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And I've never been part of a problem that I did not ignore or start
Having watched the first-season finale and just about half of the second season of Torchwood (2006–11), I have put the series on hold until I can track down the rest of the first season, because while I am truly spoiler-indifferent and really enjoying the show, I have realized I don't want to replicate my experience of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun (1993–96), where I short-circuited at least one major character's arc by reading the second half first.
There are four volumes of The Book of the Long Sun: Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Lake of the Long Sun (1994), Caldé of the Long Sun (1994), and Exodus from the Long Sun (1996). The plot concerns a revolution on a generation starship whose gods are literally ghosts in the machine, except perhaps for the minor god whose revelation to a young augur in the first novel kicks off a quest that starts like the Blues Brothers and ends like Les Mis; unlike Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980–83) with its experimental play of memory and time, The Book of the Long Sun is notable for its dead-ahead structure which does not even incorporate flashbacks, although occasionally its characters dream. In other words, all information not encountered in order in the text must be explicitly filled in or deduced in hindsight, and Wolfe uses this technique to keep the reader reevaluating interactions and motivations in light of later events. It was therefore utterly disastrous for me to read the last two volumes first, which of course I had no way of knowing one late autumn night in my junior year of college when the second-half omnibus was lying around a friend's dorm room and I wanted something to read while five people I liked very much were carrying on a conversation that bored me completely.
The Book of the Long Sun is one of the narratives where I have a favorite character; his name is Patera Remora and he is the coadjutor of the city-state of Viron, which in the classically inflected religion of the Whorl means more or less what it does in the Catholic or the Anglican Church, only with a lot more haruspicy. When encountered for the first time in Caldé of the Long Sun and even more so in Exodus from the Long Sun, he is an excruciatingly sympathetic character. In the midst of spies and factions, barricades and negotiations and casualties on all sides, Remora is a paper-pusher out of his depth and he knows it. Sometimes it makes him funny, but he's frightened all the time. A fence-sitter by nature and an establishment figure by profession, now that he's thrown in with Patera Silk and the revolutionaries against the Ayuntamiento of Viron and even a schism of his own Chapter, he's trying desperately to do the right thing and mostly floundering toward it, but to say that he's not graceful about the process is several orders of understatement. Conversationally, he's one of those formal, diffident people who are always correcting themselves like an unsolicited apparatus criticus; physically, he's the kind of tall and thin that looks like a deck chair folding up when he takes a seat and he can be trusted to trip over his own feet at moments of action almost as reliably as over his own tongue at moments of truth. One of his characteristic gestures is nervously pushing his hair out of his eyes, another worrying his religion's equivalent of a rosary. Emotionally, he's a mess. Undergoing a classic katabasis in the tunnels beneath Viron with the sibyl-turned-revolutionary-general Maytera Mint and an agent of the Ayuntamiento, Remora is scalding in his self-honesty and oblivious when it comes to reading the room—he has a knack for choosing exactly the wrong moment to unburden his conscience, share his feelings, or suggest a stratagem for which there is invariably a simpler solution. And yet he does come out of it stronger, with a truer sense of himself and what matters to him than when he started, even if you could still give yourself an ulcer waiting for him to finish a complete sentence; it's not silly at all that by the end of the series he's become one of the central figures of the exodus to the planet the ship-born characters call the Short Sun Whorl, eventually the Prolocutor of the Vironese Faith on Blue. He'll do it well now—he wouldn't have before. And the ghost of his mother in Mainframe is proud of him.
When encountered for the first time in Lake of the Long Sun, Remora is not sympathetic at all. He is an ecclesiastical snot. For all his easy invocation of the gods, he's far more office politician than priest, as polished as he is insincere, more concerned with keeping a lid on an inconvenient theophany than with actually helping the manteion on Sun Street out of its financial difficulties as Silk has been appealing for weeks, even though leaving the younger augur to his own devices just accelerates the combination of divine and secular intrigues that drives the unraveling of the Whorl; he's a second-order antagonist but a tellingly blinkered one, so enamored of his own delicacy in disposing of a sensitive affair that it doesn't occur to him to investigate further, except where he imagines that he already knows what he'll find. He intercepts letters, he offers bribes. He may not be as destructive, but he's as good a representative as any councillor of the Ayuntamiento of the structures of power and complacency that Silk will end up shaking to their roots. Of course his fastidious self-assurance will crack to pieces the minute the world begins to shift its shape, his petty ambitions and illusions rendered profoundly and embarrassingly irrelevant by the events spiraling around the man he once blessed and brushed off in the same patronizing farewell. Serves him right, the would-be Richelieu. He was always behind the eight-ball of this game and it wasn't even billiards in the first place.
