study me then, you who shall lovers be
Is this a Torchwood post that I see before me? And a canon one too, rather than one of my increasingly fruitbat dreams? Indeed it is, who'd have, etc...
A long long time ago - seriously, getting on for a year, long enough ago that I'm not even sure if anyone knew then whether they'd be novel or audiobook - the two new Torchwood *things* showed up for pre-order on the Book Depository and I ordered them both. I honestly can't remember why I did that now. Maybe a completist thing? I have all the novels and audioboks and assorted tut, all ready to be neatly packed into a mouse-proof box for the attic, I guess. Maybe it was a nostalgic nod to the dead, as they seemed set to be the last bits of pre-CoE canon we'd ever be getting. Who knows, it's even possible I was still harbouring some tiny shreds of deluded hope that the new series wouldn't be the anything-but-Torchwood hodgepodge it seems to be shaping up into.
Anyway, I did pre-order them, and then I forgot, and so getting a Book Dep. despatch email last week was a bit of a surprise. I toyed with the idea of just not listening and selling them all still nicely shrink-wrapped on eBay, but in the end I opened them and listened anyway: see 'completist' above. So here's a summary of what I thought about both under a cut or two, organised in unspoilery and slightly more spoilery slices, together with what I'm planning to do with them both.
The two audiobooks are Department X, and Ghost Train, both written by James Goss and read by Kai Owen. Department X has Jack, Gwen and Ianto investigating Odd Stuff happening at a once-glamorous Cardiff department store, now faded and unfashionable. Ghost Train is something of a Rhys adventure, as he tries to solve a Harwoods-related mystery that - natch - turns out to cross wires with Torchwood business. It isn't clear which order they should be in. and doesn't really matter. Ghost Train was the last one published, but it also includes one reference to one strand of Department X which makes me think it's actually meant to be the earlier story.
So, what were they like?
You're not going to get an objective impression from me about anything Torchwood anymore, if you ever did. The thing is, I didn't listen to these in any spirit of hating or wanting to troll: where I am now, thinking about Torchwood just tends to make me feel sad and defeated, but just as with the very occasional fanfic I'll still click on, there's always that nostalgic desire for just one more story that takes me back to the point in time when everything was still to play for. And I actually enjoyed James Goss's TW novels quite a lot - after Joe Lidster, Goss came closest (for me) to capturing the feeling of random alien mayhem, but shot through with an affectionate tolerance for / love of the characters themselves - unlike TW novelists like Trevor Baxendale or Peter Anghelides, say, who seemed to mostly be shoehorning the characters into their own pet horror scenarios. (Or Sarah Pinborough, whose Gwen-fetish might have been cute if it didn't come wrapped in a thick greasy topcoat of rancid homophobia.) But Almost Perfect and Risk Assessment were imaginative and creepy, and had a convincing Gwen and Ianto in particular, as well as portraying Jack and Ianto's flirtatious, uncertain relationship quite persuasively.
So I went in about as neutral-positive as I could be these days.
And neither of them is a stinker, neither of them is a bad story. They're just - meagre, curiously flat. Torchwood Lo-Cal. There's precious little drama or tension in either, no matter how much the background music keeps trying to drum it up. Of course, with any TW canon set before Children of Earth, building any convincing sense of danger or menace is an almost impossible ask - still, there's none of the genuinely horrible nuance that some audiobooks or radio plays have managed, like Lidster's In The Shadows, with that mad moral-crusader cabbie and his matchbox of eternal damnation. My attention wandered while listening to both, which might explain why Department X in particular made absolutely bugger-all sense to me by the end.
There's no mention at all of Owen or Toshiko or the times before Exit Wounds at all, really. There's also not a whisper of something I badly wanted; namely, the presaging hints threaded through the pre-CoE radio plays. That probably wouldn't have been Goss's strongest card either, since his TW style has generally been one of relentless quirky cheerful flippancy, even when the world is crashing in flames. He's not especially empathetic - nor are most of the TW novelists, to be fair - but with the foreknowledge of CoE impossible to un-know, that unwavering perky indifference to no matter what suffering and dying is happening felt unsatisfying to me. A better writer - or maybe one who cared more - would have found some way to at least subtly acknowledge what has been lost and we all know is about to be lost around the corner: to be poignant. There's one sense in which I think Goss may have been aiming at something like that, but it's spoilery so I'll put it in further down.
