The emotional developments in season two develop a whole new underlayer once you've seen where they all started out.
That's why I stopped where I did and went back. Even in hindsight and just in the first half of the season, a number of elements are quite impressive given the start conditions. (The fact that Owen agrees to go on a date with Tosh. It's not even the fact that it's Tosh, in whom he displayed negative interest in the first season. It's that for most of the first season he demonstrated no capacity for dating rather than sexing and for the rest of the first season he demonstrated no capacity to recover from Diane. I remain fascinated by the reversal of their crush dynamic in "Adam," because while I suppose Adam might have done it to amuse himself, I took it—at the time—to mean that underneath all the cynicism Adam claimed to have scraped away, the attraction to Tosh was already present. That little quirk of a smile he gives her right before he takes the Retcon, when he is his own cynical, scared, standoffish self again but still remembers being the hopeless geek in love with her. His line at the end about not doing flowers or apologies put "I Won't Send Roses" in my head for the next three days.)
I particularly found myself enthralled with watching Owen and Ianto develop a smooth working partnership after they were literally brawling on the floor and shooting at each other at the end of last season.
I still feel the show dropped the ball a little with Ianto in the first season because there were no visible stages between the time they almost all died because he stashed a Cyberwoman in the basement and the time no one thought twice about including him on the camping trip to the murder village, but it does reverberate through the end of the season, as witnessed by the aforementioned brawling. It just struck me now that Ianto, Tosh, and Owen each have similar arcs of trusting or being trusted by their teammates, which may be another reason that I class them more closely than Jack or Gwen.
(Someday I want to write the fic about Gwen, between seasons, ordering everyone to do team-building exercises, because it seems like exactly the kind of thing she'd do ... and it actually works, possibly only because they are interrupted halfway through by aliens and have to fight for their lives.)
I agree strongly with the second half of this sentence. Minus the aliens, I suspect a complete washout. Can you imagine trying to get Ianto to do a trust fall?
"Ouch" is definitely the right reaction to season one Owen.
So much of it is self-inflicted. Which is entirely in character, but you watch him snap out something unforgivable just because one of his teammates thought about asking if he was okay, and it is just facepalming. And therefore his forgiveness from Jack lands like twenty tons of emotional TNT and I can't believe I forgot it for thirteen years.
One of my Torchwood-watching friends described Owen as a man in a hatesex relationship with his emotions, which is tragilariously accurate.
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That's why I stopped where I did and went back. Even in hindsight and just in the first half of the season, a number of elements are quite impressive given the start conditions. (The fact that Owen agrees to go on a date with Tosh. It's not even the fact that it's Tosh, in whom he displayed negative interest in the first season. It's that for most of the first season he demonstrated no capacity for dating rather than sexing and for the rest of the first season he demonstrated no capacity to recover from Diane. I remain fascinated by the reversal of their crush dynamic in "Adam," because while I suppose Adam might have done it to amuse himself, I took it—at the time—to mean that underneath all the cynicism Adam claimed to have scraped away, the attraction to Tosh was already present. That little quirk of a smile he gives her right before he takes the Retcon, when he is his own cynical, scared, standoffish self again but still remembers being the hopeless geek in love with her. His line at the end about not doing flowers or apologies put "I Won't Send Roses" in my head for the next three days.)
I particularly found myself enthralled with watching Owen and Ianto develop a smooth working partnership after they were literally brawling on the floor and shooting at each other at the end of last season.
I still feel the show dropped the ball a little with Ianto in the first season because there were no visible stages between the time they almost all died because he stashed a Cyberwoman in the basement and the time no one thought twice about including him on the camping trip to the murder village, but it does reverberate through the end of the season, as witnessed by the aforementioned brawling. It just struck me now that Ianto, Tosh, and Owen each have similar arcs of trusting or being trusted by their teammates, which may be another reason that I class them more closely than Jack or Gwen.
(Someday I want to write the fic about Gwen, between seasons, ordering everyone to do team-building exercises, because it seems like exactly the kind of thing she'd do ... and it actually works, possibly only because they are interrupted halfway through by aliens and have to fight for their lives.)
I agree strongly with the second half of this sentence. Minus the aliens, I suspect a complete washout. Can you imagine trying to get Ianto to do a trust fall?
"Ouch" is definitely the right reaction to season one Owen.
So much of it is self-inflicted. Which is entirely in character, but you watch him snap out something unforgivable just because one of his teammates thought about asking if he was okay, and it is just facepalming. And therefore his forgiveness from Jack lands like twenty tons of emotional TNT and I can't believe I forgot it for thirteen years.
One of my Torchwood-watching friends described Owen as a man in a hatesex relationship with his emotions, which is tragilariously accurate.
Please tell them from me that's beautiful.