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lullabelleSo I watched Torchwood in more or less one sitting. All three seasons, during the course of one rainy week in December, when I was laid up with the pig plague.
It took me a couple of days to sort my thoughts enough for me to actually write down what I thought of Children of Earth, and even then this is all very knee-jerk. I did my best not to edit it as I typed it up, because it's what I thought before I became at all involved in the fandom. I think I had a different take on a lot of it because I didn't have any expectations. It was all immediate for me. Looking back on this, even just a few months later, is interesting.
Edited to say: Obviously, spoilers for CoE.
Pacing -- off like a shot, tight storytelling, completely uncampy, but loses its sense of whimsy, which I kind of miss. Improvement of film quality and effects.
The old man was annoying, but he was probably meant to be.
The 456 were a very effective villain. By effective, I mean it made my skin crawl off my body and hide under the bed. I flinched everytime it pussed on the glass, or whatever that was.
TW stumbled across a few cardinal horror tropes and applied them with surprising deftness. 1) Kids are scary. 2) Less is more. Children-are-creepy has been beaten to death recently, but TW brings a new-enough twist to it to keep it from being gimmicky, directing the alien threat towards the kids instead of through the kids and towards the adults. The 456 are an all-but-unseen threat that want 10% of the world's children... so that they can get high. And we've just cranked the evil factor up to 11.
A little lower on the evil scale is John Forbisher, the government fall guy whom you want to feel bad for, but between issuing a kill order on Torchwood and making every bad (read: cowardly) decision available to him, he manages to sidestep pretty much any sympathy you might be inclined to throw his way.
Johnson -- freaky shit, hard as nails, liked that she wasn't mindless and they were able to sway her in the end.
Lois -- really liked her, hope she joins Torchwood, though she might catch hate if she does, since she will essentially be filling Ianto's shoes, and the fanosphere seems pretty unwilling to let him go.
Rupesh -- excellent red herring. Replacement for Owen? Nope! Government plant. Now a dead government plant. Took me completely by surprise. I will note, however, that it bothers me that all the minority characters with the exception of Lois are dicks, and post-Tosh Torchwood is very white. Grumble. Also, the projects where Ianto's family lives? Very white. Just sayin'. Not really going to blow this too out of proportion, because there's only so much you can do in 5 hours, and most of the new characters who are introduced are in some way assholes, so choice rolls are at a minimum. But, still. White-ass projects.
Alice and Steven. Guess it makes sense that, with as much ass as Jack supposedly gets, he'd eventually fertilize someone, but it's still strange to see him in a family setting, and it only serves to drive home how much he doesn't really belong, a point already brought up by the new and awkward note his relationship with Ianto has taken.
I'm probably in the minority here, but I feel Gwen was underplayed. Oops! Pregnant, can't do shit. The whole Gwen's-knocked-up plotpoint irritated me. It felt like a convenient way to remove her from the show without killing her, since it would be unlikely she'd leave Torchwood otherwise, especially considering she seemed firmly against children until she actually got pregnant. Frustrating. I hope Eve Myles comes back for series four. I really do love Gwen. Another reason her pregnancy bothered me is because it tied her to Rhys more firmly and... well, I've never really gelled to Rhys. He's boring. It's like they created an everyman character and succeeded just a little too well. Gwen and Rhys escape Cardiff in a potato truck just to give Rhys something to do. But anyways.
The real meat of the miniseries, character-wise, is Ianto and Jack, both together and seperately. You get to meet Ianto's family, which is really the first time you see Ianto at all outside the Torchwood environment. The whole Ianto storyline is bittersweet and open to a million interpretations simply because he never gives anything away. You can interpret however you will, but you never really know Ianto's motivations for anything. This makes him interesting. It also, coupled with a cute face, a very nice behind, and a canon relationship with his smoking hot boss, made him a fangirl magnet. He was very much a choose-your-own-adventure character and it made him a quiet kind of wild card. In retrospect, his death shouldn't have come as a surprise. By killing off Owen and Tosh in the series 2 finale, right after revealing their origin stories in "Fragments", RTD had already displayed a penchant for offing characters after major revelations. I know there was a lot of speculation over whether or not his death was homophobic. I'm going to vote a tentative 'no', just because Torchwood destroyed pretty much everything it had, except for Gwen who seems irritatingly immune, and Rhys who is caught up in her magical immunity wake.