As for Kai Owen as narrator... well, again, he's not terrible or anything. He's just not all that good at it. About as competent an audio reader as John Barrowman, I guess? When he's immersed in the story he doesn't do too badly, which means that Ghost Train is mostly the better narration (since it's entirely Rhys 1st-person POV). But there are also way too many times when his reading is either lumpy or just plain wrong. Department X starts with a large volume of dialogue, and Owen just can't seem to manage to deliver the "he said... she said"s without trampling them clumsily onto the heels of each previous sentence. There are some strange tonal choices throughout: one character says something "while winking at Jack" but the delivery of the actual line is a kind of hysterical yelp, that kind of thing.
And the accents! Look, we've only got Jack, Gwen, Rhys and Ianto now in the main cast - 75% Welsh, 25% Kai Owen's own bloody character on the show. So, his Jack is a game try but pretty awful, his Ianto is oddly flat and dull, his Gwen is squeaky and strange - but even his Rhys doesn't sound like Rhys half the time! Now that's quite a nifty trick to pull off. The thing about audiobooks is that they suit some actors better than others, but for the most part of course, the better the actor, the better the delivery. Now, for all the reservations I have about what a mean-spirited arse Gareth David-Lloyd is personally capable of being at his worst, I have always liked his acting. I think he has a genuine talent for instinctively understanding the core of the character, and then conveying that to an audience. As far as audio narratives go, he's a dream - he has that deliciously enjoyable accent, and he's a fluent, relaxed reader, with the natural mimic's gift for catching both the accent of another person's voice, and their cadences, the lyricism of their speaking patterns. Because of that, his reading of Brian Minchin's The Sin Eaters was head and shoulders above the rest of the cast's audiobooks: the story was so-so but damn, he really sounded like Jack and Gwen and Rhys when he was reading! Kai Owen delivers the words like a competent actor, but at some level he simply doesn't have an ear for the nuances that make Ianto sound like Ianto, say, or maybe he hears it but can't deliver it.
All of which means that these two audiobooks are essentially, irredeemably inert. And also depressing, which I'll explain in the next bit. I've listened once: I have no interest in listening again. More on that later!
Here is the next bit! Not a complete synopsis, but plenty of spoilers.
s
p
a
c
e
There are a number of spoilery reasons these two stories didn't move me and certainly didn't give me any cathartic warm fuzzies, which was probably what I wanted when I pre-ordered.
Maybe the biggest thing of all is the tone. Both stories are set in dully unappealing environments, with these strangely downbeat, dull themes. Ghost Train involves boring bits of the Cardiff rail network - old trains, dusty old stations - being borrowed or cloned by aliens who turn out to be nerdy, stereotypical traffic controllers, obsessed with lifeless systemic efficiency. Department X is all about a once-grand, proud department store, the star of Cardiff, now hopelessly out-of date, commercially obsolete and superseded by what's clearly the St David's shopping mall. It's a horrible but perfectly plausible version of Howells ten years from now, on its last legs, shabby and unloved, with only a few loyal old biddies as the last straggling customers. As it turns out, the shop is freezing them in the basement and eating them, which only shows they really should have followed their fickle neighbours to John Lewis after all.
I don't know about you but I've known so many shops like this fictional G R Owen, and they are depressing and soul-sucking beyond question, from the unfashionable discounted stock to the pitiful last few customers hoping for a tired 'bargain', to the staff, all eking out their days while waiting for the inevitable redundancy and closure. There is nothing about this scenario that is in any way amusing or jolly, and after the umpteenth gloomy description of the sad old manager hopelessly watching the place he'd loyally served for his whole working life crumbling wretchedly around him, I honestly couldn't have felt more miserable. And then wait until you meet Gareth... Ghost Train was marginally less chronically gloomy, but then again it's basically a story about intergalactic trainspotters and traffic wardens. It's as if Goss searched for the two most dismal, depressing themes he could imagine, then laid on the hopeless sense of defeat and obsolescence with a generous trowel. Maybe he was trying to make his own point about the eventual fate of the Torchwood we used to know? Maybe. I don't know, but he certainly depressed the shit out of me even more than before, which as far as all things Torchwood goes is pretty impressive.
