fandom top 5's, pt. 1

[rm]

Top five things that would be different about Torchwood if [I] were the showrunner.

1. Solid chronology. I know that's insane in the Whoniverse, but I think Torchwood always suffered a lot from us never knowing when any event happened in relation to any other event. I've really just come to the conclusion that CoE takes place maybe a week after The Dead Line -- it's the only thing that makes sense, but I hate that we're all always left grasping around for these things. I know it rains a lot in Cardiff, but what fucking season is it?

2. More would have happened with "Ianto is a lying liar who lies" sooner. Cyberwoman was great, and letting that just sit for a while is smart. But we don't have hints of Ianto's dishonesties again except in: Fragments and From Out of the Rain, which actually just looked like a research error when it aired. We also get a sense Ianto might be a lying liar who lies because of the two different birthdays that exist for him, if you include tie-in material canon. I also always felt that the "master tailor" line felt wrong in my gut; I'm not sure why, maybe I've spent enough time on both sides of that equation that it just hit my antenna funny. But then, we never really get the confirmation of Ianto is lying liar who lies until the Debenham's moment. It's brilliant and completely re-opens the character for us. But I would have made sure it was seeded better and used it as a more significant plot point, especially since it's interesting that Ianto, the lying liar who lies, is also the only one who can bring the truth to the fore in Adam. I thought the show really wasted its possibilities on this front.

3. Play up Jack's alienness. Jack's first language isn't 20th century English, and his culture is not an earth culture. Sure he's been here a long time, and knows how to assimilate for all sorts of reasons, but we have Jack use all these awkward idioms ("the worst creatures you can imagine") and there are all these cracks about Jack's manners, and it would have been so easy with a line or two here and there, with an extra shot or two in any of the episodes that reference Boeshane, to really get the Jack is alien. I think reducing Jack being different down to either his sexuality or his immortality short-changes the character and the complexity of what Torchwood could be.

4. Have Euros Lyn direct everything. Really. He got much more nuanced performances out of Barrowman than anyone else who directs for Torchwood, and he was able to keep GDL's considerable skills focused and on target. His choices with sound and space were, I think, fantastic, and I wonder a lot about what he could have done for us in all those "monster of the week episodes."

5. Non-sexual love. This isn't about toning down the sex in Torchwood at all. This about the fact that the show is, in my opinion, at its finest in Jack's interaction with that guy that comes through the Rift on the plane. That serious, adult drama there in the conversation Jack has with him in the bar -- man to man, and more moving for Jack being queer and for it not being about that -- I would have really love to see that sort of love and affection explored in other places, including between the team (Tosh, we hardly knew you!) and being vocalized. Our culture is very "just friends" but often some of the hardest relationships are those that involve love without the expectation and recognition that comes with sex and family.

6. Yes, there's a six. I get a six, because six shouldn't even have to be on the list, but woah, less with the offensive South Asian portrayals/castings/plotlines. Torchwood is faily faily faily here, and that would not be happening if I ran the world or the show.


Top five peeves re. Deathly Hallows?

1. SNAKE BUBBLE TO THE HEAD. Really, it's not just that. It's that JKR took a narrative about outcasts and then made the popular kids into outcasts instead and threw out all the marvelous grey that was Snape's character by just making him a creepy stalker that couldn't get laid.

2. It wasn't ready for prime-time. It needed a tighter edit.

3. Remus. Tonks. Off-screen demise. WHUT?

4. Draco. Another chance for complexity in just a sentence or two thrown away.

5. One of the best moments in the book revolves around Kreacher, who explains that he did not die because his master told him not to. It's horrifying. It's brilliant (weirdly, I hate the house elves, and they get all the best moments in Deathly Hallows), but it's sort of thrown away in a mid-book bury and the people hearing the story don't even react to that part of it. There's no nice way to say this, but I felt like Book 7, in a series that's all about love, kinda proved everyone is actually a bigot, and not in a useful, teaching moment way.



Top Five Vehicles

Seriously? I don't even drive. This is hard work.

1. The Tardis.

2. An old-skool BSG Viper. Fuck yeah!

3. Okay, my favorite show when I was like eight, was Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. I don't remember what his ship was called, and I don't care, but it's going on this list, right here, right now.

4. That lovely little plane that comes through the Rift in Out of Time. Sweet.

5. The big triangular battleships in Star Wars (I am a bad geek, I don't know my terminology). There's a shot in one of the films in the first trilogy with two or three of them passing each other real close, like, it was was always breathtaking, so breathtaking to me.

Comments

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

I actually figured that the deal with Jack being human-or-not involved the Doctor's assertion, way back when it was Ecclestone, that the human race spread out and colonised the universe; for all we know, he might have been human, just not earth-human. Born on a different planet, but still genetically homo sapiens.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I've always assumed Boeshane was another planet, but with human colonizers. Language, and damn near everything else will have shifted by then though.

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

Thing is, by the time Jack came to Torchwood, he'd been living on earth for centuries, and before that, he was apparently spending a lot of time on Earth. I wonder how many centuries you have to live before you totally forget your native tongue, with no one around you can speak it with or to. I suppose those of us who can speak with people in our native language all the time and only live maybe a century at most couldn't even imagine, but it's a factor all the same.

On a totally different line of thought, part of me was going, "Well, the TARDIS' chameleon circuit imprinted some of its properties onto that spot over the Hub in "Boom Town", so maybe the Rift retained some of the TARDIS' ability to translate directly into people's heads so even if he was speaking his native language, no one would realise..." But then I realise that we hear Ianto speaking Welsh from time to time ... then, of course, I realise that the only time I ever heard him speak Welsh on the show was after the Hub blew up. Then I wonder, "What the hell kind of effect is a massive bomb detonating near the Rift manipulator going to have on the Rift?" ...Interesting times.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yup, I wonder about those things. Well, Jack comes to Earth post-Game Station in the mid 19th century. So he's been on Earth about 150 years when Torchwood the show starts. Prior to that, he was wandering around with the Time Agency, presumably spending some time on Earth, and then post Time Agency, running cons. I think though I wouldn't argue for him being on Earth for more than 160 years, pre-show, although that may well be enough time to forget native tongue -- I don't know, although it's something I think about a lot in fic. I wonder, if he practices, alone in the dark.

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

Thing is, why? Who for? Given what happened to his family, I always got the impression that there wasn't a whole lot of his home planet left when he went off to whatever schooling he went off to in order to become a Time Agent. I sort of figured that at least half the reason he never held onto things, even before the whole "I'm immortal" mess, was because he lost his home, his family and possibly his planet and that sort of thing makes everything transient.

Then there's the fact that he couldn't have practiced when he spent from 7BC to the 1800s or so buried alive, constantly resurrecting and suffocating and resurrecting again. If he hadn't forgotten by the time we started Torchwood S1, I can't imagine he'd still have the language after coming onto two millennia of constant trauma.

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

I wondered about the Rift thing too.

As to the language thing, my great grandmother lived to be a hundred. They spoke German at home when she was a child and she was originally bilingual. (She was born in 1888) Then WWI and II happened and during and after both of them it was unwise to speak it. My grandmother and mother only retained a few sentences. My Gran had lost most of her German by the time she was 90, with most of what was left being simple conversational phrases. I'm guessing about a century or so, as a result, but obviously there is no way to prove it.