Cranky Gala bitches about Torchwood part 1

[galadriel1010]

Jack Harkness
Jack Harkness appeared on Doctor Who and in my life as a tidal wave. Hugely destructive, changed my world around completely, but actually washed away all the crap, poorly built bits of my life that I didn't want or need, creating more space for me to build myself. I nearly cried when he died. I definitely cried when the Doctor left him behind, and I followed him cheerily to Torchwood, not because I was in love with him, but because I identified with him. He was my Doctor, crashing into my life and giving me the opportunity to make something more of myself. Like the Doctor, I sort of loved him, but touching him would be like touching the sun and finding out that it's just a lightbulb. Heroes are best viewed from a distance.

I see Jack as damaged but not broken, capable of rebuilding after everything; but it's been so long and he's been knocked down so many times that he doesn't rebuild properly any more. Wood and mud may wash away quicker, but it's not worth as much. He creates shallow friendships and doesn't invest anything in them. Anyone he does let in and build something with has to be strong, lasting and so, so worth it. If he loves someone, he has to trust them to stick by him through everything, to give him every chance he needs. Ideally, anyone he loves must be someone who would take the opportunity to stay with him if it were presented to them. In earthquake-prone cities they use specialised building techniques to make their buildings stronger so that they can withstand the quakes, so it's all the more devastating and shocking if they fall.

He's not a coward. He just chooses his battles carefully.

I see him like a tropical island. Seen from a distance there's calm blue seas surrounding him, beautiful verdant forest, soft yellow sand and beautiful old buildings among the trees. Get closer, though, and you see the harsh rocks in the water, the poisonous animals in the trees and the buildings are desolate. Oh, and watch out for the jellyfish. None of this is any less beautiful. In fact it's more beautiful, in its way. But it's dangerous, and you have to be both careful and determined to survive there.

Ianto Jones is the one who got close, who built the sanctuary for Jack to hide in and weather the storms. Jack has so much invested in him that losing him is a greater blow than he's been struck in a long time. It's like losing his house, instead of his sandcastle. And I honestly believe that Ianto would have changed places with Owen and stayed by Jack's side forever, because that's what he does, he protects the people he loves.

Ianto Jones
And if we're talking about him as Jack's protector, we have to talk about him as a person.
Loyal, strong, courageous, intelligent, stupid. The man who built his house on sand. Where Ianto is a solid base for Jack to build on, Jack is like quicksand. He's not malicious or cruel about it, but he's thixotropic. Shake him up and he turns to liquid to best weather the shaking.

He's the one who's truly capable of taking Torchwood forwards (which is why I always use him to do this). He sees what needs to be done and the best way to do it, and then he does it. He doesn't even realise that this is what he's doing (because then someone might stop him and he'll have to explain.) Better just to get on with it with even him unaware that he's doing it, then he can deny all knowledge.

I think he's also got PTSD which has never been looked at, and that he averts a meltdown by devoting himself wholeheartedly to something else and telling the meltdown that he's busy right now. In canon it's Torchwood and Jack, and as long as they're stable he's fine. I actually think that he was having a breakdown in CoE, and that he wouldn't have gone into Thames House otherwise.

Jack might be a hero, but Ianto is the one I'd trust to save me.

Gwen Cooper
Cow
I've done a post before on why I think that Gwen Cooper is a bitch; she's manipulative, selfish and blind to her own faults. Mostly I don't like her because if I had to work with her I'd want to rip her head off by the end of the first day (and it takes quite a lot to get me properly cross). A lot of this is Jack's fault, telling her that she's special and ties them to the outside world, but Jesus did she let it go to her head.

She uses sex to advance her position at Torchwood, and pushes Ianto and Tosh aside. It's very obvious with Ianto, who goes from being a close confident to Jack in the first episode to going completely unnoticed by Cyberwoman, and the fact that he's still around and being trusted suggests that it's not because he tried to fade away as fandom seems to believe. If he had, then Gwen would have been the one putting things into secure storage (because she would have happily taken on that role, and any others that happened to be lying around).

So yes, I think that Gwen thinks that the world revolves around her. I also don't think she's very good at her job, and that Jack should have fired her after the Carys incident. I do have problems in that episode with Jack sending Gwen to interrogate Carys – what sort of idiot sends the rookie to interrogate a prisoner who's already killed once and doesn't even monitor her? The only reason they spotted the snog fest was because Owen happened to glance at it. Maybe the reason Jack kept her on was that he fucked up himself in that one. I think he probably regretted it though.

Owen Harper
Appears to have had a morality lobotomy prior to the first series, but got better. Drugging people into wanting to have sex with him probably made sense in his head; possibly he had such an inflated opinion of his own attractiveness that he thought they naturally wanted them and he was just releasing their inhibitions.

I also think he looks like a frog, and can't imagine why Gwen slept with him.

