Torchwood (finale)
There is nothing I can say outside this cut that wouldn't be a spoiler. Sooo...
WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED.
I just started watching Torchwood last week, damn it. I got to see the whole Owen arc all back-to-back and fell head-over-heels for Owen (and Tosh). I got to have about five days of fluffy, fannish show-love and, before I could even get around to doing a post of the "OMG I love Torchwood and Owen and Tosh" sort, now THIS?
Not upset, really, just ... stunned. And suddenly rather, no, scratch that, VERY un-fannish about the show ... for a number of reasons and not JUST the fact that they just killed both my favorite characters. Well, okay, it has a lot to do with that. BUT.
Is it just me or did that episode make NO SENSE AT ALL? In fact, is it just me or was most of the episode other than the Owen and Tosh death scenes almost laughably bad? I can take a little lack-of-sense. Heck, I can take a lot of lack-of-sense if the emotional impact makes up for it. (I watch SGA. 'nuff said.) But ... but ... BUT. The entire emotional underpinning of the Grey plot (that Grey is evil and crazy and hates Jack; that Jack blames himself for Grey's fate) didn't work for me. Grey went crazy and evil after ... what, a few hours of trauma? And spent the rest of his life planning for a really, really weird and nonsensical revenge? Which Jack, for some reason, thinks he deserves?
Grey seems to have skipped the insane criminal mastermind stage and gone straight to just plain insane. I cannot figure out his plan at all. Burying Jack alive for 2000 years is pretty horrible, all right, but the steps to his plan seem to go something like this:
1. Have a lackey carry out your revenge for you: set off bombs around the city, capture and torture Jack, and take him into the past.
2. Reveal yourself. Gloat for two seconds, dig a hole, bury him. Excellent... revenge accomplished.
3. Now wander off, secure in the knowledge he could not possibly, given all of eternity, dig himself out from under four feet of dirt. (Apparently, he couldn't, but WHY NOT???)
4. Since the plan's done and Jack's put away, let the unwilling and fairly powerful lackey who knows all of your plans run off scot-free to the future, because clearly he's not just going to run off to Jack's friends and tell them what's going on. Or try to interfere with your master plan in any way. Naaaaahhh.
5. But wait! The plan's not done! You still have to torture Jack's friends. I guess you must have missed the step in megalomaniac school where you're supposed to torture and/or kill the friends *in front of* the person who's life you're trying to destroy. Oops. So, yeah, better go do that, then.
6. At which point you procede to wander around the Hub, randomly imprisoning or injuring people without killing them, until they stop you.
And this is not even getting into the pointless melodrama and over-acting and random slow-motion! Aaaugh! It's like we've been dropped back into season one! Help!
I think all of this was even more noticeable at the climax because they were cutting back and forth between the Jack/Grey/Spike scenes (sorry, he'll always be Spike to me) and the Owen/Tosh scenes, and the latter were just ... better, in pretty much every way. It still didn't make much sense (the meltdown of the nuclear reactor can only be stopped by venting it into the control area? huh?) but -- I don't think this is just my Owen/Tosh fangirlism coming out here ... the emotion in those scenes felt so much more powerful and true, rather than forced; it was tense and heroic and brave and sad and terrible, while the scenes with Jack were just sort of melodramatic and over-the-top and borderline absurd.
(... seriously, he spent 2000 years buried alive and he's still the exact same guy who went into the pit? SGA can be pretty lousy at carrying through the emotional consequences of the characters' actions, but even they're not THAT bad!)
I will give TPTB this -- if they were gonna kill off my two favorite characters in one fell swoop, at least they went out well. They had an awesome death scene that pushed my fan buttons in all kinds of ways. But ... but now they're dead, and not the kind of dead that people come back from, either. Which means we're left with Jack, Ianto and Gwen. And, I'm sorry, but while I do like the three of them (Gwen somewhat less than the other two), I'm not sure if I'm especially interested in watching the Jack, Ianto and Gwen Show. And my fannish interest has pretty much gone *fizzle*.
Oh well, it was fun while it lasted; I think that might take the prize for shortest fan-fixation ever!
