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cherryNow, I'm going to say right off the bat that I don't meta much. This is readily self-apparent.
With that out of the way: I'd like to talk about Jack Harkness for a bit.
Included are specific spoilers for S1 and S2 of Doctor Who, and a bit of vagueness for aired S3. Brief reference to That Utopia Clip JB showed on Jonathon Ross a few weeks back, and mention of trailer tidbits, and speculation for Utopia.
Things I wish for this week's Who:
Jack's return not to be All About Rose. I wonder how the 'Rip open the dimension walls and go get Rose' people would have responded if her send off was being sent on a suicide mission and then never mentioned again, even when it would have made actual sense for those remaining to do so. ("We're on a spaceship from the 51st century! Hrm, 51st century, 51st century, rings some sort of bell. Didn't we used to be quite fond of someone from around then? ... Naaah.")
When it looked like there was going to be no emotional continuity at all in S2, I could grudgingly accept Never Mentioning Jack. It made them look horrible, but it was internally consistent. Given the time spent on missing Rose in S3, though, it really, really rankles.
I want very much for there to be an exchange that goes something like this:
Jack: Rose?
Doctor: Off with her mother, ridiculously rich father, new baby sister, canonical boyfriend, and his almost-canonical boyfriend. Oh, and she's helping run Alt!Torchwood.
Jack: Good for her. I`m running Torchwood 3 myself.
Doctor: OMG TRAITOR.
Martha: Wait. You sent him on a suicide mission so that you could complete a task you chickened out on, he died, you left him where he fell, on a space station full of corpses, and it's ROSE you think you've done poorly by?
Something that started to bother me, even before S2 started, was that Jack seemed to be little more in love with the Doctor (and Rose, to some extent) than they were with him. There was an emotional imbalance there that pushed all the wrong buttons -- Jack gets in on the fun, happy times, but when the chips are down it rather seems he's disposable. This just made the look on Jack's face when he watched the TARDIS dematerialize a bit more traumatizing.
I think it's easy to forget that the Doctor was originally going to leave Jack to die. At the end of TDD, the Doctor is going to let Jack fly off with the bomb in stasis to sacrifice himself: without Rose's input , I'm pretty sure the Doctor would have just skipped merrily along through time.
Now, I think the case can be made that Nine was incapable of loving Jack. There's a whole can of worms that I could get into about Nine, and his PTSD self, but I'm only going to touch on it. To me, Nine isn't really the Doctor. He's a highly traumatized man playing at being the person he thinks he used to be. His moral compass is completely gone, and he needs someone to ask the most basic humanitarian questions. His willingness to sacrifice the world for one girl is deeply troubling, but in character. He's lost touch, and is largely incapable of perspective, as we see when he decided that dead earth + daleks + his not killinating > dead earth + no daleks + his killinating.
I can see the Rose and Nine dynamic, and I understand how it works. Jack is a bit of an outlier in this case. One of the things that always confused me most about fandom was the 'nice' Jack faction -- Jack is many things, but 'nice' is not one of them. I was hoping that, if nothing else, TW would have cured people of this particular quirk. This seems to have failed.
I think that TW has highlighted something else -- DW!Jack was someone Jack was playing at being. Now, we could just call it shoddy characterization differentiated by two different intended viewing audiences, but I rather think that the Jack we saw with Rose and Nine was someone Jack wanted to be. It was a chance leave behind a bit of the darkness, some of his past. Jack is a soldier, and he knows war, and chances are pretty good he's committed some atrocities. I don't think they haunt him ceaselessly -- I think he's worked through a decent amount of it. He's very capable of doing what he needs to do. When it comes right down to it, Jack understands things, Jack is things, that Nine isn't prepared to deal with.
Jack is in love with Nine, but Nine doesn't have enough of a sense of self to *really* be in love with anyone, I think. It's part of why I don't buy anyone's perfect love helping to redeem him.