Good doctor, maybe. Shit friend, though. Also often unprofessional.

Toshiko Sato
I wuvs Toshiko. Tosh could have been so awesome. Imagine if Mary had been actually okay, and they ended up bringing her onto the team as Tosh's alien girlfriend. It would have been super.
But she always got pushed aside, often by Gwen. She'd be part of my dream Torchwood team, which Gwen wouldn't come anywhere near. She needed a Jack to see her and rescue her the way that he rescued Ianto, but Jack had his hands full.

Comments

[wounded-melody.livejournal.com]

I love this XD

[lionessvalenti.livejournal.com]

Could you please put this behind a cut? I completely respect your opinions and your journal is where should be able to express them, but I'd rather not read character bashing on my f-list. I'm definitely not asking you to change anything, except adding a cut, if you don't mind. Thanks. :)

[fiwen1010.livejournal.com]

Oh fuckbears, I knew I'd forgotten something. Sorry about that. Told you I wasn't quite with it.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

She uses sex to advance her position at Torchwood

And Ianto doesn't? Fragments makes it quite clear that Ianto manipulated Jack into thinking with his dick rather than his head, and I don't think there is any instance in which Gwen does something similar. Certainly, there seem to be a few instances in early S1 where Gwen seems open to having an affair with Jack, but in none of these instances does she do so in relation to her position at Torchwood -- she doesn't do it in order to deceive Jack, nor does she offer sex in exchange for a promotion. Her affair with Owen, likewise, is not about improving her position in Torchwood -- and really, it's Owen who pursued Gwen aggressively beforehand, not the other way around -- Gwen simply gave into it when she was vulnerable. And while one can certainly say that Gwen treated Rhys badly in S1, I don't think we can say that she necessarily treated him any worse than Ianto treated Jack.

[fiwen1010.livejournal.com]

I think Ianto tried, certainly, but I don't think he succeeded. I'm fairly certain that Jack only hired him because... dude, he caught a pteranodon using dark chocolate. And I'm always inclined to look more favourably on Ianto at that stage because he'd just come out of Canary Wharf, his girlfriend was dying and trapped in the form of the beings that killed nearly everyone he worked with and he was left with little to no choice. That's not using it to advance his position, but to find a safe place.

I came to dislike Gwen particularly when we were looking at inter-personal relationships in team building, and at team roles. You don't need to have sex with someone to appeal to them on a sexual level, but there's something about the way that Gwen carries herself differently about Jack when she wants something out of him that's different to normally.
Okay, so if I had boobs like Gwen's and a boss with a reputation like Jack's, I might be tempted to wear a lower cut top on days when I knew I wanted something out of him. But I wouldn't neccessarily like myself for it.

And I'm not saying at all 'if you wear clothes showing off your figure, you must be out for sex'. But low cut tops at Torchwood are not practical. Too much running. Which is mostly the fault of the costume department, but the costume they choose reflects on the characters who wear them.

I see the way Gwen treated Rhys differently to the way Ianto treated Jack partly because Jack had a duty of care to Ianto, but mostly because I don't believe they were having sex. They may have had a friendship, but I get the feeling that that lapsed after Gwen joined the team, and I don't really believe it was due to Suzie's absence.

[thebuttonontop.livejournal.com]

i love your descriptions... ianto especially, and its so true... :) all of it... cept for owen. i think owen can be a great friend .... i think he just doesn't necessarily pay attention.

[fiwen1010.livejournal.com]

Thanks :)
He could be a very good friend. But yeah, he'd need to look up from his computer game/autopsy/naval contemplation more often. He gets there towards the end of the second series.

[teleens-journal.livejournal.com]

I agree with everything... except Owen being redeemable. He was a rapist who never had to pay for it in any fashion.

The sad part is that even though he's a rapist, I still like him better than Gwen, because at least he was consistently a bastard (imho). I'd trust him to save my life. I wouldn't trust being alone in a room with him.

I hate myself sometimes for how much I hate Gwen, when every other character in the series has flaws and in some cases, much worse flaws. Hell, when you really look at her character, in every way she's caused the least HARM of all of them, even factoring in her fuckups here and there.

Ianto caused the deaths of two innocent people and almost ended the world and he's my favorite character.

Jack gave away children and was generally 'needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few all the time', but he was Jack, so, um, yeah.

Tosh was a traitor - for a good cause, but she still caused harm with her actions. She paid for her mistakes though, so maybe she and Gwen are tied and I like her much better as a character, :).

Owen never redeemed himself (in my eyes). Ever. I disliked him in some ways more than I disliked Gwen and that's saying something.

