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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 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.
no subject
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.