Another thing I really disliked about these two stories is how they're set in Cardiff, but have very little textual connection with the pre-CoE Torchwood and all its silly, cracky, random gizmos and pterodactyls and Weevils and cryo-crypts and all the rest. Ghost Train mostly takes place following Rhys from home to Harwoods and on various round-Cardiff chases, including a stopover at Ianto's flat for a couple of weeks. (If you're hoping for fun, illuminating details of Ianto's domestic world in canon, hope on: we find out that it's neat, boring and clean, with a big telly and a nice sofa and a Rio Ferdinand calendar - a detail I didn't believe in the slightest, partly because Ianto is obsessively careful about not flashing his orientation in any way, not to mention that if he really wanted a 'fit men' calendar, surely but surely he'd have the rugby-loving good taste to choose the Dieux du Stade, come on!)
The thing is, Rhys makes one five-second visit to the Hub, and - that's it. He sees the SUV tooling around the town, but in general it's as if all the Torchwoody-ness of the show has already been tidied away: no strange gadgets, no fun bits and bobs of alien tech. Department X is worse in that it's set entirely in this big decrepit shop, with Gwen and Ianto undercover. The Hub i- sorry, was - the heart of the show in many ways, and these two stories feel as if the heart's already been crushed out of them. In a similar way, the aliens of both stories are both omnipotent in a supernatural, handwavey, disengaged way - and utterly banal. Both stories use the idea of super-powerful aliens in some way disguising themselves as not just humans, but the most boring of humans in the most mundane of settings, doing dull everyday things. It smacks of aspiring to the zany oxymoronic contrasts of Douglas Adams' sci-fi universe, without the talent to make that genuinely amusing.
And Team Torchwood itself is strangely subdued. There are scarcely any scenes where the three of them interact together, and most of the action in both stories is Jack, Gwen or Ianto doing something solo, or Jack and Gwen together while Ianto is stuck with Rhys, or with one of the OCs. Not that he's missing anything. Goss in his earlier TW novels had a real sense of the kind of playfully bitchy bantering the team has always tended to enjoy, even in the teeth of crisis, but that's almost all gone here. As it was in CoE, indeed. Jack still bounces around doing flamboyant stuff without telling either of his partners what's happening: Gwen still chatters away to OCs or to Rhys, Ianto still says very little, though there's now no trace whatsoever of his dryly snarky spirit. I don't know if any of this is deliberate on Goss's part, but he's writing the way I suspect I'd be writing now if I tried to go back to Torchwood, as if all the lustre and vibrancy has gone out of the narrative. It's really hard to escape the feeling that the spirit has already left the building.
Jack and Ianto? Well, Jack isn't the snide, chilly, condescending heteronormative fuckwad he became in CoE, so that's nice. At one point, Goss has Ianto thinking about Jack as "his best friend" which made me pull a face I don't have the right emoticon to describe (not least because, for all his fussy undertones, I seriously don't think Ianto's ever been such a big wet girl's blouse, 'best fwiend' my arse.) Elsewhere, though, they're flirty and canoodling mildly in Menswear, and during Rhys's (covert) two-week stay at Ianto's flat, either Ianto stays with Jack or Jack spends the night with Ianto, much to Rhys's embarrassed discomfort: the walls are apparently very thin... So, they're lovers, we know they are (no watershed-esque narrative pixellating for the kiddies) and there's absolutely no feeling of any UST whatsoever between Gwen and Jack - she only has eyes for Rhys, and Jack is friendly but businesslike with her. Ianto and Gwen also clearly function very much as equal deputies to Jack's lead. And when Ianto goes missing in Department X, Jack is very furiously focused on recovering him: in Ghost Train, the only advice he gives Rhys at the most critical tits-up point is "tell Ianto", trusting implicitly that Ianto will have the level-headed intelligence to figure everything out and do what's needed to save the day.
And yet... there's no real feeling of affection either, between Jack and Ianto or any of them. I was looking out for it with Jack and Ianto of course, but even with Gwen and Rhys, even though they have the odd moments of cozy domestic harmony - and Rhys babbles on and on and bloody on about how gorgeous Gwen is, how bee-oo-tii-ful, how she's got a great arse blahblah - there's also the point in Ghost Train where he sees her die in a giant explosion... and then he carries on. Occasionally remembering to mention how he's all shocked and stunned because OMG, Gwen's dead! - but really, you'd be hard-pressed to feel as if he actually thinks for a moment that she really is lost, or that he's all that cut up about it. Again, that might be Kai Owen's banal delivery, but it might also be that James Goss just isn't trying to sell it very convincingly at all.
