Torchwood Children of Earth
Jul. 21st, 2009 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficBefore I get to the end, I'm going to go chronologically.
-I quite liked Rupesh, especially his speech about noticing the suicides. Because it acknowledges the general public's awareness of alien goings-on (and of Torchwood) and gives us a glimpse at the impact to society the events of New Who must have had. I was of course totally psyched out by Rupesh, too. I thought they were making us an Owen replacement. At the time, of course, I foolishly thought that they wanted to rebuild the show after last season. More fool me.
-I also quite liked Lois. Although she felt a bit like a "we didn't manage to get Freema on the show, so here" casting choice. In the Who tradition, this means she's going to be part of UNIT now, though, doesn't it? Or she'll be retconned into the stone age.
-Peter Capaldi as Frobisher was also brilliant. He's quite good at playing a thin-lipped bureaucrat, clearly intended to be an Eichmann-like character. I also totally anticipated the end of his character arc, as soon as he took out the gun. Though I would have liked to see what the news media made of it.
-I also was only slightly upset that they blew up the base. I, foolishly, thought that this meant we'd get new sets. I did not see it as a creative statement by Davies about what he intended to do to this particular part of the Who franchise.
-Each of these episodes was about 58 minutes long, as aired in the UK, which means that they'll have to cut about a quarter of it for US broadcast. Let me guess what scenes in Day Two are going to get cut... Hmmm... I've seen several discussions of this, and it seems that that was Barrowbum, not a stand-in. And there's no doubt that was Barrow-full-frontal.
-Yay for Ianto backstory! Aside from being part of Torchwood One, which I don't recall being mentioned outside of "Cyberwoman," he's been a blank slate. I always figured each writer had a completely different idea of his character, which is why there was no consistency in how he was written week to week (suicidal depression one week, snarky banter the next). Now we see his background is like a lot of fandom supposed, though a bit less emo. Working class, abusive father, no mention of a mother, and he pretty much severed ties with his family when his father died. Presumably, this is about the time he went to London. I loved his sister, her happily mundane life, and how you can see that Ianto's abandonment has hurt her.
-Ianto's not gay, just Harkness-sexual. Okay. As many have pointed out, way to go where slash fandom went forty years ago. There are two fan explanations of this that make perfect sense to me. One - Ianto is still straight, and Jack's just that good. (This is what I'm inclined to believe the writers were thinking.) Two - as we've seen in the past, Ianto is fanatically loyal. So, though it's clear that Jack is his first guy, it makes perfect sense that he's been faithful since then. As some have pointed out, this sounds like the denial at the beginning of a journey of sexual realization. I was just mostly amused to see Ianto saying words I've seen over and over in fic from every fandom. It's like slash fandom reached up his bum and made him talk like a puppet.
-I also loved meeting Jack's daughter and grandson. It actually confronts some of the thornier issues of his mortality upfront. Not just that he outlives everyone, but that after a certain point, people don't want him around because of their own mortality. His daughter is awesome, too. She has the most finely attuned Jack BS meter I think we've seen on the show. She knows just how dangerous he is and keeps her distance accordingly, but she also clearly still thinks he hangs the moon. Hence her faith that he'll rescue her when she's kidnapped. Hence her insistence that Jack can solve the problem with the 456.
-I spent much of the fourth episode trying to place the female bureaucrat with the cleft chin, since it is a strikingly unusual feature on a woman. I finally realized she was in the Sherlock Holmes episode "The Cardboard Box," one of the series' most disturbing, where she played a coldly manipulative home-wrecker. I thought she was brilliant here. As soon as they said 10%, I thought lowest achieving. So I actually liked her candid acknowledgement that they're not going to be fair about this "lottery," and if they're not going to be fair, why not chuck out the dregs of society? It's brutal, but it's the sort of brutal pragmatism this show loves. And I respected her courage in saying it. Because for all of the kowtowing before Torchwood's blackmail threats, I think everyone in that room knew that they would be ruined for being part of this, one way or another. This would be an epic shitstorm, whoever got taken. And that chick was at least going to make the choices that caused the least harm, in her view. Which, of course, makes explicit the casual classism of her, and everyone else in that room's, view.
