we don't sniff the sub-etheric resonator!
So I feel the need to ramble a bit about Torchwood. SPOILERS LIKE HELL. (Season 2, first two episodes.)
So, two new episodes, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Sleeper. I don't have a lot to say that hasn't already been discussed at length on torch_wood, but I just lurk there, so I figured I'd sort out what I think by writing it down...
KKBB was pure gold. What impressed me the most was how true Jack was to the standard of sheer humanity; the Doctor didn't "fix" him, but the Doctor didn't really need to do anything. Jack just needed to see him again, to get the closure he didn't have on the Game Station. Even the Doctor's "I don't know" answer to all of Jack questions was fine; all that mattered was that Jack got the chance to ask. So he comes home (home! home?) to Cardiff and his team, he has to switch from follower to leader again, but somewhere in the process he doesn't quite succeed -- because John shows up and cuts him down a peg from "leader," prevents him from slotting nicely back into the role he'd set up for himself at Torchwood. (Also the team's newfound coherence pushed him out a bit. You see his pathetic attempts to be needed -- "He was pushed." "Uh-huh." "How did you manage without me?" Har har.) But this is all good, because the end result is that Jack is on more level footing with the rest of the team, not a sort of creepy puppetmaster like he was last season.
The change from KKBB to Sleepers was massive. Sleepers, as my suitemate put it, is Gitmo!Torchwood. It bothered me to no end that there was no motive attributed to the alien invaders, no personality; they HAVE to have a motive unless they are like viruses, but if they care enough to send in a recon cell to retrieve info before they devote their forces to an attack, then they have strategy; they aren't mindless. Things that aren't mindless have motive. And Jack doesn't accept this, he just barges in and refuses to listen, won't take "no" for an answer, won't stop pushing even after he's crossed an obvious line. It's torture. Jack says in the boardroom that "It didn't click [that she was a threat] until I saw the implant [in Beth's arm]." That means that he tortured her without just cause, without even a hunch. He just assumed she killed those two men in the flat, and assumed that in order to have done that, she had to be an alien. Hell, he was more compassionate to Suzie, and didn't she do almost exactly the same thing, only she actually knew she was doing it?
Raise your hand if you think Jack's a bit of an alien racist? *up* (Not MUCH, and not consciously, but something in him seems to struggle with the idea that just because he's from the future doesn't make him "superior" or "more advanced.")
Which, well, why not? What do we know about the Time Agency? John, the only other Agent we know, seems to be a pretty screwed-up guy, and he has no great fondness for people he considers inferior. He doesn't seem to recognize them as anything more than objects. (Those dudes on the roof; the people in the bar -- "Go, go, stay, go"; even the rest of the Torchwood team. "Eyecandy.") I think I mentally equate the Time Agency with the Peacekeepers from Farscape more than anything else, and of COURSE people whose job it was to maintain the timelines and police the Vortex would start to think that they were superior, that they knew everything and had all the right answers. After all, they "fix history." They know how history was "supposed to happen." There's a deeply ingrained psychological superiority complex going on here, and Jack is falling back on it as a crutch (along with his natural ability to out-charisma everyone else within ten miles) when it frustrates him that he doesn't have hard evidence. To Beth: "I KNOW you're an alien." Proof? Who needs it when, as a Time Agent, it doesn't matter if there's proof, because dammit, you just KNOW how things are supposed to be? And meeting John again made Jack simultaneously repulsed by his past and more conscious of it. A long century of repression was just undermined during KKBB.
Also -- the mysterious Gray. There's no telling what emotional ties Jack has to Gray, or what sort of psychological shift the very mention of him/her/it could have caused. Choosing to leave the Doctor + meeting John + remembering Gray = V. Unstable Jack.
The short version: Jack has a stick up his ass the size of a tree trunk due to various events he hadn't factored into the ideal homecoming he'd fantasized about on the Valiant, and he's taking it out on anyone who gets in his way. And it's hurting people. His decisions in Sleeper may have been unavoidable ones (I hesitate to say "right"), but his methods were cruel and unusual. His bedside manner, as Beth so graciously puts it, is rubbish.