Where's the love, Team Torchio? Oh, they're looking out for each other, worried about their safety, anxious when they're threatened, but there's a strange absence of any intimacy, any tenderness. I think of Jack in Exit Wounds, in The Stolen Earth, how he clung to them both, how he was unabashedly demonstrative. The times when Gwen clung to Rhys like he was her lifeline. And sure, desperate times maybe, but now they're all just a bit too busy rushing about solving supernatural crimes to be genuinely affectionate. There's even a reference in Ghost Train to how Ianto scrupulously avoids revealing his feelings the incessant times he has to witness Jack dying, how he's developed this special, carefully neutral manly hug, to provide a touch of discreet but stoic reassurance for Jack while not alarming him with anything too emotional. And while I'll admit that feels all too painfully in-character, the truth is I have a sad, soppy weak love of emotional warmth between characters I care for, to us being given just the occasional crumb of compassion and tenderness. God knows, we never got many of those before CoE as it was, and just the slightest touch of that in either of these stories would have been like a sweet sorrowful glimmer in the darkness. But there's no glimmer here, and that means there never will be ever anymore.
So as I say, I have no reason to listen to either of these again, and I don't feel any urge to keep them either.
But I also don't want to sell them. So here's my cunning plan. Do you want them? You can have them! Let me know - leave a comment here, then PM an address to me, and I'll post them to you. First come first served - with only one catch. If someone else also wants them, after I've sent them to you and you've listened, please mail them on to the next person. And if there are three of you, the second recipient mails them on to the third, and so on. Like an impromptu library conga - so if you want them, you just have to be willing to pass them on and either pay the postage onward, or negotiate something adult and fair with the next recipient.
That's all! I appreciate, with a sales pitch like that, none of you may want to listen to these at all, and in any event I expect the Fight Clubs will come up with the goods eventually anyway. But I don't personally want to upload these, I just want to send them on to someone who will send them on in turn. They're probably worth listening to, if only to see if you agree with me or think I'm being cruel and unfair.
In conclusion: see icon. oh Torchwood...
A long long time ago - seriously, getting on for a year, long enough ago that I'm not even sure if anyone knew then whether they'd be novel or audiobook - the two new Torchwood *things* showed up for pre-order on the Book Depository and I ordered them both. I honestly can't remember why I did that now. Maybe a completist thing? I have all the novels and audioboks and assorted tut, all ready to be neatly packed into a mouse-proof box for the attic, I guess. Maybe it was a nostalgic nod to the dead, as they seemed set to be the last bits of pre-CoE canon we'd ever be getting. Who knows, it's even possible I was still harbouring some tiny shreds of deluded hope that the new series wouldn't be the anything-but-Torchwood hodgepodge it seems to be shaping up into.
Anyway, I did pre-order them, and then I forgot, and so getting a Book Dep. despatch email last week was a bit of a surprise. I toyed with the idea of just not listening and selling them all still nicely shrink-wrapped on eBay, but in the end I opened them and listened anyway: see 'completist' above. So here's a summary of what I thought about both under a cut or two, organised in unspoilery and slightly more spoilery slices, together with what I'm planning to do with them both.
The two audiobooks are Department X, and Ghost Train, both written by James Goss and read by Kai Owen. Department X has Jack, Gwen and Ianto investigating Odd Stuff happening at a once-glamorous Cardiff department store, now faded and unfashionable. Ghost Train is something of a Rhys adventure, as he tries to solve a Harwoods-related mystery that - natch - turns out to cross wires with Torchwood business. It isn't clear which order they should be in. and doesn't really matter. Ghost Train was the last one published, but it also includes one reference to one strand of Department X which makes me think it's actually meant to be the earlier story.
So, what were they like?