Coming in at the point where this character started to break down into sympathy, I missed all of that. I missed that he had ever been so supercilious and comfortable instead of shocky and gauche, that he had casually talked down to and ordered around characters before whom he would be shown as indecisive and incompetent when faced with soldiers and spy-catchers instead of circular letters and cups of beef tea; I missed that he had ever thought he was on top of this situation and not just scrambling to survive it. I missed that he had done harm. I missed how much he grows as a person. There's no reason to expect from Remora's introduction that the glossily dismissive emissary from the Prolocutor's Palace would ever put himself in danger for the sake of a truce or offer himself for torture in a comrade's place or get himself demoted to regular augur and nonetheless walk around beaming at everyone because he finally lived up to his mother's dreams for him. Seriously, it's a good arc, all the more so because it belongs to a person who never stops looking or sounding like an emotionally disorganized deck chair that teethed on a thesaurus, and it's not like I can't still appreciate it for the id-blast that it is. But I got it back to front and while that is sort of apropos for the character, I really suspect it would have been even more effective in the right order.
Anyway, since I have seen character development already in the seven episodes of Torchwood I've watched so far, I figure I should go back for all of it from the start, even knowing that the writing of the first season has some hiccups, to say the least. I hope Gene Wolfe of blessed memory appreciates that I have taken the lesson. Not everyone can make me care, even slightly, about linear narrative.
There are four volumes of The Book of the Long Sun: Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Lake of the Long Sun (1994), Caldé of the Long Sun (1994), and Exodus from the Long Sun (1996). The plot concerns a revolution on a generation starship whose gods are literally ghosts in the machine, except perhaps for the minor god whose revelation to a young augur in the first novel kicks off a quest that starts like the Blues Brothers and ends like Les Mis; unlike Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980–83) with its experimental play of memory and time, The Book of the Long Sun is notable for its dead-ahead structure which does not even incorporate flashbacks, although occasionally its characters dream. In other words, all information not encountered in order in the text must be explicitly filled in or deduced in hindsight, and Wolfe uses this technique to keep the reader reevaluating interactions and motivations in light of later events. It was therefore utterly disastrous for me to read the last two volumes first, which of course I had no way of knowing one late autumn night in my junior year of college when the second-half omnibus was lying around a friend's dorm room and I wanted something to read while five people I liked very much were carrying on a conversation that bored me completely.
The Book of the Long Sun is one of the narratives where I have a favorite character; his name is Patera Remora and he is the coadjutor of the city-state of Viron, which in the classically inflected religion of the Whorl means more or less what it does in the Catholic or the Anglican Church, only with a lot more haruspicy. When encountered for the first time in Caldé of the Long Sun and even more so in Exodus from the Long Sun, he is an excruciatingly sympathetic character. In the midst of spies and factions, barricades and negotiations and casualties on all sides, Remora is a paper-pusher out of his depth and he knows it. Sometimes it makes him funny, but he's frightened all the time. A fence-sitter by nature and an establishment figure by profession, now that he's thrown in with Patera Silk and the revolutionaries against the Ayuntamiento of Viron and even a schism of his own Chapter, he's trying desperately to do the right thing and mostly floundering toward it, but to say that he's not graceful about the process is several orders of understatement. Conversationally, he's one of those formal, diffident people who are always correcting themselves like an unsolicited apparatus criticus; physically, he's the kind of tall and thin that looks like a deck chair folding up when he takes a seat and he can be trusted to trip over his own feet at moments of action almost as reliably as over his own tongue at moments of truth. One of his characteristic gestures is nervously pushing his hair out of his eyes, another worrying his religion's equivalent of a rosary. Emotionally, he's a mess. Undergoing a classic katabasis in the tunnels beneath Viron with the sibyl-turned-revolutionary-general Maytera Mint and an agent of the Ayuntamiento, Remora is scalding in his self-honesty and oblivious when it comes to reading the room—he has a knack for choosing exactly the wrong moment to unburden his conscience, share his feelings, or suggest a stratagem for which there is invariably a simpler solution. And yet he does come out of it stronger, with a truer sense of himself and what matters to him than when he started, even if you could still give yourself an ulcer waiting for him to finish a complete sentence; it's not silly at all that by the end of the series he's become one of the central figures of the exodus to the planet the ship-born characters call the Short Sun Whorl, eventually the Prolocutor of the Vironese Faith on Blue. He'll do it well now—he wouldn't have before. And the ghost of his mother in Mainframe is proud of him.