Now to Ianto. WTF man. I love it, I do! He's hilarious, he's oozing personality all of a sudden, he's wearing a non-somber color (RED=GOOD, *drool* -- much better than the cringe-worthy pink of last week -- we can be a little more obvious about the gay thing if we try harder!), he holds his own against Jack. ("As long as it's not in an office. Some fetishes should be kept to yourself.") It's beautiful. Please, no more rats-in-stomach emo Ianto. But here's the thing -- I didn't have a problem with numb, bleeding-heart, bursting-into-tears Ianto. Because, you know what? It was justified. A lot of bad shit happened to him and he had no support system to help him deal. He went into a state of complete emotional lockdown and convinced himself that he didn't need any help. Lisa's death interrupted his mental cleaning routine, threw him off kilter, made him feel dirty. He got steadily more assertive throughout season 1, but never emerged from that shell. KKBB -- suddenly, Jack isn't joking about sexual harrassment anymore, he's asking Ianto to "drop the 'sir'" and offering a relationship on equal terms. So Ianto's sudden shift in behavior is one of two things -- happiness, recovery, letting himself go back to what he was before his lockdown of the past couple years, letting himself return to the state he was in when he last fell in love -- with Lisa. OR, it's just the stages of grief finally manifesting. He's gone manic. He's still, as someone over at the Torch_Wood comm said, a "big, adorable Welsh defense mechanism." Either way, it's been so long since he's loosened up that his on/off switch for "appropriateness" has rusted over. He doesn't have a filter telling him when to stop.
The most intriguing thing is that the other characters aren't oblivious to this huge change in him; Jack reigns him in twice during Sleeper (Ianto: *fakes being electrocuted* Jack: HEY. *'cut it out' face*) and even Owen (Owen for cripe's sake!) gives him this disbelieving, slightly disappointed look after a particularly sharp joke while Beth is in the room, being all traumatized. So I think the writers know what they're doing, and they will call attention to Ianto's behavior at some point. Which is exactly what they should do. (They need to call Jack on being a right racist bastard, too. He can't go from all soppy "I came back for all of you" in KKBB to "I'm-angry-and-in-charge-and-I-don't-have-to-justify-my-orders-to-you" in Sleeper without someone noticing, right?)
Anyway. I could go on about Jack & Ianto for days, but it's all been said more eloquently over at Torch_Wood. I love being in a fandom where even squee is accompanied by some intelligent meta or discussion. (Not that it's completely wank-free, but it's easier to avoid than in Doctor Who fandom, from what I can see.)
Other stuff... Tosh, Owen, Gwen.... Tosh hasn't had much to do yet, so my opinion of her hasn't changed, but she was always my third-favorite after Jack & Ianto. BUT, strangely enough, I think I may be starting to like Owen a little more! I hated him unrepentantly for large chunks of the first season, and I never really "got" the emotional impact of his breakdown in Jack's arms in End of Days (I just never got the impression that he liked Jack much or respected Jack's opinion), but now I'm starting to reach the belated realization that he was playing the part of "rebellious, insecure teenage son who just wants his father-figure's approval and tries to gain it by not showing weakness, i.e. not seeming to care about anything." Which, granted, even though it is nice to have his season 1 role a little more justified, I prefer his newfound season 2 independence. For a while I considered being annoyed that Gwen took over as leader in Jack's absence, since Owen was second-in-command, but the team organization actually does make a lot of sense now. I think you just had to take Jack out of the picture and let the other four sort it out amongst themselves, decide on whatever actually FIT rather than what was listed on paper. The team are so much more competent and cohesive now because while Jack was gone, they weren't really running Torchwood -- they were just surviving. Survival necessitates teamwork. Jack's devotion to some kind of bizarre office hierarchy was what kept everyone so awkward in their roles last season.