And Gwen. She just bothered me literally from Day One. I wanted the show to be through Jack's eyes and when it was through hers I was seriously disappointed. It all went downhill from there, :(, mostly because there was never a good reason why Jack kept her around. She wasn't a genius, she wasn't a sniper, she wasn't a weapons expert, she wasn't expert in ANYTHING except lying to Rhys for no good reason (in the first episode, she lies about being near the murder scene - why?) and well, I have a serious issue with a woman who has a great guy at home and treats him like dirt. I'm married to a guy that Rhys reminds me of and seeing Gwen treat him like that really pissed me off.

So, um, yeah. I'm thinking that I'm actually going to have to write my own post on this and get it all out, preferably before the new series comes out and Jack comes back to Earth because of his 'unstated love for Gwen Cooper'. For serious.

I just threw up in my mouth a little.

[fiwen1010.livejournal.com]

I think Owen was redeemed by dying, but it does annoy me that he was never called up on his use of the pheremone spray except in an 'this is alien tech and you shouldn't use it' way. I also have real issues with the fact that he watched and then recorded his colleague making out with a prisoner, even before they knew that she was using pheremones to entice people into sex. But then there were so many idiot balls bouncing around in that episode that I'm tempted to write it off completely.

Gwen has the higest body count on screen, once you factor in the fact that all the deaths in Day 1 were because of her inability to throw.

Ianto was fucked up at the start of the show, and I'd give him a pass for that if nothing else. It'd be mitigating circumstances at the very least in a court of law, but he'd more likely be declared unfit to stand trial. I also have problems with describing Tanizaki as an innocent, but I don't like him.

Gwen... that scan in CoE wasn't showing a baby at all, it was showing the idiot ball embedded in her stomach. From the start she's shown as the one copper who's never heard of Torchwood, despite living in Cardiff, which is a bad start. How she managed that despite being so nosy, I have no idea. Also, she's that nosy that she must have known that Tosh was into Owen, which makes her affair with him all the crueller.

You have a Rhys at home, I have a Gwen for a best friend. Not with the cheating, but the way she insinuates herself with men, and she's done it between me and guys I liked in the past. On one notable occasion she sat between me and him, in a gap that wasn't big enough and forced me to move out of the way, and then told me that I was sending out 'go away' signals that would put him off when he went to the bar. And didn't see any problem with this situation...

So I completely believe that Gwen didn't realise what she was doing, because they never do.

Ah yes, his unstated love for Gwen Cooper. That thing he doesn't want to do by bringing Ianto back, cheapening his death? That line did it.

[teleens-journal.livejournal.com]

Eh, I know they wanted Owen to be redeemed by dying, but even then I never really felt as though he was, :(.

To me, an innocent person is one that's done nothing to make them deserve death and I think that Tanizaki qualifies

Gwen had a lot of reprehensible behavior. If, as a friend of mine said she was, she was actually RTD's self-insert, I don't think I'd ever want to be friends with RTD, lol.

I could never be friends with a woman like that. Rather, I could never *stay* friends with her.

And I agree completely about that line. It makes me want to gag every time I see it, :(.

[fiwen1010.livejournal.com]

I sort of saw Owen's death as karma - you die, you think about everything you've done, and now you have to live with that knowledge. I have another ranty ramble about selfishness and selflessness in Torchwood to do (I really need to stop doing them out loud whilst walking home from the shops. I get all sorts of funny looks), but I think that his death is an example of selfishness being punished.

Tanizaki is a weird one for me, because it depends on why he had all that knowledge. The way he looked at Lisa, I always got the idea that he was another Lumic, but a few steps behind.

Gwen is either a Mary Sue or a self-insert. Even if she isn't, the fact that he doesn't seem to see anything wrong with her actions is enough to make me judge him. I know we accept that the characters' views are not those of their creator, but when he talks about that character as a moral compass, and an essentially good person, and she's... Gwen... Ugh.

[coldwater1010.livejournal.com]

Gwen does sneak Suzie out of the Hub despite having first hand experience of her psychopathic abilities which allows her to murder her father. I do think that's a pretty deliberate and culpable act.

I can't say I'm one of Gwen's champions. Her moral superiority while doing things like retconning Rhys grates and kind of makes me wish someone would tell her to get over herself and I think her abilities and qualities are inflated far above their value on the show. (Of course I also think the hatred of her is inflated far above her crimes off it, but that's another story ),but I honestly can't see where she uses sex to advance her career. Her relationship with Jack seems more about lust and hero worship and the fact that apparently no-one, man, woman or alien, can be in Jack's orbit without finding him irresistable. The same is apparently true for Gwen and while,yes, they are both physically attractive people, really show? Her relationship with Owen again seems more about her dissatisfaction with Rhys and her,inexplicable to me at least, attraction to Owen.

