Procrastinating Gala Bitches about Torchwood part 2

[galadriel1010]

Gwen
It couldn't really start with anyone else, could it? Poor lass. It's no secret that I don't like Gwen, but I try to like her, I really do. It just doesn't work. I think Gwen is so disliked for three reasons:

Audience surrogate
Gwen was our introduction to Torchwood. She's the one we met and identified with, because she was like us and having her eyes opened to a whole new world. Unfortunately, the pushy, slightly clumsy and clueless companion is not who we want to be. Really, did anyone want to be the girl on the TARDIS asking "what does that mean, Doctor?" every episode? Of course not. They wanted to be the Brigadier, or Jamie, or Jack. Recent female companions in Doctor Who have managed to buck the trend and be both the information dump receptacle, and bring something of their own as well. Gwen and, I think, Rose never really managed this. They have nothing to offer other than their enthusiasm and curiosity. And for the character we identify with to be that one... sorry dears, but I alwys wanted to be Jack, Mickey or Ianto, who'd been around and knew what they were doing. And didn't need to be rescued all the time.

On top of this, she is a very good character and a very fleshed out character, but we judge her as we would judge ourselves. If you can identify with her and say 'that could be me', then you're going to look on her more harshly if she does something that you don't want to consider doing yourself. It starts badly, to be honest. Jack's just come back to life and seen his friend shoot herself in the head because she's a mass murderer who got found out, and the first thing Gwen says is "I remember". That's nice, dear. Here, I'll help you forget again. And the lying to Rhys and nosiness that started in the very first episode. Couldn't investigating Torchwood have waited until she wasn't concussed and didn't have to lie to him about where she was going?

So the show set us up with this character who we were supposed to identify with who is shown to be fairly lacking in empathy, a liar who seems to have done it before, nosy and meddlesome, and not particularly good at it. I'll start shopping around for a better character to identify with, thanks.

Main character
She's the main character. The show was supposed to be all about her, but the BBC wouldn't let RTD do it until he proposed this new idea with John Barrowman in it. Gwen remained the main character, but shared the limelight with Jack. And, well, Jack's just prettier. And we already identified with him and, by and large, were at least a little bit in love with him. She took screentime away from Jack, who we were watching for.
And then Ianto came along, and he's prettier than her as well, and he and Jack make such a very lovely picture. And Gwen kept stealing time when they could be kissing. Literally, in Adrift. Yeah, I know Torchwood wasn't about boys kissing but... Meh

Purpose, or lack thereof
She has no specialist skills. She put together the profile on Carys in Day One, which could have been a crowning moment, but it was Tosh who eventually got the information they needed to catch her and Owen who knew what it meant. What is Gwen's purpose there? Extra field agent (who had to be taught to wield a gun and couldn't do any of the research), conscience (who seemed to be only casually acquainted with her own), researcher (who isn't as good at it as either the archivist or the technician)... or is she just there to challenge the others and poke her nose in where it's not welcome? Yeah, they needed someone to do that, but it's a pretty shitty job description, and could have done with a more sensitive touch most of the time.

Tl;dr: We identified with her in the wrong way and couldn't see the point of her.

Jack
If you're not at least a little bit in love with Jack, I think you've misplaced your heart. For starters, that smile could turn the butchest lesbian (but would be more successful if he didn't know it) is a work of art on a par with the Aston Martin DB9 (I'm not the only one who'd marry that car, right?), and then he's so tortured and hurting and vulnerable and still a hero. He's everyone's Prince Charming.
But he's seen as promiscuous and slutty, which is a reather horrible case of slut shaming, as he's spread his sexual exploits out over more than a century anyway, and the only character he's slept with in recent years is Ianto. (If he'd slept with anyone else we'd know about it; Torchwood was not subtle about that. There would have been a hideous blow-up in the Hub). But interviews tell us that he sleeps around, and who are we to argue with them?
Usually first in line, actually.
Jack has allowed a lot more people to be sex positive, but there's still a layer of prudish slut shaming which seems to deny him emotions and connections.

But he's still our leader, and we will still follow him anywhere. We admire him for making the hard decisions and keeping us safe. He's also the last surviving WW1 veteran by now, and the sacrifices he's made to keep us safe are worthy of our respect.
(Yes, I know he didn't actually fight in the war. But he doesn't actually protect us from aliens either)

Ianto
He looks good in a suit. He's also adorably protectable, but will never actually need our protection, very damaged and stil going. He survived things no one should have to, and he gets up and goes on again.
He's also a fantastic role model for bisexual youth, taps into our love of the secret service image that creates our love for James Bond, and gets the guy we all want.
Of course we identify with him, he gets to shag Jack Harkness.
And the only mistake he makes is trying to save the woman he loves whilst everyone around him ignores that he exists, not long after he survived the Battle of Canary Wharf. It's sort of hard not to hate Jack for letting him down.
Even in End of Days, when Lisa appears to him to get him to open the Rift, she doesn't tell him that he'll get her back. She tells him that people will die if he doesn't do it - no promise of her return, just an instruction to keep people safe.
Did I mention that he's pretty?

Tosh
Poor Tosh. It's sort of hard to identify with her. She's quiet and closed off, intelligent beyond most of our capacities for understanding (unless you believe the Torchwood Archives' estimate of her IQ, in which case she wouldn't get into MENSA. As flattering as that statistic was for me, there is no way I'm brighter than Tosh. I am a glowworm to her lava lamp. Or something).
Very good at her job, totally ignored. And pining over Owen, which makes you wonder if she has any sense at all.
But it's hard to identify with computers, and she never got to be much more than an extension of Mainframe.