Okay, now we get to the thorny bits.
-Why are Gwen and Ianto so surprised that Jack gave up the children? "The Jack I know would fight." The Jack you know gave up that girl to the fairies. And has an institution where he keeps hopeless cases. And was all for executing sleeper agents even if they were unaware of their actions. The Jack you know has always done shit like that. This combined with Ianto's repeated statements that this thing with Jack is all new to him (hello, shagging since season one? Dating since season two?) leads me to believe that Ianto and Gwen don't remember those earlier incidents. Clearly Jack has retconned season one and parts of season two out of existence. Otherwise those reactions make no sense.
-I appreciate them wanting to deal with the moral issues of choosing between decimation (in the literal sense) and annihilation. The X-Files has been down this road before. But in this case, the totally failed to establish the threat. An alien race shows up and demands millions of children, and you...aquiesce. No show of force necessary? No idea if they're bluffing? We don't even get the story about the virus until episode three. But even so--Torchwood didn't spend the last forty years working on how to neutralize this threat? I don't believe that. And controlling the children is not proof that they could kill everyone. Remember the blood control in "The Christmas Invasion"? Where the Doctor showed that though they could make people say things they couldn't make them kill themselves? Why the absolute faith that that's not what's going on here?
-Also also, since I'm talking about plot holes regarding the aliens. If they're so bloody powerful, why the fuck do they need to negotiate? They have fucking transporter beams! Why not just take the kids? And if they are using the children as a drug, wouldn't they want to set up something like the Wraith in SGA, where they cull periodically? The 456 just don't seem to be acting very intelligently. Oh, well, they're high, I guess. This is them just dicking around for a bit. Later they'll get the munchies.
-Ianto dying. Wish I didn't see that one coming, but I did. Unfortunately, the whole thing was handled so stupidly I was too busy rolling my eyes to care. So far, Torchwood had been fairly cagey--infiltrating the meetings, threatening the bureacrats with exposure. And Jack uses the chance so dearly bought to...yell at the alien. WTF? I mean, it's typical Jack, but how is this a plan? You go in to face the alien, say "We declare war on you! What are you going to do about it?" and then are surprised when it attacks? You didn't have any way to attack it! What the hell were you doing? Also, didn't the UK build that tank? Wouldn't you know how to wreck it?
So it was inevitable that Ianto die as soon as he walked into that building. Since Jack's plan was pretty much "we're not gonna! Make me!" Why take the mortal along with you? What the hell?
And then--oh, the actual death scene. Not only do they shoot it in typical Torchwood fashion, with somber music, slow motion, and just enough time for Ianto to say some cliched vaguely meaningful stuff, but that has to be the least flattering shot of Gareth David-Lloyd ever. Was it necessary to point the camera up his nose?
And then there's the explanation for the death. They've released a deadly flu virus. Which apparently works like sarin gas, but without the symptoms. Seriously. Flu makes people pass out dead in a couple of seconds? I do not think so. Why not just say that they've released sarin gas or something? And why did Ianto pass out first? Everyone else is running madly about. The only people falling over, seem to be being trampled (seriously, I would have loved it if the alien was bluffing and just enjoyed watching humans trample each other to death). That one dude made it to his hazmat suit and then was fine, as if getting into a suit makes you retroactively not infected. Plus, the flu was supposed to kill 25%, right? So how is it almost instantaneously killing everyone without exhibiting any flu-like symptoms at all. And most importantly, why is Jack fine? Why is Ianto gasping for breath, and Jack is fine? Shouldn't they be dying at about the same rate?