When encountered for the first time in Lake of the Long Sun, Remora is not sympathetic at all. He is an ecclesiastical snot. For all his easy invocation of the gods, he's far more office politician than priest, as polished as he is insincere, more concerned with keeping a lid on an inconvenient theophany than with actually helping the manteion on Sun Street out of its financial difficulties as Silk has been appealing for weeks, even though leaving the younger augur to his own devices just accelerates the combination of divine and secular intrigues that drives the unraveling of the Whorl; he's a second-order antagonist but a tellingly blinkered one, so enamored of his own delicacy in disposing of a sensitive affair that it doesn't occur to him to investigate further, except where he imagines that he already knows what he'll find. He intercepts letters, he offers bribes. He may not be as destructive, but he's as good a representative as any councillor of the Ayuntamiento of the structures of power and complacency that Silk will end up shaking to their roots. Of course his fastidious self-assurance will crack to pieces the minute the world begins to shift its shape, his petty ambitions and illusions rendered profoundly and embarrassingly irrelevant by the events spiraling around the man he once blessed and brushed off in the same patronizing farewell. Serves him right, the would-be Richelieu. He was always behind the eight-ball of this game and it wasn't even billiards in the first place.
Coming in at the point where this character started to break down into sympathy, I missed all of that. I missed that he had ever been so supercilious and comfortable instead of shocky and gauche, that he had casually talked down to and ordered around characters before whom he would be shown as indecisive and incompetent when faced with soldiers and spy-catchers instead of circular letters and cups of beef tea; I missed that he had ever thought he was on top of this situation and not just scrambling to survive it. I missed that he had done harm. I missed how much he grows as a person. There's no reason to expect from Remora's introduction that the glossily dismissive emissary from the Prolocutor's Palace would ever put himself in danger for the sake of a truce or offer himself for torture in a comrade's place or get himself demoted to regular augur and nonetheless walk around beaming at everyone because he finally lived up to his mother's dreams for him. Seriously, it's a good arc, all the more so because it belongs to a person who never stops looking or sounding like an emotionally disorganized deck chair that teethed on a thesaurus, and it's not like I can't still appreciate it for the id-blast that it is. But I got it back to front and while that is sort of apropos for the character, I really suspect it would have been even more effective in the right order.
Anyway, since I have seen character development already in the seven episodes of Torchwood I've watched so far, I figure I should go back for all of it from the start, even knowing that the writing of the first season has some hiccups, to say the least. I hope Gene Wolfe of blessed memory appreciates that I have taken the lesson. Not everyone can make me care, even slightly, about linear narrative.
no subject
I am fascinated by it tonally because the episodes I've seen so far function most like a moderately violent, rather hurt/comfort-driven workplace comedy.
.... this is amazingly and delightfully accurate. :D Yeah, I think Torchwood might be one of the weirdest shows I've seen - it's not as if other comedic found-family sci-fi doesn't exist, but I can't think of anything else with this show's particular mix of those elements with its sometimes extremely dark, horror-esque edge, as well as a mix of surprisingly deep emotional realism with gleefully, goofily batshit plot elements and effects.
I wasn't sure if it would be your thing or not, but I am really delighted that you're liking it! I, too, find it deeply charming and endearing. I really didn't expect to get sucked down when I rewatched it this spring, because it didn't do this to me back in 2008 - but I now realize that a big part of that was having had a massive ragequit due to later developments, and now that I've managed to compartmentalize the part of the show that I like from the part I don't like, I am finding that I do, in fact, really love it, and remember how much I loved it the first time around.
I just finished 'Reset,' which ends in a major character death, and prior to his major character death Owen spent much of the episode trying and failing to get the singularity scalpel to work without carnage or at least property damage, and it is no small deal that he finally, successfully uses it to save Martha from an alien parasite when it's not even clear that the thing is the surgical instrument he so stubbornly insists on as opposed to some kind of alien energy weapon, but he almost vaporizes Ianto in the process and he does accidentally explode a hitman.