You're not going to get an objective impression from me about anything Torchwood anymore, if you ever did. The thing is, I didn't listen to these in any spirit of hating or wanting to troll: where I am now, thinking about Torchwood just tends to make me feel sad and defeated, but just as with the very occasional fanfic I'll still click on, there's always that nostalgic desire for just one more story that takes me back to the point in time when everything was still to play for. And I actually enjoyed James Goss's TW novels quite a lot - after Joe Lidster, Goss came closest (for me) to capturing the feeling of random alien mayhem, but shot through with an affectionate tolerance for / love of the characters themselves - unlike TW novelists like Trevor Baxendale or Peter Anghelides, say, who seemed to mostly be shoehorning the characters into their own pet horror scenarios. (Or Sarah Pinborough, whose Gwen-fetish might have been cute if it didn't come wrapped in a thick greasy topcoat of rancid homophobia.) But Almost Perfect and Risk Assessment were imaginative and creepy, and had a convincing Gwen and Ianto in particular, as well as portraying Jack and Ianto's flirtatious, uncertain relationship quite persuasively.
So I went in about as neutral-positive as I could be these days.
And neither of them is a stinker, neither of them is a bad story. They're just - meagre, curiously flat. Torchwood Lo-Cal. There's precious little drama or tension in either, no matter how much the background music keeps trying to drum it up. Of course, with any TW canon set before Children of Earth, building any convincing sense of danger or menace is an almost impossible ask - still, there's none of the genuinely horrible nuance that some audiobooks or radio plays have managed, like Lidster's In The Shadows, with that mad moral-crusader cabbie and his matchbox of eternal damnation. My attention wandered while listening to both, which might explain why Department X in particular made absolutely bugger-all sense to me by the end.
There's no mention at all of Owen or Toshiko or the times before Exit Wounds at all, really. There's also not a whisper of something I badly wanted; namely, the presaging hints threaded through the pre-CoE radio plays. That probably wouldn't have been Goss's strongest card either, since his TW style has generally been one of relentless quirky cheerful flippancy, even when the world is crashing in flames. He's not especially empathetic - nor are most of the TW novelists, to be fair - but with the foreknowledge of CoE impossible to un-know, that unwavering perky indifference to no matter what suffering and dying is happening felt unsatisfying to me. A better writer - or maybe one who cared more - would have found some way to at least subtly acknowledge what has been lost and we all know is about to be lost around the corner: to be poignant. There's one sense in which I think Goss may have been aiming at something like that, but it's spoilery so I'll put it in further down.
As for Kai Owen as narrator... well, again, he's not terrible or anything. He's just not all that good at it. About as competent an audio reader as John Barrowman, I guess? When he's immersed in the story he doesn't do too badly, which means that Ghost Train is mostly the better narration (since it's entirely Rhys 1st-person POV). But there are also way too many times when his reading is either lumpy or just plain wrong. Department X starts with a large volume of dialogue, and Owen just can't seem to manage to deliver the "he said... she said"s without trampling them clumsily onto the heels of each previous sentence. There are some strange tonal choices throughout: one character says something "while winking at Jack" but the delivery of the actual line is a kind of hysterical yelp, that kind of thing.
And the accents! Look, we've only got Jack, Gwen, Rhys and Ianto now in the main cast - 75% Welsh, 25% Kai Owen's own bloody character on the show. So, his Jack is a game try but pretty awful, his Ianto is oddly flat and dull, his Gwen is squeaky and strange - but even his Rhys doesn't sound like Rhys half the time! Now that's quite a nifty trick to pull off. The thing about audiobooks is that they suit some actors better than others, but for the most part of course, the better the actor, the better the delivery. Now, for all the reservations I have about what a mean-spirited arse Gareth David-Lloyd is personally capable of being at his worst, I have always liked his acting. I think he has a genuine talent for instinctively understanding the core of the character, and then conveying that to an audience. As far as audio narratives go, he's a dream - he has that deliciously enjoyable accent, and he's a fluent, relaxed reader, with the natural mimic's gift for catching both the accent of another person's voice, and their cadences, the lyricism of their speaking patterns. Because of that, his reading of Brian Minchin's The Sin Eaters was head and shoulders above the rest of the cast's audiobooks: the story was so-so but damn, he really sounded like Jack and Gwen and Rhys when he was reading! Kai Owen delivers the words like a competent actor, but at some level he simply doesn't have an ear for the nuances that make Ianto sound like Ianto, say, or maybe he hears it but can't deliver it.
All of which means that these two audiobooks are essentially, irredeemably inert. And also depressing, which I'll explain in the next bit. I've listened once: I have no interest in listening again. More on that later!