Gwen... okay, can't say I'm a big Gwen fan. I wasn't last season, anyway. I resented her for having more screen time than every other character combined (I think someone did the math and this is really true?) and for being doe-eyed and naive and also an utter hypocrite. Besides, what kind of job description is "moral compass"? Seriously? She was brought on to be a police liason and never once liasoned with the police, EVER. (In fact she ran away from her old mates in the force whenever she saw them.) Her dedication to humanity and her moral outrage at things like retconning innocents were so bloody holier-than-thou, while she just went and did the same damn things to her own benefit when she felt like it. (I still sting over her mistreatment of Rhys, who ANYONE should deserve as a boyfriend; he's so adorkable and sweet and seems like the greatest best friend you could have.) Jack's obsession with her seemed so forced to me. I mean, the writers seemed to indicate that he was oblivious to her flaws, and JACK of all people is not oblivious to ANYONE'S flaws (except maybe the Doctor's). Jack revels in flawed people. So maybe you could argue that Jack reveled in Gwen's flaws, which I could accept, but still -- it just means that his "hand-picked" Torchwood Team was not picked by any reasonable criteria at all, but rather to suit Jack's tastes in social experiments. So that makes Jack a bad leader. And it just irritated me when anyone said he was a great leader, because he's so obviously not. He's making it up as he goes along and relying on his own mystique to keep people from questioning him.
BUT. I'm liking Gwen a bit more this season. She has an actual role on the team. Her only real skill is people-management, so it makes sense that she's sort of taken over the in-office leadership while it looks like Owen is a bit more in charge in the field. In fact, I think I quite liked Gwen in KKBB. Her irritation with Jack, her sarcastic "Oh, that's an engagement ring, that is" and her general lack of hypocrisy and moral compassing was all pretty easy to swallow. (However, throwing away her life to keep John from blowing up the city without any apparent thought to Rhys, whom she supposedly loves, was not so okay. I understand that she's hot for Jack, but I don't have to like it.)
Sleeper!Gwen... eh. She's okay painted as a soft counterpoint to Jack's harshness. But despite Jack's apparent and unwarranted cruelty, Gwen's "humanitarianism" is just as cruel most of the time. She tells the nicest lies she can, but they're still lies and they don't make Beth feel any better. Actually, one of my favorite bits is after Beth has finally accepted everything that's going on -- she's tired of hearing lies, so she finally shuts Gwen out and turns to Jack to ask that he euthanize her if he can't fix her. Proof that even the writers recognize that Gwen is intolerable sometimes.
Back to Sleeper in general for a second... my awesome (but, alas, ill and slightly concussed, may she soon recover) suitemate pointed out a perfect and obvious explanation for why every single Torchwood personality seemed to be ratcheted up tenfold during this episode: the viewer is seeing Torchwood as Beth sees Torchwood. Strange, almost cosmic in scale, full of people whose priorities are so alien to her own (ironically) "normal human" ones that she can't really comprehend it when they do show compassion. Random technobabble ("we don't sniff the sub-etheric resonator!") that she can't even react to, because how are you supposed to? It explains why Ianto's humor seems callous, Gwen's compassion is over the top, Jack acts like a Guantanamo interrogator and Owen is needle-happy. (And Tosh fades into the background.)
It's just a theory. I also like the various theories about Jack & Ianto's behavior, so I'm not fully subscribing to any of the above. (I do like the theory that Ianto is going a touch manic, though. I've seen manias. Certain on/off switches go poof into thin air and, as I once told a loved one who has manic-depression, "You speak with that paint-thinner voice, and it scares me.") Ianto has classic signs -- doesn't know where to reign in his humor, is a tad defensive and irritable ("No one knows more than me!"), overreaches himself (what is he doing with that wrench in the bowels of some machinery early on? why is he always up in everyone's business? what was he doing with that car antenna -- did he think he could fix the SUV singlehandedly, or berate Jack about it during the middle of a crisis?).
Anyway, I'm holding out for the next couple of episodes, especially because ep 3 is supposed to have the Jack/Ianto kiss from the trailer, and eps 4 & 5 are Cath Tregenna scripts, who did my two favorite episodes from season 1 (Out of Time and Captain Jack Harkness). Episode 5 looks particularly promising. (Also, spoilers from a passage in John Barrowman's autobiography seem to indicate that there's another J/I snog in ep 5, but it's accompanied by an "emotional breakdown" -- which, if it is Ianto's, could support the mania/stages of grief theory. NOT MY THEORY, btw. Someone on Torch_Wood originated it. Just clarifying that almost all of this has been said before, I just wanted to compile my thoughts somewhere I could find them again.)