Yes! I think the entire thing with the singularity scalpel is such a great encapsulization of Owen's character (and also the show in general), because he is a flaming dumpster fire of a human being, but he also has this bone-deep drive to help people - it's the deep and fundamental core of him, to the point where he is determined to take an object that almost anyone else would take one look at and assume is a weapon, and not just use it to heal people, but also insist that healing people, not hurting people, is its function. This despite almost blowing up (or actually blowing up) various people with it. And he does actually make it work! But then he dies like 5 minutes later - saving Martha and his friends, no less. It is ludicrous and wonderful and darkly funny and bleak and optimistic - just a really excellent combination, very much narrative catnip for me.
I love all aspects of this situation. I just feel like normally I see its equivalent in fic, not actual canon.
Yeah, I feel like the show overall is indulgent in a way you don't normally see on TV. (Iron Fist was somewhat that way too, though the feel is different.) One of the main things about Torchwood that sucked me in is its sheer unrepentant willingness to commit - to the full (melo)dramatic emotions of the scene, or to its utter bonkers-ness, whatever the situation calls for. This show doesn't really do things by halves.
I have a friend who actually looking on my behalf as we speak, but if for whatever reason it doesn't pan out, I will return to your offer.
Sounds good - just let me know!
no subject
Oh, good! I also have many feelings at the moment. It's even made me think again of learning to vid, which never happens, but which every few years I contemplate.
.... this is amazingly and delightfully accurate. :D
Thank you! Please feel free to snurch, if useful, and if people still use that verb.
(I have had a particularly exhausted, discombobulated, rather miserable day, but have recently been cheered up by witnessing friends elsenet arguing over the conjugation of yeet. Someone just defended the use of the perfect passive participle yote into the sun by invoking the Great Vowel Shift. Humanity at its best.)
Yeah, I think Torchwood might be one of the weirdest shows I've seen - it's not as if other comedic found-family sci-fi doesn't exist, but I can't think of anything else with this show's particular mix of those elements with its sometimes extremely dark, horror-esque edge, as well as a mix of surprisingly deep emotional realism with gleefully, goofily batshit plot elements and effects.
I love the combination and I love the fact that it works. If I have encountered anything like it elsewhere—and I keep feeling that I have, but I haven't been able to place it—it's definitely not on English-language TV. At the moment it reminds me very slightly of the manga Saiyuki.
I wasn't sure if it would be your thing or not, but I am really delighted that you're liking it!
It is definitely one of my things. Once I got past the initial glitch of PTSD, it seems to have slotted itself immediately into comfort viewing, which might always have been true but is especially unsurprising under current conditions. Everybody is a disaster and nobody gets out alive, but that doesn't mean you stop fighting, no matter how ridiculously, horrifyingly weird things get. I'm so glad you have been able to rediscover your love for it! I will undoubtedly watch through the later developments and then read a lot of fic.
I think the entire thing with the singularity scalpel is such a great encapsulization of Owen's character (and also the show in general), because he is a flaming dumpster fire of a human being, but he also has this bone-deep drive to help people - it's the deep and fundamental core of him, to the point where he is determined to take an object that almost anyone else would take one look at and assume is a weapon, and not just use it to heal people, but also insist that healing people, not hurting people, is its function.
Yes! And I am truly not sure that he's right, because it's a piece of junk that fell through the Rift and left its service manual in another dimension, it could be a super-advanced toilet de-clogger for all anyone knows, but if he's wrong, then the resident abrasive cynic of Torchwood Three turned a thing of destruction into a thing of lifesaving by sheer force of bloodyminded caring and that makes it even more beautiful. (And poignant: "You save one life, a hundred lives, but it's never enough . . . Who will save me?")
It is ludicrous and wonderful and darkly funny and bleak and optimistic - just a really excellent combination, very much narrative catnip for me.
That is also a really good tonal summation of Torchwood. At least at this stage of its development, it's not a grimdark show.
(Iron Fist was somewhat that way too, though the feel is different.)
(Agreed. Iron Fist did less with black comedy, but it shared the emotional realism combined with plotting from Mars.)
One of the main things about Torchwood that sucked me in is its sheer unrepentant willingness to commit - to the full (melo)dramatic emotions of the scene, or to its utter bonkers-ness, whatever the situation calls for. This show doesn't really do things by halves.
