life without a plot

Damn. 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. )

I'm not even going to squint at my flist (or lj generally speaking) until I've watched S3, because I suspect I'm already a tiny bit spoiled anyway, but I'll just post my thoughts about the audio plays in the meantime. Since I'm usually a very visual person I wasn't sure at all how I'd do without the optic element, but scribbling happened anyway; I think it's something of a pavlovian reflex by now. Actual pen & paper scribbling even, in my computerless holiday state. Now posting that before actually watching S3 is clearly an exercise in masochism and superfluousness, but OTOH I'm kind of curious how my interpretations compare to actual canon. Plus, I have an unhealthy inability to throw away anything.

(And I'm almost willing to bet that I was & will be the only person to walk across the Möchsberg and the park in Hellbrunn with Jack and Gwen and Ianto saving the world in my ears, and a probably completely inane smile on my face. soavezefiretto was right, I so needed that IPod. *g*)


1. Asylum

Well, hallelujah. Thank you. Finally addressed at least to a certain extent some of the issues that needed addressing after the much too torture-happy S2. Wanted to hug PC Andy, several times. Really liked the story and would have loved to have a tv episode with it.

It only struck me just how wrong things have gone when Gwen gets the call that she's supposed to bring Frida to the Hub, and there was an alarm going off in my head. From a pure gut reaction, however nice Gwen was being about it, I didn't trust them, and Jack most especially, with that girl's well-being at all. Which is kind of problematic, if these are supposed to be the good guys. I have no idea if last season went intentionally in this direction, exploring the darker sides of TW, or if they looked at it and at least in retrospect realised that some of team TW's actions weren't looking so good especially in view of what happened over the last years during the Bushite 'war against terrorism', but the suggestion that TW itself might be the cause of violent anti-alien discrimination in the future certainly acknowleges that things are still far from right and that Jack isn't handling this as well as the thinks he is, or changed it as much as he wants to think he did.

After this episode I'm still not a hundred percent happy, but at least recognising something basic like that there are, oh, good and evil and all kinds of moral shades of grey aliens, and acting accordingly, is at least a start and makes me feel a bit easier. Given the admittedly very difficult situation they're working in that's at least something.

( Jack though... he's really a bit of mess, isn't he? )


2. Golden Age

Didn't do a lot for me, to be perfectly honest, the premise seemed a bit... extreme, maybe? Or maybe it's because I'm not British? And Ianto must be getting a bit tired by now of almost getting killed by Jack's psychotic exes...

'I just can't die, no matter how hard I try.' (Jack)

Was Jack actively trying at one point, hoping that it would finally stick, or did he just not care at all? (me, after Fragments and the 1300something deaths) Which I guess answers that question. And a pretty awful thing to say with that kind of offhandedness.

'I was only obeying orders.' And admittedly that phrase has very likely a less ominous ring to a British ear, but my brain can't stop itself from thinking, when else, where else, doing what else?

'Since when have you obeyed orders?' (Ianto)

Ianto is has probably made some educated guesses about Jack that are more right than wrong, but he's wrong here, because Jack clearly did then, even if it meant hurting someone he loved, and probably in a lot of other situations, because TW would hardly have tolerated someone who sabotaged them at every turn. They'd just have stuck him in the cell next to the weevil, or the contemporary equivalent thereof. The cell with the weevil, even. (Which, come to think of it, I wonder if they did, and how often, before he finally gave up.) Clearly the story about how exactly he came to join Torchwood is not one of Jack's favourite dinner time anecdotes.


3. The Dead Line

Good story, enjoyed it. Would have loved to see that one, too.

Really liked that Ianto has finally advanced to some kind of officially recognised boyfriend status, so that he gets to sit beside Jack while Gwen and Rhys go out to investigate, which is also where I could almost start to suspect that TPTB are actually reading my posts because that fixes my admittedly maybe not wholly rational S1 pet peeve with Gwen's death watch while Ianto secretly snuggles Jack's coat.

Ianto's speech was beautiful and quite heartbreaking (as was the music accompanying it, as well as the 'not just a blip in time' end), and didn't surprise me at all; this was pretty much what I expected from Ianto - no illusions about what he's doing and what he has and hasn't, and suffering from it. It shouldn't be so hard for him.

( But start *talking* to each, for god's sake. *sigh* )


What I do believe is that Jack will be fighting as long and as hard as possible that no one whom he was close to will ever be just a blip in time to him. This is after all the man who cares enough to regularly check on someone whom he's dated three decades earlier, for a few weeks, to see if she's okay. Jack's when, what & with whom anecdotes might be occasionally annoying, but he's clearly holding on to these memories.

Which is how I think he eventually turned into the Face of Boe - he didn't want to forget anyone and needed a bigger brain for that. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. :)

Very much tl;dr, way too much time spent writing it, but here goes anyway. Rewatching TW S2 I (think I) finally figured out what went wrong with Jack/Ianto, and why.