Here is the next bit! Not a complete synopsis, but plenty of spoilers.
s
p
a
c
e
There are a number of spoilery reasons these two stories didn't move me and certainly didn't give me any cathartic warm fuzzies, which was probably what I wanted when I pre-ordered.
Maybe the biggest thing of all is the tone. Both stories are set in dully unappealing environments, with these strangely downbeat, dull themes. Ghost Train involves boring bits of the Cardiff rail network - old trains, dusty old stations - being borrowed or cloned by aliens who turn out to be nerdy, stereotypical traffic controllers, obsessed with lifeless systemic efficiency. Department X is all about a once-grand, proud department store, the star of Cardiff, now hopelessly out-of date, commercially obsolete and superseded by what's clearly the St David's shopping mall. It's a horrible but perfectly plausible version of Howells ten years from now, on its last legs, shabby and unloved, with only a few loyal old biddies as the last straggling customers. As it turns out, the shop is freezing them in the basement and eating them, which only shows they really should have followed their fickle neighbours to John Lewis after all.
I don't know about you but I've known so many shops like this fictional G R Owen, and they are depressing and soul-sucking beyond question, from the unfashionable discounted stock to the pitiful last few customers hoping for a tired 'bargain', to the staff, all eking out their days while waiting for the inevitable redundancy and closure. There is nothing about this scenario that is in any way amusing or jolly, and after the umpteenth gloomy description of the sad old manager hopelessly watching the place he'd loyally served for his whole working life crumbling wretchedly around him, I honestly couldn't have felt more miserable. And then wait until you meet Gareth... Ghost Train was marginally less chronically gloomy, but then again it's basically a story about intergalactic trainspotters and traffic wardens. It's as if Goss searched for the two most dismal, depressing themes he could imagine, then laid on the hopeless sense of defeat and obsolescence with a generous trowel. Maybe he was trying to make his own point about the eventual fate of the Torchwood we used to know? Maybe. I don't know, but he certainly depressed the shit out of me even more than before, which as far as all things Torchwood goes is pretty impressive.
Another thing I really disliked about these two stories is how they're set in Cardiff, but have very little textual connection with the pre-CoE Torchwood and all its silly, cracky, random gizmos and pterodactyls and Weevils and cryo-crypts and all the rest. Ghost Train mostly takes place following Rhys from home to Harwoods and on various round-Cardiff chases, including a stopover at Ianto's flat for a couple of weeks. (If you're hoping for fun, illuminating details of Ianto's domestic world in canon, hope on: we find out that it's neat, boring and clean, with a big telly and a nice sofa and a Rio Ferdinand calendar - a detail I didn't believe in the slightest, partly because Ianto is obsessively careful about not flashing his orientation in any way, not to mention that if he really wanted a 'fit men' calendar, surely but surely he'd have the rugby-loving good taste to choose the Dieux du Stade, come on!)
The thing is, Rhys makes one five-second visit to the Hub, and - that's it. He sees the SUV tooling around the town, but in general it's as if all the Torchwoody-ness of the show has already been tidied away: no strange gadgets, no fun bits and bobs of alien tech. Department X is worse in that it's set entirely in this big decrepit shop, with Gwen and Ianto undercover. The Hub i- sorry, was - the heart of the show in many ways, and these two stories feel as if the heart's already been crushed out of them. In a similar way, the aliens of both stories are both omnipotent in a supernatural, handwavey, disengaged way - and utterly banal. Both stories use the idea of super-powerful aliens in some way disguising themselves as not just humans, but the most boring of humans in the most mundane of settings, doing dull everyday things. It smacks of aspiring to the zany oxymoronic contrasts of Douglas Adams' sci-fi universe, without the talent to make that genuinely amusing.
And Team Torchwood itself is strangely subdued. There are scarcely any scenes where the three of them interact together, and most of the action in both stories is Jack, Gwen or Ianto doing something solo, or Jack and Gwen together while Ianto is stuck with Rhys, or with one of the OCs. Not that he's missing anything. Goss in his earlier TW novels had a real sense of the kind of playfully bitchy bantering the team has always tended to enjoy, even in the teeth of crisis, but that's almost all gone here. As it was in CoE, indeed. Jack still bounces around doing flamboyant stuff without telling either of his partners what's happening: Gwen still chatters away to OCs or to Rhys, Ianto still says very little, though there's now no trace whatsoever of his dryly snarky spirit. I don't know if any of this is deliberate on Goss's part, but he's writing the way I suspect I'd be writing now if I tried to go back to Torchwood, as if all the lustre and vibrancy has gone out of the narrative. It's really hard to escape the feeling that the spirit has already left the building.