That's part of what I'm enjoying as well. There's a real sense of skating on the edge: I understand it means that when the show screws up, it screws up spectacularly, but then so do its characters, so I accept the appropriateness.
Sounds good - just let me know!
Friend just came through! Expect more feelings.
no subject
You know, it actually kind of does, although I think Saiyuki wasn't quite weird enough - I mean, Saiyuki is weird, but set against the backdrop of the general bizarreness of a lot of other manga in its genre, it's actually pretty much within acceptable parameters or even on the coherent side. Whereas Torchwood is weird (and also queer) in a way that American sci-fi TV just isn't, which I think is part of what gives it that unique flavor.
I had thought that Torchwood never made that much of an impression on me in 2008, but then I was thinking today about how this Owen icon - that I made for myself just after I finally decided to check out the show and marathoned nearly all of season 2 in a handful of days, and a couple of days before I ragequit the show over the final episode of season 2 - is one that's meaningful enough to me that I held onto it for twelve years, through my bitter resentment of where the show ended up, through the move from LJ to DW and all of the various icon cleanups as I fell in and out of love with new shiny things. So perhaps it's not that surprising that I was primed to fall back in love with it when I went back to it. Sometimes you do. And in particular ...
Once I got past the initial glitch of PTSD, it seems to have slotted itself immediately into comfort viewing, which might always have been true but is especially unsurprising under current conditions. Everybody is a disaster and nobody gets out alive, but that doesn't mean you stop fighting, no matter how ridiculously, horrifyingly weird things get.
Yes! I think this is one of those cases of hitting it when I was in exactly the right headspace for it. Come to think of it, I must have been in a not-too-different headspace in early 2008 (coming off 8 years of Bush) and maybe that's why I liked it then, too. But it happened to slot very neatly into a particular kind of emotionally satisfying viewing/reading for me right now. They live in a world that's unsafe and unhappy and unfair, but they carve out their own little enclave of warmth and light, for however long it lasts, and they never give up and they never stop trying to stave off the dark for however long they can. I am very much here for that.
At the same time, the show is just bonkers enough (and also just dated enough) not to remind me too much of any specific thing that I don't currently want to think about, whereas some other things I love that have the same "enclave of light in darkness" feeling (the Ben January books, say) are just a little too close to home in some ways to quite hit the level of escapism that really makes for comfort viewing right now.
Yes! And I am truly not sure that he's right, because it's a piece of junk that fell through the Rift and left its service manual in another dimension, it could be a super-advanced toilet de-clogger for all anyone knows, but if he's wrong, then the resident abrasive cynic of Torchwood Three turned a thing of destruction into a thing of lifesaving by sheer force of bloodyminded caring and that makes it even more beautiful.
YES. ALL OF THIS. He not only decided that it was definitely and absolutely a lifesaving tool, but he made it be one, because he just wouldn't give up until he got it to bend to his determination to save people with it.
I love that dichotomy of Owen - his bitter cynicism and angry urge to push people away, constantly at war with his innate caring and the way that he instantly shifts into concerned doctor mode when someone needs his help.
At least at this stage of its development, it's not a grimdark show.
No, it's really not. I think in seasons three and four, it actually does become grimdark, and that's one reason why I refuse to admit those seasons into my personal headspace. But the first two seasons, as dark as they can be, are very optimistic about human resilience in a way that really speaks to me right now.
no subject
Part of it is the disaster party vibe, but I just wouldn't be surprised if a non-binary bodhisattva turned up on Torchwood and flirted with everyone. I may be more surprised that it never happened.
Whereas Torchwood is weird (and also queer) in a way that American sci-fi TV just isn't, which I think is part of what gives it that unique flavor.