And now I've been typing for maybe two and a half hours, so I'm going to shut up and wait until next week to see if any new revelations come! (Beyond, you know, OMG JACK/IANTO HOTNESS, *GURGLE*.)
sleepy now
-rave
So, two new episodes, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Sleeper. I don't have a lot to say that hasn't already been discussed at length on torch_wood, but I just lurk there, so I figured I'd sort out what I think by writing it down...
KKBB was pure gold. What impressed me the most was how true Jack was to the standard of sheer humanity; the Doctor didn't "fix" him, but the Doctor didn't really need to do anything. Jack just needed to see him again, to get the closure he didn't have on the Game Station. Even the Doctor's "I don't know" answer to all of Jack questions was fine; all that mattered was that Jack got the chance to ask. So he comes home (home! home?) to Cardiff and his team, he has to switch from follower to leader again, but somewhere in the process he doesn't quite succeed -- because John shows up and cuts him down a peg from "leader," prevents him from slotting nicely back into the role he'd set up for himself at Torchwood. (Also the team's newfound coherence pushed him out a bit. You see his pathetic attempts to be needed -- "He was pushed." "Uh-huh." "How did you manage without me?" Har har.) But this is all good, because the end result is that Jack is on more level footing with the rest of the team, not a sort of creepy puppetmaster like he was last season.
The change from KKBB to Sleepers was massive. Sleepers, as my suitemate put it, is Gitmo!Torchwood. It bothered me to no end that there was no motive attributed to the alien invaders, no personality; they HAVE to have a motive unless they are like viruses, but if they care enough to send in a recon cell to retrieve info before they devote their forces to an attack, then they have strategy; they aren't mindless. Things that aren't mindless have motive. And Jack doesn't accept this, he just barges in and refuses to listen, won't take "no" for an answer, won't stop pushing even after he's crossed an obvious line. It's torture. Jack says in the boardroom that "It didn't click [that she was a threat] until I saw the implant [in Beth's arm]." That means that he tortured her without just cause, without even a hunch. He just assumed she killed those two men in the flat, and assumed that in order to have done that, she had to be an alien. Hell, he was more compassionate to Suzie, and didn't she do almost exactly the same thing, only she actually knew she was doing it?
Raise your hand if you think Jack's a bit of an alien racist? *up* (Not MUCH, and not consciously, but something in him seems to struggle with the idea that just because he's from the future doesn't make him "superior" or "more advanced.")
Which, well, why not? What do we know about the Time Agency? John, the only other Agent we know, seems to be a pretty screwed-up guy, and he has no great fondness for people he considers inferior. He doesn't seem to recognize them as anything more than objects. (Those dudes on the roof; the people in the bar -- "Go, go, stay, go"; even the rest of the Torchwood team. "Eyecandy.") I think I mentally equate the Time Agency with the Peacekeepers from Farscape more than anything else, and of COURSE people whose job it was to maintain the timelines and police the Vortex would start to think that they were superior, that they knew everything and had all the right answers. After all, they "fix history." They know how history was "supposed to happen." There's a deeply ingrained psychological superiority complex going on here, and Jack is falling back on it as a crutch (along with his natural ability to out-charisma everyone else within ten miles) when it frustrates him that he doesn't have hard evidence. To Beth: "I KNOW you're an alien." Proof? Who needs it when, as a Time Agent, it doesn't matter if there's proof, because dammit, you just KNOW how things are supposed to be? And meeting John again made Jack simultaneously repulsed by his past and more conscious of it. A long century of repression was just undermined during KKBB.
Also -- the mysterious Gray. There's no telling what emotional ties Jack has to Gray, or what sort of psychological shift the very mention of him/her/it could have caused. Choosing to leave the Doctor + meeting John + remembering Gray = V. Unstable Jack.
The short version: Jack has a stick up his ass the size of a tree trunk due to various events he hadn't factored into the ideal homecoming he'd fantasized about on the Valiant, and he's taking it out on anyone who gets in his way. And it's hurting people. His decisions in Sleeper may have been unavoidable ones (I hesitate to say "right"), but his methods were cruel and unusual. His bedside manner, as Beth so graciously puts it, is rubbish.