Jack and Ianto? Well, Jack isn't the snide, chilly, condescending heteronormative fuckwad he became in CoE, so that's nice. At one point, Goss has Ianto thinking about Jack as "his best friend" which made me pull a face I don't have the right emoticon to describe (not least because, for all his fussy undertones, I seriously don't think Ianto's ever been such a big wet girl's blouse, 'best fwiend' my arse.) Elsewhere, though, they're flirty and canoodling mildly in Menswear, and during Rhys's (covert) two-week stay at Ianto's flat, either Ianto stays with Jack or Jack spends the night with Ianto, much to Rhys's embarrassed discomfort: the walls are apparently very thin... So, they're lovers, we know they are (no watershed-esque narrative pixellating for the kiddies) and there's absolutely no feeling of any UST whatsoever between Gwen and Jack - she only has eyes for Rhys, and Jack is friendly but businesslike with her. Ianto and Gwen also clearly function very much as equal deputies to Jack's lead. And when Ianto goes missing in Department X, Jack is very furiously focused on recovering him: in Ghost Train, the only advice he gives Rhys at the most critical tits-up point is "tell Ianto", trusting implicitly that Ianto will have the level-headed intelligence to figure everything out and do what's needed to save the day.
And yet... there's no real feeling of affection either, between Jack and Ianto or any of them. I was looking out for it with Jack and Ianto of course, but even with Gwen and Rhys, even though they have the odd moments of cozy domestic harmony - and Rhys babbles on and on and bloody on about how gorgeous Gwen is, how bee-oo-tii-ful, how she's got a great arse blahblah - there's also the point in Ghost Train where he sees her die in a giant explosion... and then he carries on. Occasionally remembering to mention how he's all shocked and stunned because OMG, Gwen's dead! - but really, you'd be hard-pressed to feel as if he actually thinks for a moment that she really is lost, or that he's all that cut up about it. Again, that might be Kai Owen's banal delivery, but it might also be that James Goss just isn't trying to sell it very convincingly at all.
Where's the love, Team Torchio? Oh, they're looking out for each other, worried about their safety, anxious when they're threatened, but there's a strange absence of any intimacy, any tenderness. I think of Jack in Exit Wounds, in The Stolen Earth, how he clung to them both, how he was unabashedly demonstrative. The times when Gwen clung to Rhys like he was her lifeline. And sure, desperate times maybe, but now they're all just a bit too busy rushing about solving supernatural crimes to be genuinely affectionate. There's even a reference in Ghost Train to how Ianto scrupulously avoids revealing his feelings the incessant times he has to witness Jack dying, how he's developed this special, carefully neutral manly hug, to provide a touch of discreet but stoic reassurance for Jack while not alarming him with anything too emotional. And while I'll admit that feels all too painfully in-character, the truth is I have a sad, soppy weak love of emotional warmth between characters I care for, to us being given just the occasional crumb of compassion and tenderness. God knows, we never got many of those before CoE as it was, and just the slightest touch of that in either of these stories would have been like a sweet sorrowful glimmer in the darkness. But there's no glimmer here, and that means there never will be ever anymore.
So as I say, I have no reason to listen to either of these again, and I don't feel any urge to keep them either.
But I also don't want to sell them. So here's my cunning plan. Do you want them? You can have them! Let me know - leave a comment here, then PM an address to me, and I'll post them to you. First come first served - with only one catch. If someone else also wants them, after I've sent them to you and you've listened, please mail them on to the next person. And if there are three of you, the second recipient mails them on to the third, and so on. Like an impromptu library conga - so if you want them, you just have to be willing to pass them on and either pay the postage onward, or negotiate something adult and fair with the next recipient.
That's all! I appreciate, with a sales pitch like that, none of you may want to listen to these at all, and in any event I expect the Fight Clubs will come up with the goods eventually anyway. But I don't personally want to upload these, I just want to send them on to someone who will send them on in turn. They're probably worth listening to, if only to see if you agree with me or think I'm being cruel and unfair.
In conclusion: see icon. oh Torchwood...