I still wouldn't say that the show's hit its stride by the mid-first season, but we are definitely into the realm of "I just watched that on TV, so I guess it wasn't fic," which feels essentially Torchwood to me. I loved "Countrycide" because everyone everyone is prepared for aliens and it's just Sawney Bean, but I also loved it because it's full of the team taking mostly literal hits for one another and Owen being rubbish at camping. "Cyberwoman" is basically Whumptober in a can: take the neatest, most reticent, most buttoned-down and nearly invisible member of our main cast, here's your forty minutes of suit porn and crying. (Less facetiously, I also consider it the show's best handling of sexuality to date: the first episode established a quietly flirtatious vibe between Ianto and Jack and now we find out Ianto's been hiding his half-Cybered girlfriend in the basement for four months and absolutely no one remarks on the Kinsey scale because the Hub's in lockdown, there's a Cyberwoman fighting their pterodactyl, and in any case Jack's almost shot him at least twice. "Greeks Bearing Gifts" was also generally less concerned with Mary's human-form gender than with the fact that she uses Tosh to get into Torchwood. That episode reminded me strongly of the eavesdropping passage in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: whatever Tosh hears through the filter of the pendant and Gwen and Owen's new relationship energy, an episode ago Owen was the one yelling at Jack about how they couldn't just leave Tosh and Ianto on their own in the murder village; but that's not the memo she gets.) I rather bounced off "Small Worlds"—it's a nice conceit, but I have high standards for narratives that invoke the Cottingley Fairies, Yeats' "The Stolen Child," and forests that exist only in the deep time of the land—but I can appreciate the show attempting the experiment of dark fantasy rather than horror-sf.
this Owen icon - that I made for myself just after I finally decided to check out the show and marathoned nearly all of season 2 in a handful of days, and a couple of days before I ragequit the show over the final episode of season 2 - is one that's meaningful enough to me that I held onto it for twelve years, through my bitter resentment of where the show ended up, through the move from LJ to DW and all of the various icon cleanups as I fell in and out of love with new shiny things.
That does seem telling and also a nice thing to discover you didn't lose.
They live in a world that's unsafe and unhappy and unfair, but they carve out their own little enclave of warmth and light, for however long it lasts, and they never give up and they never stop trying to stave off the dark for however long they can. I am very much here for that.
Le Guin, "Nine Lives" (1969): "We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?"
whereas some other things I love that have the same "enclave of light in darkness" feeling (the Ben January books, say) are just a little too close to home in some ways to quite hit the level of escapism that really makes for comfort viewing right now.
GOOD AFTERNOON HAVE YOU CONSIDERED ACCEPTING MY OPINIONS ABOUT HANNIBAL SEFTON INTO YOUR LIFEI can see that.I love that dichotomy of Owen - his bitter cynicism and angry urge to push people away, constantly at war with his innate caring and the way that he instantly shifts into concerned doctor mode when someone needs his help.
Yes. And I'm glad to see it as far back as the first season, in "Ghost Machine," in "Countrycide" where his first major scene with Gwen is that hard sell on workplace bad romance but his second is treating her for a shotgun blast, at which point he's as fast and gentle as he can be and even when her hand wanders from gripping the shoulder of his jacket to stroking the back of his hair, he stays focused and professional, which does not mean detached: "Come on. I'm good."
I think in seasons three and four, it actually does become grimdark, and that's one reason why I refuse to admit those seasons into my personal headspace.
I really can't throw out Children of Earth because it did introduce me to Peter Capaldi, but I respect your decision. I appreciate that Ianto has a shrine in Cardiff, but I'd prefer if he didn't have to.
no subject
I did really enjoy "Greeks Bearing Gifts" with its evenhandedness about Tosh's new girlfriend (she's homicidal and terrible, but not in a way that has anything to do with it being a lesbian relationship; the only sour note was Jack's OOC transphobic comment, which again I am inclined to fob off on the writers rather than having it be a character note). It's too sad to be a favorite, though. I wish she had gotten to hear something nice, and I also wish the show had followed up on her peek into Ianto's depression.
Oh, speaking of which, there's a really gorgeous missing scene from "Cyberwoman" with Ianto and Tosh that I really wish they'd kept. It takes place at the end of the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trHsWBDdGXk
in "Countrycide" where his first major scene with Gwen is that hard sell on workplace bad romance but his second is treating her for a shotgun blast, at which point he's as fast and gentle as he can be and even when her hand wanders from gripping the shoulder of his jacket to stroking the back of his hair, he stays focused and professional, which does not mean detached: "Come on. I'm good."
Oh man, that scene where he's treating Gwen is so lovely, as well as his clear worry for their missing teammates; it's so interesting to me, such a gorgeous character touch, that Owen, the cynic, is the one who keeps insisting they have to go back for the ones they've left behind.