I don't know how the Ten/Jack dynamic is going to work. I don't know if they're going to address any of this. The Doctor taking off from Cardiff, when he sees Jack running and calling his name? Does not bode well. I'm not sure how they're going to address all of this without making the Doctor look like (even more of a) heartless bastard. I'm worried he's going to resent Jack for being the one who gets to live.
In my mind, I'm fanwanking it so that the reason we're getting so much emo from Ten over Rose is that she's the safe one to miss. She's fine. She has the potential to be so much better than fine. She's not dead on the Game Station, she wasn't mindwiped and sent back to her time, she didn't have the fabric of her being unravelled until she'd no longer existed at all. She didn't die because of him, and he didn't kill her (like, say, his entire family) in a war. The only way that it works for me is if he's using her memory like methadone to distract from his real pain -- much like her presence in S2 enabled him to carry on care-free.
Now, this time tomorrow, we should have a fair deal more information, and this entire post might be obsolete. I feel that these are things that were worth saying, though.
In conclusion: JACK!
With that out of the way: I'd like to talk about Jack Harkness for a bit.
Included are specific spoilers for S1 and S2 of Doctor Who, and a bit of vagueness for aired S3. Brief reference to That Utopia Clip JB showed on Jonathon Ross a few weeks back, and mention of trailer tidbits, and speculation for Utopia.
Things I wish for this week's Who:
Jack's return not to be All About Rose. I wonder how the 'Rip open the dimension walls and go get Rose' people would have responded if her send off was being sent on a suicide mission and then never mentioned again, even when it would have made actual sense for those remaining to do so. ("We're on a spaceship from the 51st century! Hrm, 51st century, 51st century, rings some sort of bell. Didn't we used to be quite fond of someone from around then? ... Naaah.")
When it looked like there was going to be no emotional continuity at all in S2, I could grudgingly accept Never Mentioning Jack. It made them look horrible, but it was internally consistent. Given the time spent on missing Rose in S3, though, it really, really rankles.
I want very much for there to be an exchange that goes something like this:
Jack: Rose?
Doctor: Off with her mother, ridiculously rich father, new baby sister, canonical boyfriend, and his almost-canonical boyfriend. Oh, and she's helping run Alt!Torchwood.
Jack: Good for her. I`m running Torchwood 3 myself.
Doctor: OMG TRAITOR.
Martha: Wait. You sent him on a suicide mission so that you could complete a task you chickened out on, he died, you left him where he fell, on a space station full of corpses, and it's ROSE you think you've done poorly by?
Something that started to bother me, even before S2 started, was that Jack seemed to be little more in love with the Doctor (and Rose, to some extent) than they were with him. There was an emotional imbalance there that pushed all the wrong buttons -- Jack gets in on the fun, happy times, but when the chips are down it rather seems he's disposable. This just made the look on Jack's face when he watched the TARDIS dematerialize a bit more traumatizing.
I think it's easy to forget that the Doctor was originally going to leave Jack to die. At the end of TDD, the Doctor is going to let Jack fly off with the bomb in stasis to sacrifice himself: without Rose's input , I'm pretty sure the Doctor would have just skipped merrily along through time.
Now, I think the case can be made that Nine was incapable of loving Jack. There's a whole can of worms that I could get into about Nine, and his PTSD self, but I'm only going to touch on it. To me, Nine isn't really the Doctor. He's a highly traumatized man playing at being the person he thinks he used to be. His moral compass is completely gone, and he needs someone to ask the most basic humanitarian questions. His willingness to sacrifice the world for one girl is deeply troubling, but in character. He's lost touch, and is largely incapable of perspective, as we see when he decided that dead earth + daleks + his not killinating > dead earth + no daleks + his killinating.
I can see the Rose and Nine dynamic, and I understand how it works. Jack is a bit of an outlier in this case. One of the things that always confused me most about fandom was the 'nice' Jack faction -- Jack is many things, but 'nice' is not one of them. I was hoping that, if nothing else, TW would have cured people of this particular quirk. This seems to have failed.