Actually I had a bit of an epiphany after watching Meat, thinking about Gwen and Rhys and Jack and Ianto's respective relationships, especially that one scene with Jack, Gwen and Rhys: 'You love him. Makes you vulnerable,' and 'That's your decision.' - 'Yes, it is.' - 'You both have to live by it,' which Jack says without a visible hint of recognition that this might apply to him too, which I found a bit odd, now that I was watching the episodes without a week between them, when only in To the Last Man he'd said, albeit in a rather roundabout, Jack-esque fashion, that he did love (although maybe in a rather general Jack-esque way, but the word love was definitely mentioned) Ianto.

Because if he can tell Gwen that, he's thought about it. Probably learned from painful experience, because realistically, however much he may have disliked Torchwood as an institution, in over a hundred years there'll have been someone there before Ianto he's slept with, been friends with, possibly been at least a bit in love with, and lost, even if he hadn't personally sent them to their death. But at least during that episode, Jack sticks to what he's saying there. He won't compromise a mission and the rest of the team's safety, not for Ianto, not for Gwen. And while this does of course make sense for Jack as the leader of the team, it also is a bit harsh, especially as the Gwen/Rhys storyline in Meat is all about the willingness to take risks and make sacrifices for the person you love, rules and regulations be damned.

So I was thinking that they're really kind of hard on each other, for this to be the self-understood, unspoken thing that it apparently is (because there isn't a moment in that episode where Ianto is expecting Jack to come to his help), and how Jack could be so sure about being able to do this, when only three episodes later he'll completely lose it when Owen dies, and that sometimes the inside of Jack's head made no sense to me at all.

And that was when I remembered that originally it'd been Ianto who was supposed to die, and suddenly a lot of things started to fall into place and fit a lot better. With Ianto killed in Reset, the whole Jack/Ianto relationship that always seemed a bit haphazard (which, other than in S1 where relationships were indeed a bit experimental and erratic, the other S2 relationships are not: both Gwen and Rhys and Toshiko and Owen have consistently developed arcs from the first to the last episode with significant emotional moments and turning points) would have had a completely different dynamic.

( trying to reconstruct the original S2 Jack/Ianto arc )

( and this is what I think happened )

No wonder I kept waiting and waiting for the defining Jack/Ianto episode that I felt had to come in S2, but never did.

To be perfectly honest, I'm a bit torn about this. I'm invested enough in the characters and the ship that I was happy when (against all my expectations, let me add) Ianto actually survived S2. However, having actually given the alternative some thought beyond oh noes, they wanted to kill Ianto *again*, and especially looking at it from a story-telling perspective... I've got to say I'd kind of have liked to see how it'd have played out. The current version got us alive!Ianto, greenhouse!sex and the brilliant A Day in the Death, the but the original version would most likely have made for a much more emotionally satisfying, complex and dramatic Jack/Ianto arc, a probably improved Dead Man Walking and From out of the Rain and I think would have made Jack's characterisation rather less jumpy and much more coherent.

Or at least writing this I suddenly found myself liking S2 Jack a lot better than before...


[*] ETA: echoingvista points out that From Out of the Rain and Adam were switched; I'd assume in order to... not even so much to give Jack a better justification for trying to resurrect Owen (he doesn't remember his promise), but to make the viewer understand it a little better.

And that is the (last?) missing piece that'd make the whole of S2 flow so much better. The slow From Out of the Rain would have fit better earlier in the season, it'd have fleshed out Ianto's character and background at least a bit before they'd killed him, and Adam - which already is one of my favourite S2 episodes as it is -, would have even more powerful as well as more inherently logical. Gwen's admission that she loved Jack would have made for a smoother transition between Something Borrowed and Adrift as far as Gwen's relationship with Rhys and Jack is concerned; Adrift would have served to emphasise that regardless of her love for him there are too many things dividing them, that she'd made the right decision. If Owen kept his lines, it'd have paved the way for his death in the finale; he would still die, no one saving him, but save a lot of lives (maybe finally enough?) through his death. As for Jack/Ianto... ouch, ouch, ouch. Messed up and emotional, and I'd never have thought of that. Pretty damn genius.

My inner Jack/Ianto shipper is protesting, but I have to say that they didn't do themselves (or anyone except the Jack/Ianto fans) any favours with all those last minute changes and hasty patching up. It messed up the whole Jack/Ianto arc, significantly weakened the Jack/Gwen/Rhys arc and brought about all those inconsistencies in the relationships that drove me crazy when I was watching S2 the first (and second) time, because it made it all seem so erratic sometimes.

With 100% more Jack/Ianto after all the Jack/Gwen meta in the Adrift review. And thanks go to alex_beecroft for making me watch the relevant scenes 1382 times think it all through. *g*


( Torchwood 2.12 Fragments )