And has everyone forgotten that Jack Harkness possesses the power of the magic kiss of life? Jesus christ, writers. At least attempt to make the death of a major character somewhat plausible. This death is up there with the Lone Gunmen for level of stupid death. (We have to seal ourselves in this room with a bomb to save everyone else from it. Even though we could easily walk out of the room and then seal it, with us on the outside.)
There is one thing and one thing only that came out of Ianto's death that I appreciated, and that was Ianto's sister telling Gwen that she didn't know him at all. I loved that. That it's now canon that she thought she and Ianto were close and Ianto was lying to her about everything. That was a nice touch.
-Jack is a sociopath. We knew this already. The twist where he has to kill his own grandson to stop the aliens--that was actually kind of brilliant. That is the completion of Jack's character arc towards killing the few to save the many. That moment right there shows that he's no better than any of the bureaucrats discussing the selection of children, he just had different options. The thing is, aside from one initial protest, I don't think there was any doubt that he would do it. When we first see Jack with Stephen, he is only there because he needs a child to experiment on. Sending frequencies through the kid was his initial plan. So it doesn't feel that devestating to Jack to kill his own grandson. It's not like we saw boatloads of affection between them.
The only problem is, though this Jack is just as sociopathic as I've believed him to be since season one, since his actions can't really be explained any other way, it is just a step too far for me. Yes, the angstbunny has a too far.
-Emo Jack runs away. The ending to this was... Uh, if Jack could pop onto a freighter, why didn't he do that a long time ago? Like, after he realized he was too early for the Doctor and before he realized he couldn't die? Seems like the perfect time to get off this backwater. The thing is, this actually makes perfect sense for Jack, and completes his character arc. But it turns the entire series of Torchwood into merely tragic backstory for our angsty hero. Yes. That means Ianto (and Tosh and Owen and Suzie) are all women in refrigerators.
The ending just confirms the writers' view of the show: that this is The Jack show, with a side of The Gwen show. And I've always found that view ignored the most interesting bits of the show. Now they've not only ignored the interesting bits, they've killed all of them.
The only good part of this scene was Gwen having her belief that she was enough for Jack, and he would stay for her, brutally ripped to shreds.
Basically, this whole miniseries just exemplified that Jack is a self-aggrandizing, ultimately selfish, cowardly, and not terribly heroic guy. So it makes sense that he runs away from the hero image he's constructed on earth. What doesn't make sense is why you would have the hero of an episodic television show reveal himself to be a coward and a weakling, meanwhile killing off most of the cast of that show. This whole story felt like the kind of storytelling that's supposed to be "good" for us as an audience. Hard to watch, but ultimately edifying. But you know what? Other shows have done such moral dilemmas better. And it boggles my mind why you would write a television show like this.
Basically, I did like a lot of the little character bits they gave us here; Ianto's family, Jack's family, even the stuff with Gwen. But then Russell T. Davies threw a break all the toys! you can't have them! fit (a la X3), so all that stuff is pretty much useless. For my further enjoyment of the fandom, and I always loved the fandom far more than the show (I'm sorry, but the show has so often been crap), I'm going to use those character bits and declare the rest of CoE apocryphal.
My worry, though, is the fandom. Because from my slice of it that I've seen on lj, people aren't rushing in with fix-it fic. I've only seen one request on the storyfinders comm, and if people were still emotionally engaged with the show, there should be a ton more than that. My worry is not so much that the show did stuff I didn't like, but that it alienated enough of the fandom that the fandom will effectively die.
Cause this is the worst thing that can happen to a fandom. Not cancellation. Many fandoms live decades beyond cancellation. The worst thing that can happen is a dead fandom walking. When the show is still going but is so bad that the fans can't stand to watch it. Because then writers just get tired of wrestling with a whole bunch of canon they don't like. It not only means, for this, that they won't write CoE era Torchwood fic, but they may be so disengaged by it that they abandon all their other Torchwood fic.
It's happened to a lot of fandoms. Look at Heroes. And Andromeda. And Dead Zone. There's nothing worse to fandom than a squee killer.
