(Untitled)

[solitary_summer]

I've been kind of sitting on the fence (or maybe more precisely hopping on & off the fence) about MD so far, but there wasn't a single thing about this episode I didn't love. (Except possibly bits of the music, if I'm being very nit-picky. There were some odd choices there.)

Comments

[solitary_summer]

Having said that, I hope what's happening to the world is a bit more complicated than just a jilted lover and a bunch of gangster types wanting Jack for their own purposes

I do think it'll be more complicated, but Angelo is clearly important, since the entire religious angle of the miracle seems to hang on him. I guess it'll depend on what he actually hopes to achieve with it... I wouldn't mind him being a central figure, but I really hope they don't completely butcher the characterisation in the process.

especially as neither RTD or JB have ever really understood why some Jack/Ianto fans were dissapointed with how their relationship developed over three series

I'm taking everything RTD and JB say about TW with a grain of salt - they have to sell the show, they're not going to publicly criticise it. And we don't know what happened behind the scenes, especially back in S1 when the whole thing was completely new and experimental; everyone was afraid that moving TW to America would mean heterosexualising it, but perhaps Starz actually gave RTD more leeway when it came to gay content than the BBC had...

I think the problem was that S1 was more or less a test balloon if SF audiences would accept a show with a non-heterosexual lead in a gay relationship, S2 was hastily patched up after RTD decided to kill Owen instead of Ianto and had very little actual relationship development as a result, and CoE was simply too short. At this point the tone was set, both Jack and Ianto had been established as rather guarded characters, neither of whom talked a lot about their emotions or were prone to big declarations. Things might have been different if we'd have had a full-length third series, but the kind of tenderness we saw in Immortal Sins hadn't been there for the first two series either, and you simply can't pull off massive character development like that in the space of five days, not when the main focus is somewhere else. I think given the material he had RTD did the best he could to at least resolve their relationship before killing Ianto. Obviously Ianto's death didn't make me happy, but I always thought the way their relationship developed in CoE was very in character.

I didn't like how long Jack's torture scene went on for either, I'm more sensitive to fictional violence as an adult that I ever was as a 12 year old watching films like Halloween.

I also noticed that this bothers me more and more the older I grow. This said though, it's not quite as painfully long when you rewatch it, and after I got over the first shock, I really did like how the scene was filmed, both the visuals and how it conveyed the religious atmosphere and imagery...