I do think there was a little bit of cheap emotional manipulation involved. By showing that Ianto is uncomfortable with his "couple" status outside of the confines of Torchwood, and having people identify him as gay regardless of how he identifies himself, it shows that he is taking his relationship with Jack seriously. He's thinking of himself and Jack in a real-world context and it's troubling him, because they're freaking doomed. I think he's also afraid to let Jack know just how deeply he feels for him, knowing how many people Jack's loved and lost before him, and will after him. Ianto will always be one of many. I think there's some fear of rejection, since Jack's been pretty elusive about quantifying exactly what it is he and Ianto have. When he concedes they're a couple, the very next scene he bitches about how he hates the term couple. Jack may love Ianto, but he's certainly not copping to it. Jack is an elusive douche. But long story short, CoE teases a love story out of a what was mostly an off-screen relationship, and then blows it to bits by killing off the more unrequited partner. He can only tell Jack he loves him when he doesn't fear the consequences anymore. Jack doesn't say it at all. It's pretty fucking tragic, and played for absolute maximum pain. So I feel like I was a little manipulated, but I think they achieved exactly what they were going for here. Which was carnage.
Jack is the focal point for this whole thing. Everything that happens here is a result of his actions. The moral grayness of this whole series is a thing of beauty. I could think about it until my brain pops. It's all a question of what is an acceptable sacrifice for survival. 12 kids for 45 years of safety? 10% of children for an undetermined length of safety? One kid to guarantee they go away, at least for now? What I find unforgivable about the whole thing is that evidently no one feels the need to follow up after the first incident. They get pulled into this alien protection racket in 1965. They pay off the aliens with 12 kids, and that's it? That's 45 years in which Torchwood or the government or whoever could have made sure the 456 never came back and that busload of doe-eyed orphans didn't give up their lives in vain. You don't just forget about impending alien threats like that. Way to be our first, last, and only line of defense, Torchwood, you shifty fucks.
Anyway, Jack's connection to the 1st coming of the 456 is revealed to the appropriate horror of Gwen and Ianto. It's this outpouring of righteous indignation from the peanut gallery that spurs Jack to tell the 456 to fuck themselves. And then the 456 kill everyone in Thames House, including Ianto. And Jack, but he gets better. (And I'm being callous here, but I cried like a bitch. I had to stop and take a walk after Ianto died, only to start crying again when Gwen came in to claim the bodies.) Nice going, champ. This is where RTD says to himself, "Well, Jack can't die, so how badly can we mangle him?" Again, Jack makes the hard decision to sacrifice his own grandson to transmit a debilitating signal to the 456. I admit, the series wraps a little neatly -- the 456 broadcast on the very wavelength that can defeat them? That's almost as bad as aliens coming to Earth who dissolve in water -- but not quite. But it's forgivable as the pseudo-science takes a backseat to the character drama anyway. My big question is, where the hell are they going from here? While I'm absolutely jazzed that Torchwood is coming back for series four, can the show survive on Jack alone? Which is why I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the return of Eve Myles. That, and she rocks, and I want to bone her into a puddle. And while I'm not freaking out over the death of Ianto, I am still mourning a bit, cuz he was totes my fave, and I was a little... perturbed?.... to hear that Jack got a hook-up on the Doctor Who Christmas special. It's his first outing since CoE, and this guy had better be pretty fucking special, or I'm going to dislike him on the grounds that he's not Ianto. Like, chocolate flavored taint special. And I might still hate him. I'll give the definitive update as soon as I've seen "The End of Time" which should happen sometime this week.