An hour and a half later...phew! The cat is glaring at me. Oh, now she's turned her back to me to protest my not paying attention.
-I quite liked Rupesh, especially his speech about noticing the suicides. Because it acknowledges the general public's awareness of alien goings-on (and of Torchwood) and gives us a glimpse at the impact to society the events of New Who must have had. I was of course totally psyched out by Rupesh, too. I thought they were making us an Owen replacement. At the time, of course, I foolishly thought that they wanted to rebuild the show after last season. More fool me.
-I also quite liked Lois. Although she felt a bit like a "we didn't manage to get Freema on the show, so here" casting choice. In the Who tradition, this means she's going to be part of UNIT now, though, doesn't it? Or she'll be retconned into the stone age.
-Peter Capaldi as Frobisher was also brilliant. He's quite good at playing a thin-lipped bureaucrat, clearly intended to be an Eichmann-like character. I also totally anticipated the end of his character arc, as soon as he took out the gun. Though I would have liked to see what the news media made of it.
-I also was only slightly upset that they blew up the base. I, foolishly, thought that this meant we'd get new sets. I did not see it as a creative statement by Davies about what he intended to do to this particular part of the Who franchise.
-Each of these episodes was about 58 minutes long, as aired in the UK, which means that they'll have to cut about a quarter of it for US broadcast. Let me guess what scenes in Day Two are going to get cut... Hmmm... I've seen several discussions of this, and it seems that that was Barrowbum, not a stand-in. And there's no doubt that was Barrow-full-frontal.
-Yay for Ianto backstory! Aside from being part of Torchwood One, which I don't recall being mentioned outside of "Cyberwoman," he's been a blank slate. I always figured each writer had a completely different idea of his character, which is why there was no consistency in how he was written week to week (suicidal depression one week, snarky banter the next). Now we see his background is like a lot of fandom supposed, though a bit less emo. Working class, abusive father, no mention of a mother, and he pretty much severed ties with his family when his father died. Presumably, this is about the time he went to London. I loved his sister, her happily mundane life, and how you can see that Ianto's abandonment has hurt her.
-Ianto's not gay, just Harkness-sexual. Okay. As many have pointed out, way to go where slash fandom went forty years ago. There are two fan explanations of this that make perfect sense to me. One - Ianto is still straight, and Jack's just that good. (This is what I'm inclined to believe the writers were thinking.) Two - as we've seen in the past, Ianto is fanatically loyal. So, though it's clear that Jack is his first guy, it makes perfect sense that he's been faithful since then. As some have pointed out, this sounds like the denial at the beginning of a journey of sexual realization. I was just mostly amused to see Ianto saying words I've seen over and over in fic from every fandom. It's like slash fandom reached up his bum and made him talk like a puppet.
-I also loved meeting Jack's daughter and grandson. It actually confronts some of the thornier issues of his mortality upfront. Not just that he outlives everyone, but that after a certain point, people don't want him around because of their own mortality. His daughter is awesome, too. She has the most finely attuned Jack BS meter I think we've seen on the show. She knows just how dangerous he is and keeps her distance accordingly, but she also clearly still thinks he hangs the moon. Hence her faith that he'll rescue her when she's kidnapped. Hence her insistence that Jack can solve the problem with the 456.
-I spent much of the fourth episode trying to place the female bureaucrat with the cleft chin, since it is a strikingly unusual feature on a woman. I finally realized she was in the Sherlock Holmes episode "The Cardboard Box," one of the series' most disturbing, where she played a coldly manipulative home-wrecker. I thought she was brilliant here. As soon as they said 10%, I thought lowest achieving. So I actually liked her candid acknowledgement that they're not going to be fair about this "lottery," and if they're not going to be fair, why not chuck out the dregs of society? It's brutal, but it's the sort of brutal pragmatism this show loves. And I respected her courage in saying it. Because for all of the kowtowing before Torchwood's blackmail threats, I think everyone in that room knew that they would be ruined for being part of this, one way or another. This would be an epic shitstorm, whoever got taken. And that chick was at least going to make the choices that caused the least harm, in her view. Which, of course, makes explicit the casual classism of her, and everyone else in that room's, view.
