Torchwood, "Day One"
"Travel halfway across the universe for the greatest sex; you still end up dying alone."
In its second episode, Torchwood continues to focus on the narrative obsessions it established in "Everything Changes," and adds a few new layers to them.
If we look at a surface description of "Day One" -- An alien that lives off the energy created by orgasm comes to Earth in search of new victims to extend its life -- it sounds deeply silly. And the premise is silly; there's no getting around that. What makes Torchwood work, thus far, is that it's able to take these kind of admittedly cheesy elements and use them to touch on deeper, darker issues.
There was a sharp focus in "Day One" on the loneliness of both death and life, and on the struggles inherent in the search for ways to give some kind of meaning to that life. We see that continue here: the unnamed alien that inhabits Carys' body needs sexual energy to live; it literally cannot continue to survive unless it makes an actual, physical connection with another living creature on a regular basis. Sex (read: connection with others, or a staving-off of loneliness) is constructed as a means of trying to give meaning to life, or meaning to one's eventual death.
And we can take that one step further, because what the show starts to do here, explicitly, is break down how a person's sexuality itself is defined, and uses this to point out, over and over again, both how little people (these people, in particular) know each other, and how much sexuality itself resists easy definitions. "You people and your quaint little categories," Jack says early on, and I think this statement is important for two reasons.
One, we're being told that it's not going to be easy to put the characters on this show into the binary gay or straight categories that most narrative media deals in -- and, in doing that, we lose a common tool we normally have for defining a person's character. If we can't define someone as either gay or straight (or even as [the allegedly non-existent] bisexual), then how do we define them? How do we relate to them and begin to understand who they really are? It forces us to dig deeper, and to push past the surface explanations to attempt to really get to know a person.
Two, what Jack says here explicitly sets him apart. We already know that he's bisexual, or omnisexual, or whatever word we want to use to describe the sexual orientation of someone from the 51st century who has, as the Ninth Doctor explained way back in "The Doctor Dances," a more flexible view of sex and desire than many people from the 21st century are likely to. We know that Jack doesn't subscribe to the usual gay/straight binary, and his comment reaffirms that. However, more importantly, the wording of it sets him apart: he's not part of "you people," not just because he rejects these categories, not just because he's immortal, but because he is, somehow, Other, in ways that go beyond both of those things.
The simple fact is that no one knows who Jack is, not really. We see this when he leaves the dinner table to go to the bathroom and the Torchwood team immediately starts quizzing Gwen to find out if she knows anything about him that they don't. The entire conversation is centered around the fact that none of them know anything about him. During the conversation, they indulge in some speculation about whether he's gay or straight (attempting to understand him by putting him into a category that, again, Jack himself has rejected), but it goes farther than that: they're not even sure if he's really an American, or where he might be from if he's not.
This lack of knowledge keeps Jack separate from the team, and also keeps them separate from him. It also goes both ways; his conversation with Gwen at the end of the episode makes it very clear that he doesn't know the team any better than they know him: "Everybody else is off doing...whatever it is they do when they're not here."
It's at this point that Gwen confronts him directly, asking Jack who he is. He avoids the question, and what he says in response is interesting: "You think knowing the answers would make you feel better? Go home, Gwen Cooper."
Like the "quaint little categories" comment earlier, I think this serves two functions. One, it again pushes us back toward the idea that life is lonely, and that it's possibly meaningless. For certain, it establishes again that there's an intrinsic impossibility, in this show, in any attempt to truly know another person, which raises the question of what inherent meaning might exist either in death or in life. Knowing the answers might solve some of the mystery, but it won't, Jack suggests here, allow Gwen to truly know him; it won't solve anything. It won't let them get closer, nor will it ease any inborn loneliness either of them might feel.
Connect this to the comment about dying alone: you can literally cross the universe. You can have the greatest sex in the world (making, again, a literal connection). You still end up dying alone, and what he seems to be suggesting here is that the "you" is a universal one.
Two, I think it's important that Jack calls Gwen by her full name here. He names her; he establishes her identity and tells her to go home, pointing out in doing so that this is why they need her, that they need her as part of the team for the very fact that she does have a life, and a perspective that the others lack, one that he certainly does. (And he seems to at least know the team well enough to know, or intuit, that they don't have outsides lives any more than he does, though he's clearly made no effort to find out any of the details.)
Contrast this also to the fact that, earlier in the episode, and more than once, Jack told Gwen that she needed to stop thinking of Torchwood as "you" and start thinking of it as "we." At the same time he's trying to draw her deeper into the team, he's also pushing her away, or at the very least trying to warn her not to allow herself to get completely consumed by it.
Note also how Owen spends much of the episode insisting on referring to Gwen as "New Girl" -- putting her in her place, categorizing her, and rejecting her identity as Gwen -- and how Gwen is firm on getting to know who Carys is as a person, on researching her life and trying to find out who she was before she was taken over by this alien consciousness.
It's all about the meaning of life and death; it's also about identity. Not so much about how people define themselves -- although that's present here, too -- but about how they attempt to define others, or how they reject doing so, and how seemingly both trying and rejecting that process lead back to the same place: To dying alone. To getting answers that don't make you feel any better.
Jesus, this show is nihilistic at times.
The thank-you kiss Gwen gives Jack is interesting: I think it's the one moment in the episode when anyone does manage to make a real connection with Jack, and in which he is, just for a second or two, reacting unguardedly and with some show of vulnerability. One tiny moment in which the gap between two people is eased, however briefly, and which indicates that there may be, after all, some hope for people finding ways to forge a real and meaningful connection.
I'm also really pleased with the show's depiction of sexuality as fluid. While so far we've seen both that people resist that breaking down and that doing so doesn't necessarily help the characters to connect any better than they did before, I think the process of breaking it down like that, deconstructing sexuality from its usual binaries, is an important one.
To an extent, it's the same kind of queering of the text we frequently do in fanfic, and it's a trope that, like many of the others on this show, I have an affinity for, but I also think that it's a good and necessary process in how we read text and subtext, and in how we regard sexuality in general. Not everyone in real life falls into neat categories of gay or straight (or of male or female), and neither do fictional characters, and I think it's important to constantly take a fresh look at our beliefs and the way we regard others.
Torchwood, for all its occasional cheesiness and plot holes, is doing a lot of good, thoughtful things along these lines, and the moments of hope -- as well as the ongoing discussions of sexuality and meaning -- interest me as much as the frequently bleak outlook does.