All in all, I give Torchwood: Children of Earth four out of five exploded pterodactyls.
A/N 1: Obviously, since writing this the future of Torchwood has become less certain. :'(
A/N 2: Saw the End of Time. I <3 Russell Tovey to bits and pieces on Being Human. I think he's fantastic. That said, he's goofy looking, and if he were to go down on me I'd be way too tempted to steer him by his ears.
A/N 3: As I've gotten more into the fandom, I've actually become more upset by Ianto's death. It's contagious. (I was also startled by the Gwen hate. That hasn't been contagious, but it's lonely here in the Gwen fan club.)
A/N 4: Also, thinking harder on the ever-controversial homophobia issue, I've become less convinced of my tentative "no", but that's another rant for another time.
It took me a couple of days to sort my thoughts enough for me to actually write down what I thought of Children of Earth, and even then this is all very knee-jerk. I did my best not to edit it as I typed it up, because it's what I thought before I became at all involved in the fandom. I think I had a different take on a lot of it because I didn't have any expectations. It was all immediate for me. Looking back on this, even just a few months later, is interesting.
Edited to say: Obviously, spoilers for CoE.
Pacing -- off like a shot, tight storytelling, completely uncampy, but loses its sense of whimsy, which I kind of miss. Improvement of film quality and effects.
The old man was annoying, but he was probably meant to be.
The 456 were a very effective villain. By effective, I mean it made my skin crawl off my body and hide under the bed. I flinched everytime it pussed on the glass, or whatever that was.
TW stumbled across a few cardinal horror tropes and applied them with surprising deftness. 1) Kids are scary. 2) Less is more. Children-are-creepy has been beaten to death recently, but TW brings a new-enough twist to it to keep it from being gimmicky, directing the alien threat towards the kids instead of through the kids and towards the adults. The 456 are an all-but-unseen threat that want 10% of the world's children... so that they can get high. And we've just cranked the evil factor up to 11.
A little lower on the evil scale is John Forbisher, the government fall guy whom you want to feel bad for, but between issuing a kill order on Torchwood and making every bad (read: cowardly) decision available to him, he manages to sidestep pretty much any sympathy you might be inclined to throw his way.
Johnson -- freaky shit, hard as nails, liked that she wasn't mindless and they were able to sway her in the end.
Lois -- really liked her, hope she joins Torchwood, though she might catch hate if she does, since she will essentially be filling Ianto's shoes, and the fanosphere seems pretty unwilling to let him go.
Rupesh -- excellent red herring. Replacement for Owen? Nope! Government plant. Now a dead government plant. Took me completely by surprise. I will note, however, that it bothers me that all the minority characters with the exception of Lois are dicks, and post-Tosh Torchwood is very white. Grumble. Also, the projects where Ianto's family lives? Very white. Just sayin'. Not really going to blow this too out of proportion, because there's only so much you can do in 5 hours, and most of the new characters who are introduced are in some way assholes, so choice rolls are at a minimum. But, still. White-ass projects.
Alice and Steven. Guess it makes sense that, with as much ass as Jack supposedly gets, he'd eventually fertilize someone, but it's still strange to see him in a family setting, and it only serves to drive home how much he doesn't really belong, a point already brought up by the new and awkward note his relationship with Ianto has taken.
I'm probably in the minority here, but I feel Gwen was underplayed. Oops! Pregnant, can't do shit. The whole Gwen's-knocked-up plotpoint irritated me. It felt like a convenient way to remove her from the show without killing her, since it would be unlikely she'd leave Torchwood otherwise, especially considering she seemed firmly against children until she actually got pregnant. Frustrating. I hope Eve Myles comes back for series four. I really do love Gwen. Another reason her pregnancy bothered me is because it tied her to Rhys more firmly and... well, I've never really gelled to Rhys. He's boring. It's like they created an everyman character and succeeded just a little too well. Gwen and Rhys escape Cardiff in a potato truck just to give Rhys something to do. But anyways.