Okay, now we get to the thorny bits.
-Why are Gwen and Ianto so surprised that Jack gave up the children? "The Jack I know would fight." The Jack you know gave up that girl to the fairies. And has an institution where he keeps hopeless cases. And was all for executing sleeper agents even if they were unaware of their actions. The Jack you know has always done shit like that. This combined with Ianto's repeated statements that this thing with Jack is all new to him (hello, shagging since season one? Dating since season two?) leads me to believe that Ianto and Gwen don't remember those earlier incidents. Clearly Jack has retconned season one and parts of season two out of existence. Otherwise those reactions make no sense.
-I appreciate them wanting to deal with the moral issues of choosing between decimation (in the literal sense) and annihilation. The X-Files has been down this road before. But in this case, the totally failed to establish the threat. An alien race shows up and demands millions of children, and you...aquiesce. No show of force necessary? No idea if they're bluffing? We don't even get the story about the virus until episode three. But even so--Torchwood didn't spend the last forty years working on how to neutralize this threat? I don't believe that. And controlling the children is not proof that they could kill everyone. Remember the blood control in "The Christmas Invasion"? Where the Doctor showed that though they could make people say things they couldn't make them kill themselves? Why the absolute faith that that's not what's going on here?
-Also also, since I'm talking about plot holes regarding the aliens. If they're so bloody powerful, why the fuck do they need to negotiate? They have fucking transporter beams! Why not just take the kids? And if they are using the children as a drug, wouldn't they want to set up something like the Wraith in SGA, where they cull periodically? The 456 just don't seem to be acting very intelligently. Oh, well, they're high, I guess. This is them just dicking around for a bit. Later they'll get the munchies.
-Ianto dying. Wish I didn't see that one coming, but I did. Unfortunately, the whole thing was handled so stupidly I was too busy rolling my eyes to care. So far, Torchwood had been fairly cagey--infiltrating the meetings, threatening the bureacrats with exposure. And Jack uses the chance so dearly bought to...yell at the alien. WTF? I mean, it's typical Jack, but how is this a plan? You go in to face the alien, say "We declare war on you! What are you going to do about it?" and then are surprised when it attacks? You didn't have any way to attack it! What the hell were you doing? Also, didn't the UK build that tank? Wouldn't you know how to wreck it?
So it was inevitable that Ianto die as soon as he walked into that building. Since Jack's plan was pretty much "we're not gonna! Make me!" Why take the mortal along with you? What the hell?
And then--oh, the actual death scene. Not only do they shoot it in typical Torchwood fashion, with somber music, slow motion, and just enough time for Ianto to say some cliched vaguely meaningful stuff, but that has to be the least flattering shot of Gareth David-Lloyd ever. Was it necessary to point the camera up his nose?
And then there's the explanation for the death. They've released a deadly flu virus. Which apparently works like sarin gas, but without the symptoms. Seriously. Flu makes people pass out dead in a couple of seconds? I do not think so. Why not just say that they've released sarin gas or something? And why did Ianto pass out first? Everyone else is running madly about. The only people falling over, seem to be being trampled (seriously, I would have loved it if the alien was bluffing and just enjoyed watching humans trample each other to death). That one dude made it to his hazmat suit and then was fine, as if getting into a suit makes you retroactively not infected. Plus, the flu was supposed to kill 25%, right? So how is it almost instantaneously killing everyone without exhibiting any flu-like symptoms at all. And most importantly, why is Jack fine? Why is Ianto gasping for breath, and Jack is fine? Shouldn't they be dying at about the same rate?
And has everyone forgotten that Jack Harkness possesses the power of the magic kiss of life? Jesus christ, writers. At least attempt to make the death of a major character somewhat plausible. This death is up there with the Lone Gunmen for level of stupid death. (We have to seal ourselves in this room with a bomb to save everyone else from it. Even though we could easily walk out of the room and then seal it, with us on the outside.)