I'll console myself with the new Dresden Files book. *consoles*
WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED.
I just started watching Torchwood last week, damn it. I got to see the whole Owen arc all back-to-back and fell head-over-heels for Owen (and Tosh). I got to have about five days of fluffy, fannish show-love and, before I could even get around to doing a post of the "OMG I love Torchwood and Owen and Tosh" sort, now THIS?
Not upset, really, just ... stunned. And suddenly rather, no, scratch that, VERY un-fannish about the show ... for a number of reasons and not JUST the fact that they just killed both my favorite characters. Well, okay, it has a lot to do with that. BUT.
Is it just me or did that episode make NO SENSE AT ALL? In fact, is it just me or was most of the episode other than the Owen and Tosh death scenes almost laughably bad? I can take a little lack-of-sense. Heck, I can take a lot of lack-of-sense if the emotional impact makes up for it. (I watch SGA. 'nuff said.) But ... but ... BUT. The entire emotional underpinning of the Grey plot (that Grey is evil and crazy and hates Jack; that Jack blames himself for Grey's fate) didn't work for me. Grey went crazy and evil after ... what, a few hours of trauma? And spent the rest of his life planning for a really, really weird and nonsensical revenge? Which Jack, for some reason, thinks he deserves?
Grey seems to have skipped the insane criminal mastermind stage and gone straight to just plain insane. I cannot figure out his plan at all. Burying Jack alive for 2000 years is pretty horrible, all right, but the steps to his plan seem to go something like this:
1. Have a lackey carry out your revenge for you: set off bombs around the city, capture and torture Jack, and take him into the past.
2. Reveal yourself. Gloat for two seconds, dig a hole, bury him. Excellent... revenge accomplished.
3. Now wander off, secure in the knowledge he could not possibly, given all of eternity, dig himself out from under four feet of dirt. (Apparently, he couldn't, but WHY NOT???)
4. Since the plan's done and Jack's put away, let the unwilling and fairly powerful lackey who knows all of your plans run off scot-free to the future, because clearly he's not just going to run off to Jack's friends and tell them what's going on. Or try to interfere with your master plan in any way. Naaaaahhh.
5. But wait! The plan's not done! You still have to torture Jack's friends. I guess you must have missed the step in megalomaniac school where you're supposed to torture and/or kill the friends *in front of* the person who's life you're trying to destroy. Oops. So, yeah, better go do that, then.
6. At which point you procede to wander around the Hub, randomly imprisoning or injuring people without killing them, until they stop you.
And this is not even getting into the pointless melodrama and over-acting and random slow-motion! Aaaugh! It's like we've been dropped back into season one! Help!
I think all of this was even more noticeable at the climax because they were cutting back and forth between the Jack/Grey/Spike scenes (sorry, he'll always be Spike to me) and the Owen/Tosh scenes, and the latter were just ... better, in pretty much every way. It still didn't make much sense (the meltdown of the nuclear reactor can only be stopped by venting it into the control area? huh?) but -- I don't think this is just my Owen/Tosh fangirlism coming out here ... the emotion in those scenes felt so much more powerful and true, rather than forced; it was tense and heroic and brave and sad and terrible, while the scenes with Jack were just sort of melodramatic and over-the-top and borderline absurd.
(... seriously, he spent 2000 years buried alive and he's still the exact same guy who went into the pit? SGA can be pretty lousy at carrying through the emotional consequences of the characters' actions, but even they're not THAT bad!)
I will give TPTB this -- if they were gonna kill off my two favorite characters in one fell swoop, at least they went out well. They had an awesome death scene that pushed my fan buttons in all kinds of ways. But ... but now they're dead, and not the kind of dead that people come back from, either. Which means we're left with Jack, Ianto and Gwen. And, I'm sorry, but while I do like the three of them (Gwen somewhat less than the other two), I'm not sure if I'm especially interested in watching the Jack, Ianto and Gwen Show. And my fannish interest has pretty much gone *fizzle*.
Oh well, it was fun while it lasted; I think that might take the prize for shortest fan-fixation ever!
I'll console myself with the new Dresden Files book. *consoles*