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Mar. 28th, 2011 07:56 pmAuthor's note: It's funny how I never plan on these things and they happen anyway. I had absolutely no intentions of writing about Jack and Ianto again after the big post in 2009; more than 9.000 words of meta—what was there even left to write about? But then I wrote about death, life, and what it means to be human in DW and TW, and in the process of rewatching for that I had a (short) paragraph's worth of an idea that I didn't think would amount to more than that, but somehow kept... not so much nagging, as occasionally nibbling at my mind, and months and months later, I'm not sure how exactly, it suddenly turned out that there still was something I wanted to write after all before we get new canon. Which then developed a life of its own, took me to places I hadn't expected, and, well. Insert obligatory warning for excessive wordiness. It's also, I guess, a sort of post-CoE closure for me, because this time I managed to tie up all the threads running through the first three seasons in my mind.
Time - he's waiting in the wings
He speaks of senseless things
His script is you and me, boy
- David Bowie, Time -
The World Is Always Ending: Time in Torchwood's Jack/Ianto Arc
Time has always been Jack's theme. Before he travelled with the Doctor, he was a Time Agent turned time-travelling conman who lost two years of his life somewhere along the way. When he danced with Rose in The Empty Child, it was in front of the clock of Big Ben. But after Rose brought him back to life permanently and he accidentally got himself stranded in 1869 in the attempt of trying to meet the Doctor again, his relationship with time changed radically. He lost the relative freedom and control he used to have over it, and suddenly found himself once more chained to a linear timeline, no longer able to jump back and forth through the centuries and millennia, using history for his own purpose. He lost his mortality, something that, as DW canon also repeatedly emphasises, constitutes a basic element of what it means to be human, but at the same time he was forced to live his life in a very human fashion, day after day after day, without even the most basic freedom every human being has, to end it. Time became a burden.
Among the clutter on Jack's desk there are two objects that are a permanent fixture throughout both the first and second series of TW: the growing Tardis coral and an hourglass. Regardless of whether they were put there with this purpose in mind, between them they illustrate Jack's state of being, and his dilemma. The former is an obvious symbol for the Doctor, for what happened to Jack, for the ability to travel in time he is hoping to regain eventually: the power of (and, to an extent, the power over) space and time. It can be read to represent his new life that, in absolute terms, has only just begun and that he's still trying to get used to. The hourglass, on the other hand, traditionally symbolises the fleetingness of time, the brevity of human life; mortality and death. It is used briefly in Fragments to illustrate the passage of the years and decades Jack spent in Torchwood, but it can also stand for the old, human, life Jack lost, the humanity he's struggling to maintain, and, as a memento mori, for a heightened awareness of the death that is omnipresent in the world around him, but continues to elude him. If the sand running through the glass symbolises the human lifespan, then in Jack's case the hourglass gets turned around again and again with each death, and the sand starts running anew. It's between these two polar opposites that Jack has to find his way now.
( Part 1: Ten Minutes, and Counting )
( Part 2: Eight Thirty-Two, Thirty-One... )
( Part 3: Thirty Minutes )
Time - he's waiting in the wings
He speaks of senseless things
His script is you and me, boy
- David Bowie, Time -
Time has always been Jack's theme. Before he travelled with the Doctor, he was a Time Agent turned time-travelling conman who lost two years of his life somewhere along the way. When he danced with Rose in The Empty Child, it was in front of the clock of Big Ben. But after Rose brought him back to life permanently and he accidentally got himself stranded in 1869 in the attempt of trying to meet the Doctor again, his relationship with time changed radically. He lost the relative freedom and control he used to have over it, and suddenly found himself once more chained to a linear timeline, no longer able to jump back and forth through the centuries and millennia, using history for his own purpose. He lost his mortality, something that, as DW canon also repeatedly emphasises, constitutes a basic element of what it means to be human, but at the same time he was forced to live his life in a very human fashion, day after day after day, without even the most basic freedom every human being has, to end it. Time became a burden.
Among the clutter on Jack's desk there are two objects that are a permanent fixture throughout both the first and second series of TW: the growing Tardis coral and an hourglass. Regardless of whether they were put there with this purpose in mind, between them they illustrate Jack's state of being, and his dilemma. The former is an obvious symbol for the Doctor, for what happened to Jack, for the ability to travel in time he is hoping to regain eventually: the power of (and, to an extent, the power over) space and time. It can be read to represent his new life that, in absolute terms, has only just begun and that he's still trying to get used to. The hourglass, on the other hand, traditionally symbolises the fleetingness of time, the brevity of human life; mortality and death. It is used briefly in Fragments to illustrate the passage of the years and decades Jack spent in Torchwood, but it can also stand for the old, human, life Jack lost, the humanity he's struggling to maintain, and, as a memento mori, for a heightened awareness of the death that is omnipresent in the world around him, but continues to elude him. If the sand running through the glass symbolises the human lifespan, then in Jack's case the hourglass gets turned around again and again with each death, and the sand starts running anew. It's between these two polar opposites that Jack has to find his way now.
( Part 1: Ten Minutes, and Counting )
( Part 2: Eight Thirty-Two, Thirty-One... )
( Part 3: Thirty Minutes )
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