The real meat of the miniseries, character-wise, is Ianto and Jack, both together and seperately. You get to meet Ianto's family, which is really the first time you see Ianto at all outside the Torchwood environment. The whole Ianto storyline is bittersweet and open to a million interpretations simply because he never gives anything away. You can interpret however you will, but you never really know Ianto's motivations for anything. This makes him interesting. It also, coupled with a cute face, a very nice behind, and a canon relationship with his smoking hot boss, made him a fangirl magnet. He was very much a choose-your-own-adventure character and it made him a quiet kind of wild card. In retrospect, his death shouldn't have come as a surprise. By killing off Owen and Tosh in the series 2 finale, right after revealing their origin stories in "Fragments", RTD had already displayed a penchant for offing characters after major revelations. I know there was a lot of speculation over whether or not his death was homophobic. I'm going to vote a tentative 'no', just because Torchwood destroyed pretty much everything it had, except for Gwen who seems irritatingly immune, and Rhys who is caught up in her magical immunity wake.
I do think there was a little bit of cheap emotional manipulation involved. By showing that Ianto is uncomfortable with his "couple" status outside of the confines of Torchwood, and having people identify him as gay regardless of how he identifies himself, it shows that he is taking his relationship with Jack seriously. He's thinking of himself and Jack in a real-world context and it's troubling him, because they're freaking doomed. I think he's also afraid to let Jack know just how deeply he feels for him, knowing how many people Jack's loved and lost before him, and will after him. Ianto will always be one of many. I think there's some fear of rejection, since Jack's been pretty elusive about quantifying exactly what it is he and Ianto have. When he concedes they're a couple, the very next scene he bitches about how he hates the term couple. Jack may love Ianto, but he's certainly not copping to it. Jack is an elusive douche. But long story short, CoE teases a love story out of a what was mostly an off-screen relationship, and then blows it to bits by killing off the more unrequited partner. He can only tell Jack he loves him when he doesn't fear the consequences anymore. Jack doesn't say it at all. It's pretty fucking tragic, and played for absolute maximum pain. So I feel like I was a little manipulated, but I think they achieved exactly what they were going for here. Which was carnage.
Jack is the focal point for this whole thing. Everything that happens here is a result of his actions. The moral grayness of this whole series is a thing of beauty. I could think about it until my brain pops. It's all a question of what is an acceptable sacrifice for survival. 12 kids for 45 years of safety? 10% of children for an undetermined length of safety? One kid to guarantee they go away, at least for now? What I find unforgivable about the whole thing is that evidently no one feels the need to follow up after the first incident. They get pulled into this alien protection racket in 1965. They pay off the aliens with 12 kids, and that's it? That's 45 years in which Torchwood or the government or whoever could have made sure the 456 never came back and that busload of doe-eyed orphans didn't give up their lives in vain. You don't just forget about impending alien threats like that. Way to be our first, last, and only line of defense, Torchwood, you shifty fucks.
Anyway, Jack's connection to the 1st coming of the 456 is revealed to the appropriate horror of Gwen and Ianto. It's this outpouring of righteous indignation from the peanut gallery that spurs Jack to tell the 456 to fuck themselves. And then the 456 kill everyone in Thames House, including Ianto. And Jack, but he gets better. (And I'm being callous here, but I cried like a bitch. I had to stop and take a walk after Ianto died, only to start crying again when Gwen came in to claim the bodies.) Nice going, champ. This is where RTD says to himself, "Well, Jack can't die, so how badly can we mangle him?" Again, Jack makes the hard decision to sacrifice his own grandson to transmit a debilitating signal to the 456. I admit, the series wraps a little neatly -- the 456 broadcast on the very wavelength that can defeat them? That's almost as bad as aliens coming to Earth who dissolve in water -- but not quite. But it's forgivable as the pseudo-science takes a backseat to the character drama anyway. My big question is, where the hell are they going from here? While I'm absolutely jazzed that Torchwood is coming back for series four, can the show survive on Jack alone? Which is why I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the return of Eve Myles. That, and she rocks, and I want to bone her into a puddle. And while I'm not freaking out over the death of Ianto, I am still mourning a bit, cuz he was totes my fave, and I was a little... perturbed?.... to hear that Jack got a hook-up on the Doctor Who Christmas special. It's his first outing since CoE, and this guy had better be pretty fucking special, or I'm going to dislike him on the grounds that he's not Ianto. Like, chocolate flavored taint special. And I might still hate him. I'll give the definitive update as soon as I've seen "The End of Time" which should happen sometime this week.