Come to that I'm not sold on the idea that Ianto uses sex to advance his career either and I say this despite the fact that I think Jack mainly hires Ianto because he's attracted to him. Personally I see that as more of a Jack issue than a Ianto issue. In fact if I was going to argue about anyone using sex and their sexuality to manipulate people I think Jack's more guilty of that than anyone else. But I digress. He shows zero desire to hire Ianto until they're rolling around on the warehouse floor, but I don't really see where it's really shown that Ianto is prepared to sleep with Jack to get into Torchwood.I mean he presumably has the opportunity to do just that when they're in the warehouse knowing that every thing else he's tried has failed and yet he baulks.If anything I think Ianto's great manipulating trick is in making himself seem non-threatening. A man who gets his strapped to a ventilator cyberised girlfriend from London to Cardiff and into the Hub with nary a whiff of suspicion obviously has mad useful skillz to sell and yet he tries to win Jack's attention by wrestling weevils, making coffee and offering to clean. One thing he does seem to understand or intuit is that no-one, not even the boss, pays attention to the bloke who 'cleans up' and apparently he's right.

I'm also less bothered by Ianto's behaviour towards Jack in s1 on a personal level than I am about Gwen's treatment of Rhys largely because there's no indication of a relationship between him and Ianto beyond being colleagues and even then Ianto apparently falls low on the totem pole and while I can see why Jack might take Ianto's actions as a personal betrayal his actions aren't about hurting Jack. Rhys is supposedly someone Gwen loves,wants to build a life with?, so yeah I do kind of expect better in those circumstances. Certainly I'd like to think my partner would treat me better than that.

But I agree with you about Tosh. I wish the show had risen above the cliche of the sad lonely geek genuis and her pathetic social skills and lovelife. I thought Tosh deserved so much better and the only thing she got in the end was a "good" death scene.

[fiwen1010.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly certain that, Torchwood being the subtle show that it is, we'd know if Jack and Ianto or Jack and Gwen had been sleeping with each other.

It's also been a while since I saw Torchwood properly, so I could be reading things into it that aren't there. You're right about the moral superiority, though. She tries to throw it around when she doesn't actually have it.

[welsh-scotsman.livejournal.com]

I read your Jack metaphor thing and that is so true! You have no idea how much I could go on about it's sheer brilliance and cleverness and use of the metaphor and...oh wait, I just have but wow, that is seriously good. I love how you showed how interlinked Jack and Ianto are and how Ianto is the support but Jack's the quicksand and with Ianto using things so he doesn't have a breakdown and where you say about him telling the meltdown he's busy and to go away; I can definitely see Ianto saying that:P

I have never and probably will never see the ifrst ep of Torchwood but I didn't watch them in order anyway; I watched c of e before the others and then worked backwards so that might have affected how I see the characters but I really, really like Owen. He is a brilliant doctor as you say and that's obvious in Meat and in Countrycide and then he has caring moments in to the last man with saying he doesnt want Tosh to get hurt and then in his dead trilogy and especially his conversation with Ianto was, in my opinion, lovely especially when he was talking to the old man and the boy with leukaemia it was all just aww!!! I'm fine. And he was lovely with Diane and with Katie beforehand. Maybe he was still getting over Katie that he hated himself so wasnt up to maintaining any other relationships so treated everyone badly as that's how he thought he should be treated but that's just me analysing a ficitonal character:P

I do agree that Tosh should have had so much more screen time. She was always the one left behind or unlucky in love or whatever and she could have been brilliant:( *is sad*

Just throwing my two pence in about Ianto getting Jack to hire him because he looked pretty; I don't think so. Ianto did try to prove his usefulness with the Weevil and the coffee but I don't think he had what it takes to go all the way so to speak as the warehouse seen shows. He could have kissed Jack but he bottled it at the last moment and got upset about it which considering he knows he's got to betray this man and he has a dying girlfriend and his world has literalyl fallen apart is only natural. Poor Yantoes:( ...and Jack...and Owen...and Tosh:( I want the old team back!!!!

[fiwen1010.livejournal.com]

Thank you :D The metaphor sort of ran away from me, but I liked it so I kept it. It also made me want a tropical island. And a Ianto.

Owen became a nicer character, but he was never punished for the fact that he's an absolute creeper to start with.

Ianto definitely tried the eyecandy thing, but I don't think he would have slept with him. I also think that they were much closer before Gwen arrived in the Hub and that Ianto knew about Jack's immortality. It's that that I hate Gwen for the most.

[alex-annn.livejournal.com]

It's always nice to read something like this and know that I am not alone.

Ianto changed my life. He came along at a time when I needed to find someone to identify with, someone who was like me. Even if that person was a fictional character. Ianto gave me strength during a time when strength was hard to come by. He helped me see the value of certain aspects of my life and my work and I will be forever grateful. I am also forever grateful to GDL. Both for his role as Ianto and for being so kind as to listen to me pour my heart out to him on several occasions. He really is the sweetest guy.