Owen
Rapist, bully, arrogant arse. At least we can't say that he went from bad to worse, because he couldn't get much worse. Out of all the team, owen is the one I really, really wouldn't want to work with, because I'd just be waiting for him to turn on me. Possibly this is why people like him more than Gwen, because they recognise the bully in him and don't want to get on his bad side.

So there is Galadriel's theories on attatchement to the Torchwood characters. Agree, disagree, seen something I missed? I was trying to work out why so many people dislike Gwen, sort of looking for validity in my dislike, and ended up looking at all of them.

Comments

[silver_sun]

Gwen.
I think the biggest problem comes down to the fact that she's a normal flawed human being who we're constantly told in the show to believe is the best person ever. And generally people don't like to be told what to think – so the more we're told she wonderful the more people rebel against it.

I don't mind her as a character, I wouldn't say she's my favourite, and often I find it hard to understand where she's coming from unless I really think about it.

Gwen appears through much of the series to have no accountability for her actions seemingly based on the fact that she's Gwen and therefore perfect as she is. Which is a shame, action, reaction and character development is good for all characters, especially main ones who get a lot of screen time.

So the thing that a lot of the time stopped when Gwen being as awesome as she could have been was the writers telling us that she was without ever giving her something on screen that showed it.


Owen.
Having read interviews at the time with the show runners saying that it - the pheromone spray - wasn't supposed to be seen like that, it was supposed to be seen kind of like the impulse and lynx bodyspray adverts where girl/guy sprays themselves and then becomes irresistible to everyone, I have admit I've put a lot of it down to very poor writing. I mean seriously if they wanted it to seem like the advert have a shot of him putting on the spray and then going out to a club and picking somebody up – yes it's still decidely skeevy, but it doesn't carry the same inference as him using the spray to change somebody's mind after they've said no, as there is the possibility that they could have said even if he hadn't been wearing the spray.

Oddly I get more where Owen is coming from, his background making him who he is, than any of the other characters. His anger at the world that he feels owes him something, his relationship with Jack (Looking to Jack as almost some kind of father figure (the father he didn't have) and hurt and anger when Jack can't live up to what Owen's built him up to be in his mind by the end of series one.). His attitude towards women, which seems to veer between hopeless adoration and seeming to see than as little more than sex objects, being perhaps in part due to his relationship with his mother. Arrogance born of self reliance from too young an age, and fear of allowing himself to rely on others.

None of this excuses his behaviour which is often objectionable, but it gives it some kind of context.

Perhaps the oddest thing to me was that almost nobody seemed to see Owen's family issues, his mother and his background seemed painfully obvious to me even in series one, long before we got the reveal of this stuff in S2. I guess maybe that's because in Owen past I can see some of my own.

[coldwater1010.livejournal.com]

I think the show was kind of dumb with whole Owen spray thing.I don't really get how it never even occurred to them that the Owen spray scenes as played out might be considered non-con.I suspect they were being someone disingenuous to be honest. But even without that I found Owen pretty unpleasant especially in his behaviour towards Tosh in s1. He was always so particularly nasty towards her for no other reason than the fact that she had the poor taste to find him attractive. And her just taking it when she didn't even deserve it just made her seem pathetic and since I liked her I started to feel resentful on her behalf. I agree he had the most growth on the show though. At least in s2 I could somewhat understand why people might want to still hang around him despite his bouts of arsiness.

Gwen I can take or leave. She always worked better for me as part of the ensemble than as a focal character and I always found her a bit too sanctimonious and hypocritical for someone who wasn't above crossing the line when it suited her ends. But I tend to think she means well most of the time, but the show just tried to hard with her and I think it kind of backfired.Plus in order to keep her our point of reference character they often ended up making her seem kind of dumb.

Jack. I go back and forth with him. I think I should find him far more fascinating than I actually do on the show. He has all the hallmarks of a fascinating, complex character and yet more and more I just find him kind of ugh. I don't think it's really his fault though. I just find the writing for him increasingly problematic.

[fiwen1010.livejournal.com]

Torchwood would have worked better as more of a team show with a more even distribution of points of view. Then Gwen wouldn't have been the one asking the questions all the time, and she wouldn't have come across as being in permanent posession of the idiot ball, and a pushy, hypocritical cow at the same tiem. Alternatively, they could have pushed her juuust a little bit further and made her into a super awesome uberbitch, and the show would have taken an awesome turn for the darker.

Jack is afflicted with that problem that faces most of the Torchwood characters - there's no character bible, so everyone interprets them differently. And I don't think anyone really knows how to deal with Jack anyway. We seem to see him as a much more rounded character than he actually is.

[fiwen1010.livejournal.com]

Yes, definitely agree with you on Gwen. The writers could have done with heeding their teachers: "You make your statement, then you prove it. A statement without proof is half a mark at best."

I always assumed that there was a reason that Owen was a jerk, but I couldn't work out what it was. I actually assumed that he was constantly hungover for a while.

And the pheremone spray... yeah, they could have done it so much better. I love the Lynx adverts for their idiocy. Especially the one where he sprays himself and is suddenly just as lanky and gawky, but in his underwear.