All in all, I give Torchwood: Children of Earth four out of five exploded pterodactyls.
A/N 1: Obviously, since writing this the future of Torchwood has become less certain. :'(
A/N 2: Saw the End of Time. I <3 Russell Tovey to bits and pieces on Being Human. I think he's fantastic. That said, he's goofy looking, and if he were to go down on me I'd be way too tempted to steer him by his ears.
A/N 3: As I've gotten more into the fandom, I've actually become more upset by Ianto's death. It's contagious. (I was also startled by the Gwen hate. That hasn't been contagious, but it's lonely here in the Gwen fan club.)
A/N 4: Also, thinking harder on the ever-controversial homophobia issue, I've become less convinced of my tentative "no", but that's another rant for another time.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-14 04:56 am (UTC)lefaym said: some people who weren't in fandom seemed just as horrified by Ianto's death as those of us who were in fandom when we saw it,
COE Day 4 was the first TW ep I ever watched, although I was aware of the Jack/Ianto relationship from catching the occasional interview or mention in the mags. I was shocked they killed him off and, tbh, assumed at the end of Day 5 that TW had been cancelled and this was their farewell special. It really did feel very much like a goodbye (complete with foot-stomping tantrum and breaking of toys so no one else can play with them) and I was surprised when they announced it could come back. I didn't see how - I still don't (not in its Cardiff form anyway) - and I doubt I'll watch anyway.
I quite liked much of COE. I liked the premise (plot holes aside), I liked the progression, I liked the creepy kids and alien (although the vomiting got a bit old and LOL-worthy towards the end), I loved the support cast. The only thing I didn't like was the awkward fit of the characters which, upon my first watching, I assumed was me just not knowing them yet. Now, after watching the first two seasons, I know that it wasn't my lack of familiarity, but the fact that these characters had been jammed into a hole that was all the wrong shape. It was a good mini-series... but it wasn't Torchwood.
I'm confused by the thrown out, 'He was gay' and the Smell the Queer comments. I don't know why they were included, why they were necessary since they added nothing to the plot. Are we to assume they were added in case someone watching hadn't got the point yet that Jack and Ianto were in a relationship therefore making the impact of Ianto's death less shocking and dramatic? Deliberate homophobia? This straight girl doesn't know, but I do know that I was uncomfortable and puzzled by them.
I have so much dislike for the J/I relationship in COE that I could actually smash the word limit here with a rant so I'm not going to start except to say that I choose to insert my own reality and build upon the tiny, miniscule glimpses we got of their relationship in the first two series. You said: But long story short, CoE teases a love story out of a what was mostly an off-screen relationship, and then blows it to bits by killing off the more unrequited partner, but I think the slow death began with the opening credits.
Thanks for writing this up. I love reading what other people think of the show. It makes me look at things differently and think, 'yeah, actually I can see that'. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-14 01:27 pm (UTC)I interpreted the whole point-at-teh-gay bit as justifying Ianto's angst, to a certain extent. I think Ianto was having a bit of an identity crisis, and the awkward comments were to prove that it's not altogether unfounded (though he still came off as a little whiny). But this could also just be me projecting.
My initial interpretation of Jack/Ianto is one of the things I've actually changed my mind on a little since writing this, and rewatching the whole shebang. I agree that they were falling apart from the word 'go'. And it makes me sad. (I actually missed a lot in my first watch-through... I was in a fever-induced fugue state.)