A love declaration in four parts: Torchwood: Children of Earth

[selenak]

These last days I've been rewatching Torchwood: Childen of Earth, and oh, it really is as good as I remember. Bloody brilliant, as Gwen Cooper would say. RTD, John Fay, James Moran, Euros Lyn and all the actors created something great there, and those five hours alone would make me appreciate everyone involved if they had never done anything else

Comments

[selenak]

re: Steven - might have been simply a question of screentime. Or of young actor age - I noticed that the children in the Whoverse who get to do actual acting scenes, like young Reinette, young Amelia or the Frobisher girls, are all older than that little boy was. In the end, as you say, it's sold to us via Alice (and after all, Jack sacrificing his grandson also means in a very real sense sacrificing his daughter), and Lucy Cohu is certainly up for the job.

Jack and Ianto: I know what you mean. The relationship made no sense whatsoever to me in s1, with it going from "I'm gonna kill you!" in Cyberwoman to "Stopwatch, Sir?" two eps later; s2 contextualized this a bit more with the Fragments flashback which at least to me had the implication that Ianto and Jack already had sex pre-Cyberwoman (since Ianto definitley used flirting to get his job and had no way of explaining he wasn't available without revealing Lisa) and the stopwatch remark was Ianto signalling they could go back to the usual. But I still thought it was mostly there in a "see, we can do canon slash!" manner. Not so here. Not that the unequality of it was entirely gone (one reason why I never shipped them, btw); but whether it was the uneasy "couple" exchanges, the smooth-flowing partnership when they were working (in the hospital, entering Thames House), or Ianto making Jack talk to him about the 1965 incident, suddenly it came across as a genuine relationship, with strengths and warts.