie from the 1970s that was just remade into a less-than-amazing franchise? In the original, gritty-freakout movie, a family whose truck breaks down is waylaid by atomic cannibal mutants in the desert. The torture is campy and hideous at the same time. In fact, the entire point of the movie is really the torture, and the escape, of our normal American family. Like Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes is literally about torture and what it can do to you. So the movie couldn't exist without torture, and in fact the torture itself is the point. How will people be dismembered? Where will the blood splatter? Will they really DO that? Without torture, there would be no movie.

Let's return to Battlestar Galactica's torture with these two examples in mind. Unlike The Hills Have Eyes, BSG is not about torture. It's about a horrific dystopia where torture has become part of everyday life. Like Cube, BSG uses torture to explore the urgency of the situation its characters are in. So do we need the torture to feel that urgency?

One might ask the same question about a scene in Iain M. Banks' novel The Algebraist, where we are treated to an intense scene of torture in order to show how evil one particular character, Luseferous, really is:

[Luseferous] had decreed that the final punishment of the assassin should be his own teeth . . . Accordingly, his four canine teeth had been removed, bioengineered to become tusks which would grow without ceasing . . . These great finger-thick fangs had erupted out of the bones of his upper and lower jaw, puncturing the flesh of his lips, and had continued their remorseless growth. The lower set curved up and over his head, and after a few months worth of extension, came to touch his scalp near the top of his head, while the upper set grew in a scimitar-like paired sweep beneath his neck . . . Both sets of teeth then started to enter the assassin's body, one pair slowly forcing themselves through the bony plates of the man's skull, the other entering rather more easily into the soft tissues of the lower neck . . . The fangs burrowing through his skull and into his brain were the ones which would shortly, and agonizingly, kill him . . . This unfortunate, nameless assassin had been unable to do anything to prevent this because he was pinned helpless and immobile against the wall of the chamber . . . his nutrition and bodily functions catered for by various tubes and implants . . . The fellow's ears and mind still worked.

Perhaps it could have been less detailed, but I would not have remembered it so vividly if it had not. Similarly, I would not have felt the horror of the humans' and Cylons' situations without seeing Six tortured by humans, and Baltar tortured by Cylons. I am not sure if making something memorable is justification, but it is certainly emotional realism. And in a genre whose entire narrative substance is the unreal, the science fictional, a dose of emotional realism can be potent indeed.