Torchwood: Children of Earth Day Four

[theoriginalspy]

I think the entire planet knows the spoiler by now.  It's strange that this one event has caused an eruption of reaction.  The majority of this post will not be dealing with the fandom response.   All anyone needs to do is look on Twitter, or LJ, or any other social networking site to find out how the fandom is reacting.  Whether the first

Comments

[reggietate]

Great post. I was completely unspoiled for Torchwood this time round, having somewhat lost interest after being deeply involved in Primeval. And I was really enjoying the series in that light. This hasn't spoiled it for me, because I was never a great fan of Ianto, I mainly like Torchwood for its stories rather than the characters. But like you, I can't see a good reason for killing him off like this, just when he was getting interesting, and when the show had successfully transferred to BBC1.

There's been some speculation that this makes way for Gwen/Jack, which would definitely be a bad move. Not because I dislike Gwen, or even the idea of the pairing, but Gwen is happily married, with a child coming, and a loving husband. And at this point it would seem out of character for any of them to go down that route. So I hope they don't go there. Despite not being deeply emotionally invested in any of the characters, I do care what happens to them, and that kind of development just wouldn't fly, IMO.

As I want to be surprised by the outcome of all this, and the climax, I'm now avoiding spoilers for part 5. Thankfully, as I'm not actually 'in' the fandom, it isn't too hard. It'll be interesting to see what the final verdict is, once we've seen all five parts. I'll be disappointed if there's a reset without major consequences. But several of my own flisters are upset, so I won't be that unhappy if Ianto is brought back in some way. It's not been a great year for hanging onto favourite characters in Brit SF/Cult shows. As I pointed out to another LJ-er, it's fine to serve teh story and not be influenced by fannish reaction, but a lot of the fans are watching those other shows too, like Primeval and Robin Hood, etc, all of which have lost well-loved characters recently. One more may just break the camel's back for many of them.

It won't kill the show, and is unlikely I think to harm the ratings too much in the general audience, but it's bound to cause some ill-feeling in the fandom at large. As you say, there just wasn't a compelling enough reason for Ianto to die.