Now to Ianto. WTF man. I love it, I do! He's hilarious, he's oozing personality all of a sudden, he's wearing a non-somber color (RED=GOOD, *drool* -- much better than the cringe-worthy pink of last week -- we can be a little more obvious about the gay thing if we try harder!), he holds his own against Jack. ("As long as it's not in an office. Some fetishes should be kept to yourself.") It's beautiful. Please, no more rats-in-stomach emo Ianto. But here's the thing -- I didn't have a problem with numb, bleeding-heart, bursting-into-tears Ianto. Because, you know what? It was justified. A lot of bad shit happened to him and he had no support system to help him deal. He went into a state of complete emotional lockdown and convinced himself that he didn't need any help. Lisa's death interrupted his mental cleaning routine, threw him off kilter, made him feel dirty. He got steadily more assertive throughout season 1, but never emerged from that shell. KKBB -- suddenly, Jack isn't joking about sexual harrassment anymore, he's asking Ianto to "drop the 'sir'" and offering a relationship on equal terms. So Ianto's sudden shift in behavior is one of two things -- happiness, recovery, letting himself go back to what he was before his lockdown of the past couple years, letting himself return to the state he was in when he last fell in love -- with Lisa. OR, it's just the stages of grief finally manifesting. He's gone manic. He's still, as someone over at the Torch_Wood comm said, a "big, adorable Welsh defense mechanism." Either way, it's been so long since he's loosened up that his on/off switch for "appropriateness" has rusted over. He doesn't have a filter telling him when to stop.
The most intriguing thing is that the other characters aren't oblivious to this huge change in him; Jack reigns him in twice during Sleeper (Ianto: *fakes being electrocuted* Jack: HEY. *'cut it out' face*) and even Owen (Owen for cripe's sake!) gives him this disbelieving, slightly disappointed look after a particularly sharp joke while Beth is in the room, being all traumatized. So I think the writers know what they're doing, and they will call attention to Ianto's behavior at some point. Which is exactly what they should do. (They need to call Jack on being a right racist bastard, too. He can't go from all soppy "I came back for all of you" in KKBB to "I'm-angry-and-in-charge-and-I-don't-have-to-justify-my-orders-to-you" in Sleeper without someone noticing, right?)
Anyway. I could go on about Jack & Ianto for days, but it's all been said more eloquently over at Torch_Wood. I love being in a fandom where even squee is accompanied by some intelligent meta or discussion. (Not that it's completely wank-free, but it's easier to avoid than in Doctor Who fandom, from what I can see.)
Other stuff... Tosh, Owen, Gwen.... Tosh hasn't had much to do yet, so my opinion of her hasn't changed, but she was always my third-favorite after Jack & Ianto. BUT, strangely enough, I think I may be starting to like Owen a little more! I hated him unrepentantly for large chunks of the first season, and I never really "got" the emotional impact of his breakdown in Jack's arms in End of Days (I just never got the impression that he liked Jack much or respected Jack's opinion), but now I'm starting to reach the belated realization that he was playing the part of "rebellious, insecure teenage son who just wants his father-figure's approval and tries to gain it by not showing weakness, i.e. not seeming to care about anything." Which, granted, even though it is nice to have his season 1 role a little more justified, I prefer his newfound season 2 independence. For a while I considered being annoyed that Gwen took over as leader in Jack's absence, since Owen was second-in-command, but the team organization actually does make a lot of sense now. I think you just had to take Jack out of the picture and let the other four sort it out amongst themselves, decide on whatever actually FIT rather than what was listed on paper. The team are so much more competent and cohesive now because while Jack was gone, they weren't really running Torchwood -- they were just surviving. Survival necessitates teamwork. Jack's devotion to some kind of bizarre office hierarchy was what kept everyone so awkward in their roles last season.