I think that TW has highlighted something else -- DW!Jack was someone Jack was playing at being. Now, we could just call it shoddy characterization differentiated by two different intended viewing audiences, but I rather think that the Jack we saw with Rose and Nine was someone Jack wanted to be. It was a chance leave behind a bit of the darkness, some of his past. Jack is a soldier, and he knows war, and chances are pretty good he's committed some atrocities. I don't think they haunt him ceaselessly -- I think he's worked through a decent amount of it. He's very capable of doing what he needs to do. When it comes right down to it, Jack understands things, Jack is things, that Nine isn't prepared to deal with.
Jack is in love with Nine, but Nine doesn't have enough of a sense of self to *really* be in love with anyone, I think. It's part of why I don't buy anyone's perfect love helping to redeem him.
I don't know how the Ten/Jack dynamic is going to work. I don't know if they're going to address any of this. The Doctor taking off from Cardiff, when he sees Jack running and calling his name? Does not bode well. I'm not sure how they're going to address all of this without making the Doctor look like (even more of a) heartless bastard. I'm worried he's going to resent Jack for being the one who gets to live.
In my mind, I'm fanwanking it so that the reason we're getting so much emo from Ten over Rose is that she's the safe one to miss. She's fine. She has the potential to be so much better than fine. She's not dead on the Game Station, she wasn't mindwiped and sent back to her time, she didn't have the fabric of her being unravelled until she'd no longer existed at all. She didn't die because of him, and he didn't kill her (like, say, his entire family) in a war. The only way that it works for me is if he's using her memory like methadone to distract from his real pain -- much like her presence in S2 enabled him to carry on care-free.
Now, this time tomorrow, we should have a fair deal more information, and this entire post might be obsolete. I feel that these are things that were worth saying, though.
In conclusion: JACK!
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-16 05:21 am (UTC)Now, I actually don't want to believe that the Doctor abandoned Jack for no reason. Nine was not that much of a dick. I bet that there is some kind of time-paradox dealy , and the Doctor knew that Jack had to be left behind so he could save the Earth in the 21st century. Maybe some future version of Jack told the Doctor to abandon him on. I also suspect that Jack or someone who cares for him is responsible for his brainwipe.
But, yeah, I have ridiculously high hopes for the last three eps of the season. Between Johns Sim and Barrowman, I have a lot to be excited about.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-16 03:41 pm (UTC)I would like very much for there to be a logical explanation to the Doctor leaving Jack. I am virtually certain we will be offered one, but it doesn't really negate the fact that he did die (even though he got better), and it doesn't explain why neither of them ever mentioned him again. Unless, of course, we are to assume that they talked about him off screen, at the same time Rose was talking about when she became the Bad Wolf.
My favourite crack theory about Jack's two years is that he was involved in the Time War. My second is that he wiped his own memory.
I am rather filled with squee at the promise of the rest of the season. Jack's back, which I have been waiting for, and I adore Simm and Life on Mars. RTD is writing the final three episodes, and his eps aren't always my favorite, but it sounds like there's a fabulous amount of good material to work with. This gives me hope.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-16 03:52 pm (UTC)and
I think that TW has highlighted something else -- DW!Jack was someone Jack was playing at being. Now, we could just call it shoddy characterization differentiated by two different intended viewing audiences, but I rather think that the Jack we saw with Rose and Nine was someone Jack wanted to be.
make SO MUCH SENSE that I realize I have been sort of thinking them but just couldn't put such brilliant words to it. GOD, I love this kind of parallelism, when it just clicks into place--U R SO JENIUS :D
and yeah, I think--you could write some disturbingly plausible darkfic with Ten and Jack doing rather dreadful things. I think more than anything I'm interested in seeing how Jack reacts to the Doctor's changes--because in some ways, the Doctor has *become* the person who Nine frowned on Jack for being--the person that Jack tried to, or let himself pretend to, leave behind for the Doctor's approval. So...that will be tangled. *siiigh* WANT WANT NOW.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-17 01:20 am (UTC)I don't know if you've seen Utopia, but it was fabulous. I'm just sad that there are only two eps left, and there likely won't be much downtime.
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