(no subject)
Oct. 15th, 2010 06:47 pmDamn. I thought I was joking when I wrote that, but either I'm imagining things, or the cough medicine is really making my brain annoyingly unfocused and sluggish. (And people are apparently taking it for recreational purposes? That seems rather baffling...)
Anyway. This is really sketchy and incomplete, mostly stray thoughts and bits and pieces left over from the epic meta post, as well as some that made it in there, and I probably wouldn't have written it if I weren't marooned at home and too dazed and lethargic to do any serious Russian studying. It originally goes back to this post, about year ago when I was rewatching TW after CoE, and it struck me that that at least looking at it from a post-Utopia POV the Philoktetes reference fits Jack much better than Mary, and that a lot of Jack's story in S1 is told indirectly through all the things he doesn't say, the question he doesn't answer, and the themes the stories address, even when they aren't about him as such. And of course there are scenes and lines that take on a different, more serious meaning after S2, or CoE.
When I was rewatching again this summer what unexpectedly caught my attention was Sleeper. It's the one single TW episode I never paid much attention to, because for me the way Jack treats Beth comes close to being borderline triggering and I have major issues with the way the episode from the beginning operates on the assumption that she is guilty, even when this is far from clear to the audience, but if one looks at Jack's story from the mortality/humanity angle, it becomes really obvious that the question of what makes us human, the mind or the body, is far from irrelevant.
Maybe this is me completely overinterpreting, and maybe it's time I stopped writing about TW until I get new material to think about (I think it really is...), but for all that Jack is almost in the background much of the time, on some level he determines the mood of the show and the choice of stories a lot more than is immediately visible, as with the shift from the bleakness of S1 where Jack struggles with his immortality, towards a more positive mood in S2, once he at least partly and temporarily resolved his issues in Utopia/SotD/LotTL.
( How to best describe this? A brief episode by episode discussion of all the little parallels and repeated themes, focusing on Jack's story S1 through CoE. )
Anyway. This is really sketchy and incomplete, mostly stray thoughts and bits and pieces left over from the epic meta post, as well as some that made it in there, and I probably wouldn't have written it if I weren't marooned at home and too dazed and lethargic to do any serious Russian studying. It originally goes back to this post, about year ago when I was rewatching TW after CoE, and it struck me that that at least looking at it from a post-Utopia POV the Philoktetes reference fits Jack much better than Mary, and that a lot of Jack's story in S1 is told indirectly through all the things he doesn't say, the question he doesn't answer, and the themes the stories address, even when they aren't about him as such. And of course there are scenes and lines that take on a different, more serious meaning after S2, or CoE.
When I was rewatching again this summer what unexpectedly caught my attention was Sleeper. It's the one single TW episode I never paid much attention to, because for me the way Jack treats Beth comes close to being borderline triggering and I have major issues with the way the episode from the beginning operates on the assumption that she is guilty, even when this is far from clear to the audience, but if one looks at Jack's story from the mortality/humanity angle, it becomes really obvious that the question of what makes us human, the mind or the body, is far from irrelevant.
Maybe this is me completely overinterpreting, and maybe it's time I stopped writing about TW until I get new material to think about (I think it really is...), but for all that Jack is almost in the background much of the time, on some level he determines the mood of the show and the choice of stories a lot more than is immediately visible, as with the shift from the bleakness of S1 where Jack struggles with his immortality, towards a more positive mood in S2, once he at least partly and temporarily resolved his issues in Utopia/SotD/LotTL.