Gwen... okay, can't say I'm a big Gwen fan. I wasn't last season, anyway. I resented her for having more screen time than every other character combined (I think someone did the math and this is really true?) and for being doe-eyed and naive and also an utter hypocrite. Besides, what kind of job description is "moral compass"? Seriously? She was brought on to be a police liason and never once liasoned with the police, EVER. (In fact she ran away from her old mates in the force whenever she saw them.) Her dedication to humanity and her moral outrage at things like retconning innocents were so bloody holier-than-thou, while she just went and did the same damn things to her own benefit when she felt like it. (I still sting over her mistreatment of Rhys, who ANYONE should deserve as a boyfriend; he's so adorkable and sweet and seems like the greatest best friend you could have.) Jack's obsession with her seemed so forced to me. I mean, the writers seemed to indicate that he was oblivious to her flaws, and JACK of all people is not oblivious to ANYONE'S flaws (except maybe the Doctor's). Jack revels in flawed people. So maybe you could argue that Jack reveled in Gwen's flaws, which I could accept, but still -- it just means that his "hand-picked" Torchwood Team was not picked by any reasonable criteria at all, but rather to suit Jack's tastes in social experiments. So that makes Jack a bad leader. And it just irritated me when anyone said he was a great leader, because he's so obviously not. He's making it up as he goes along and relying on his own mystique to keep people from questioning him.
BUT. I'm liking Gwen a bit more this season. She has an actual role on the team. Her only real skill is people-management, so it makes sense that she's sort of taken over the in-office leadership while it looks like Owen is a bit more in charge in the field. In fact, I think I quite liked Gwen in KKBB. Her irritation with Jack, her sarcastic "Oh, that's an engagement ring, that is" and her general lack of hypocrisy and moral compassing was all pretty easy to swallow. (However, throwing away her life to keep John from blowing up the city without any apparent thought to Rhys, whom she supposedly loves, was not so okay. I understand that she's hot for Jack, but I don't have to like it.)
Sleeper!Gwen... eh. She's okay painted as a soft counterpoint to Jack's harshness. But despite Jack's apparent and unwarranted cruelty, Gwen's "humanitarianism" is just as cruel most of the time. She tells the nicest lies she can, but they're still lies and they don't make Beth feel any better. Actually, one of my favorite bits is after Beth has finally accepted everything that's going on -- she's tired of hearing lies, so she finally shuts Gwen out and turns to Jack to ask that he euthanize her if he can't fix her. Proof that even the writers recognize that Gwen is intolerable sometimes.
Back to Sleeper in general for a second... my awesome (but, alas, ill and slightly concussed, may she soon recover) suitemate pointed out a perfect and obvious explanation for why every single Torchwood personality seemed to be ratcheted up tenfold during this episode: the viewer is seeing Torchwood as Beth sees Torchwood. Strange, almost cosmic in scale, full of people whose priorities are so alien to her own (ironically) "normal human" ones that she can't really comprehend it when they do show compassion. Random technobabble ("we don't sniff the sub-etheric resonator!") that she can't even react to, because how are you supposed to? It explains why Ianto's humor seems callous, Gwen's compassion is over the top, Jack acts like a Guantanamo interrogator and Owen is needle-happy. (And Tosh fades into the background.)
It's just a theory. I also like the various theories about Jack & Ianto's behavior, so I'm not fully subscribing to any of the above. (I do like the theory that Ianto is going a touch manic, though. I've seen manias. Certain on/off switches go poof into thin air and, as I once told a loved one who has manic-depression, "You speak with that paint-thinner voice, and it scares me.") Ianto has classic signs -- doesn't know where to reign in his humor, is a tad defensive and irritable ("No one knows more than me!"), overreaches himself (what is he doing with that wrench in the bowels of some machinery early on? why is he always up in everyone's business? what was he doing with that car antenna -- did he think he could fix the SUV singlehandedly, or berate Jack about it during the middle of a crisis?).
Anyway, I'm holding out for the next couple of episodes, especially because ep 3 is supposed to have the Jack/Ianto kiss from the trailer, and eps 4 & 5 are Cath Tregenna scripts, who did my two favorite episodes from season 1 (Out of Time and Captain Jack Harkness). Episode 5 looks particularly promising. (Also, spoilers from a passage in John Barrowman's autobiography seem to indicate that there's another J/I snog in ep 5, but it's accompanied by an "emotional breakdown" -- which, if it is Ianto's, could support the mania/stages of grief theory. NOT MY THEORY, btw. Someone on Torch_Wood originated it. Just clarifying that almost all of this has been said before, I just wanted to compile my thoughts somewhere I could find them again.)
And now I've been typing for maybe two and a half hours, so I'm going to shut up and wait until next week to see if any new revelations come! (Beyond, you know, OMG JACK/IANTO HOTNESS, *GURGLE*.)
sleepy now
-rave