Re: the character deaths and the show's growing darkness in later seasons - I can't deny that it does fit the world. They've told us from the beginning that most people don't get happy endings in Torchwood. But I just want to center myself onto a "happy place" version of the show consisting of everything before the season two finale, and stay there. I still wish the show had delivered another season or two of this incarnation of the team dysfunctionally learning to love each other.
no subject
Following up on mid-to-later season one, "Random Shoes" is barely a Torchwood episode at all as opposed to a short film about a man and his life and an alien eyeball, but I liked it immensely and was vaguely surprised it wasn't nominated for a short-form dramatic Hugo (I am intrigued that that honor went to "Captain Jack Harkness," because that episode isn't remotely standalone) and "Out of Time" through "End of Days" registered to me as all one arc, which if intentional is fascinating because the through-line is Owen.
Apparently, between this and "Countrycide" (which delivers wonderfully on the team front), all I want from this era of the show is these people running around in the dark getting chased by things that want to kill them. I am a simple girl of simple tastes.
Mind if I request casefic from that era?
the only sour note was Jack's OOC transphobic comment, which again I am inclined to fob off on the writers rather than having it be a character note
Agreed. It was so out of character that it startled me until I remembered the episode was written and shot in 2006, which was a bit of ironic future shock. "You people and your quaint little categories . . ."
I wish she had gotten to hear something nice, and I also wish the show had followed up on her peek into Ianto's depression.
I said to
Oh, speaking of which, there's a really gorgeous missing scene from "Cyberwoman" with Ianto and Tosh that I really wish they'd kept. It takes place at the end of the episode
Oh, dammit. I can see why it would have been cut, because it distracts from the rhyming bookends of Ianto going about his work with no one noticing and Ianto going about his work with all eyes on him, but it's such a beautiful little grace note.
Oh man, that scene where he's treating Gwen is so lovely, as well as his clear worry for their missing teammates; it's so interesting to me, such a gorgeous character touch, that Owen, the cynic, is the one who keeps insisting they have to go back for the ones they've left behind.
"Countrycide" shows off some of the best of Owen in season one, including that the beginning of his relationship with Gwen actually looks more like human comfort than screwing an irresistible bad idea all night. I mean, it is still a bad idea. But they can hold each other and know what they've been through.
I still wish the show had delivered another season or two of this incarnation of the team dysfunctionally learning to love each other.
I don't see how it would have hurt anyone, me right now included.
Do you know if they were having problems with renewal? A half-TPK is such a weird thing to build a season toward and a miniseries third season—with another permanent regular death!—is an even weirder continuation.
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It feels that way to me too, and it is really interesting, because yeah, Owen is the emotional screw that holds the last third of the season together. He doesn't come across as anywhere near that important in the first half of the season. But it does echo, to an extent, the way that Ianto fades into the background in the first three episodes, only to suddenly come into his own in "Cyberwoman," when it turns out that his invisibility was by his own design. Owen appears early on to be mainly comic relief or at least the team's shallow playboy, but then he develops the emotional gravitas that carries the show through its final arc in this season. I really enjoy that particular reversal of expectations: "you thought this wasn't important, but actually, it's the most important thing."
"Countrycide" shows off some of the best of Owen in season one, including that the beginning of his relationship with Gwen actually looks more like human comfort than screwing an irresistible bad idea all night. I mean, it is still a bad idea. But they can hold each other and know what they've been through.
Yes! I was actually VERY surprised that I ended up as sold on Gwen/Owen as I was. I mean, it's a terrible idea all around, obviously. But the episode really sells it as a mutual comfort/shared-experience kind of thing, containing its own measure of human warmth as well as being something that the characters might plausibly do.
Oh, dammit. I can see why it would have been cut, because it distracts from the rhyming bookends of Ianto going about his work with no one noticing and Ianto going about his work with all eyes on him, but it's such a beautiful little grace note.
Yeah, from a narrative standpoint I can see why they wanted to go out on the scene they went out on, and I can't even actually figure out exactly how this scene fits with that one. But as an individual scene, it's just so lovely and such a nice touchstone for a relationship that doesn't get much development otherwise.
Do you know if they were having problems with renewal? A half-TPK is such a weird thing to build a season toward and a miniseries third season—with another permanent regular death!—is an even weirder continuation.
I don't have any idea. It's possible that it could be a planned endpoint that ended up feeling extra jarring when the show veered off in a different direction and then was dragged back to the original plan, perhaps planned that way for two seasons - one could more easily see the first season ending with two characters' deaths for (mainly) shock value than the second. I still find it bizarre that they would build up the team relationships so thoroughly in season two, and especially Owen's relationships with the team, only to blow a hole through that and anything interesting that might have come out of it.