There is one thing and one thing only that came out of Ianto's death that I appreciated, and that was Ianto's sister telling Gwen that she didn't know him at all. I loved that. That it's now canon that she thought she and Ianto were close and Ianto was lying to her about everything. That was a nice touch.
-Jack is a sociopath. We knew this already. The twist where he has to kill his own grandson to stop the aliens--that was actually kind of brilliant. That is the completion of Jack's character arc towards killing the few to save the many. That moment right there shows that he's no better than any of the bureaucrats discussing the selection of children, he just had different options. The thing is, aside from one initial protest, I don't think there was any doubt that he would do it. When we first see Jack with Stephen, he is only there because he needs a child to experiment on. Sending frequencies through the kid was his initial plan. So it doesn't feel that devestating to Jack to kill his own grandson. It's not like we saw boatloads of affection between them.
The only problem is, though this Jack is just as sociopathic as I've believed him to be since season one, since his actions can't really be explained any other way, it is just a step too far for me. Yes, the angstbunny has a too far.
-Emo Jack runs away. The ending to this was... Uh, if Jack could pop onto a freighter, why didn't he do that a long time ago? Like, after he realized he was too early for the Doctor and before he realized he couldn't die? Seems like the perfect time to get off this backwater. The thing is, this actually makes perfect sense for Jack, and completes his character arc. But it turns the entire series of Torchwood into merely tragic backstory for our angsty hero. Yes. That means Ianto (and Tosh and Owen and Suzie) are all women in refrigerators.
The ending just confirms the writers' view of the show: that this is The Jack show, with a side of The Gwen show. And I've always found that view ignored the most interesting bits of the show. Now they've not only ignored the interesting bits, they've killed all of them.
The only good part of this scene was Gwen having her belief that she was enough for Jack, and he would stay for her, brutally ripped to shreds.
Basically, this whole miniseries just exemplified that Jack is a self-aggrandizing, ultimately selfish, cowardly, and not terribly heroic guy. So it makes sense that he runs away from the hero image he's constructed on earth. What doesn't make sense is why you would have the hero of an episodic television show reveal himself to be a coward and a weakling, meanwhile killing off most of the cast of that show. This whole story felt like the kind of storytelling that's supposed to be "good" for us as an audience. Hard to watch, but ultimately edifying. But you know what? Other shows have done such moral dilemmas better. And it boggles my mind why you would write a television show like this.
Basically, I did like a lot of the little character bits they gave us here; Ianto's family, Jack's family, even the stuff with Gwen. But then Russell T. Davies threw a break all the toys! you can't have them! fit (a la X3), so all that stuff is pretty much useless. For my further enjoyment of the fandom, and I always loved the fandom far more than the show (I'm sorry, but the show has so often been crap), I'm going to use those character bits and declare the rest of CoE apocryphal.
My worry, though, is the fandom. Because from my slice of it that I've seen on lj, people aren't rushing in with fix-it fic. I've only seen one request on the storyfinders comm, and if people were still emotionally engaged with the show, there should be a ton more than that. My worry is not so much that the show did stuff I didn't like, but that it alienated enough of the fandom that the fandom will effectively die.
Cause this is the worst thing that can happen to a fandom. Not cancellation. Many fandoms live decades beyond cancellation. The worst thing that can happen is a dead fandom walking. When the show is still going but is so bad that the fans can't stand to watch it. Because then writers just get tired of wrestling with a whole bunch of canon they don't like. It not only means, for this, that they won't write CoE era Torchwood fic, but they may be so disengaged by it that they abandon all their other Torchwood fic.
It's happened to a lot of fandoms. Look at Heroes. And Andromeda. And Dead Zone. There's nothing worse to fandom than a squee killer.
An hour and a half later...phew! The cat is glaring at me. Oh, now she's turned her back to me to protest my not paying attention.