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

[spybarbie.livejournal.com]

I think that the biggest tragedy in the Harry Potter series is that JKR crafted all of this brilliant characters and then let many of them go to waste - namely, one Severus Snape.

Kreacher? I hadn't noticed that so far, I think I'm going to have to go take a look at that part now because that, right there, is fascinatingly creepy.

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

Re: 'what fucking season is it?' ... it's the UK. You really cannot tell by looking. We don't have "sun in summer, snow in winter" seasons here. Cityscapes don't have a lot of trees so it's hard to tell that way, and costume designers are focused more on a look than dressing for weather. Seriously, unless you can feel the temperature it is outside or see trees anywhere, you cannot tell what season it is in the UK (except maybe Scotland, where it still actually snows more than once a year) by looking. They could maybe have fit it into the dialogue, but I guess they figured 'a time of year when kids are in school' was enough.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Mostly, I just want relational time -- one of the problems with Torchwood is we never see impact from events that transpire -- well, if we knew it was 3 months since the last episode or whatever -- it would help a lot.

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I get that. Though to be fair to the writers, it's pretty awkward to pin that down in dialogue if you can't show it in weather (which it'd be hard to do anyway, given that a shooting schedule in no way has to match a TV show's timeline).

[rm.livejournal.com]

This is all true. Mostly it's a desire to have had more through-line during Torchwood's Monster of the Week seasons.

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

3. Play up Jack's alienness. Jack's first language isn't 20th century English, and his culture is not an earth culture.

You know that moment in Day Two when Jack is chained to the wall and yelling, “Face me like a man”? The part of my brain that wasn’t busy admiring the view was thinking, You, sir, have spent too much in the twentieth century. Because come on, “Face me like a man” — as opposed to what, a woman? FAIL. What happened to my enlightened fifty-first-century guy?

The big triangular battleships in Star Wars

I’m guessing you mean the Star Destroyers. I always wanted an X-wing, myself. Or the Millennium Falcon — variable artificial gravity orientation FTW!

Confession time: I have not yet read Deathly Hallows (don’t worry, I’m already pretty much spoiled for the megillah), and now I don’t know that I’m going to enjoy it very much

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

The real problem, I think, is that Torchwood has never had a coherent narrative line, which is something we've come to expect in the 21st century. In earlier decades showrunners could get away with a smattering of events that kept being referred to, but now I think viewers expect a show Bible pulls it all together and guides the individual scriptwriters. I think that's a big part of what Joss Whedon brought to the genre with Buffy. I often find myself wondering, when reading a series, at what point an author (or showrunner) decided something major was going to happen. Did they know at the beginning of season 1 that Ianto's father worked for Debenham's but he didn't want to admit it, or did they decide that mid-season 2, or when writing season 3? The best series set it up from the start, or near the start.

[snakeling]

You, sir, have spent too much in the twentieth century.
Dude, the wife comment, in his conversation with Hart? Not on, not on. And I could believe that Jack has assimilated, given that he's lived in linear time from 1869 on, but the fact that it didn't throw Hart leads me to believe that the 51st century is less enlightened than we're supposed to believe it is.

[svollga.livejournal.com]

Torchwood #4 - yes, yes, thousand times yes! Visual is my main channel of perception, and CoE, as well as everything he did in DW, forces me to watch-watch-watch, never looking away.

Jack being alien - it's an interesting point. On one hand, the language thing goes somehow unnoticed (even in fanfiction, Ianto is always talking Welsh in bed, why Jack never says a word in his native tongue?) On the other hand, I think Jack integrated most of the Earth culture during 140 years he was living throught it. He's more Earthian now that Boeshanian, I suppose. Thought I'd love to see some hints of 51-st century culture, not only 'sexual freedom' one.

[taffimai.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Euros doing the Space Whale episode would have been really interesting.

[nicoli-dominn.livejournal.com]

I definitely agree that Rowling didn't let her characters live up to their full potential, and that Draco, Severus and Kreacher were among them. She spent far too much time analyzing and developing the "heroes" of the story, whether they were Dumbledore or Harry and his gang. She could have focused a lot more on the supposedly "evil" or "creepy" characters and shown that not all of their actions were selfish or malicious, that sometimes even good people can do bad things or vice versa, and not for simple reasons.

I think Severus is far more complex than a sociopath with unrequited love issues. That Rowling dumbed him down so much was insulting to his character, and I never bought the whole idea about his joining the Death Eaters just because they were nice to him, or making moral decisions based on his selfish feelings for Lily. Snape is smarter than that, and capable of far more complex emotion, as Rowling used to show her readers in past books.

I found myself wishing that Snape and Harry had had a chance to talk before Rowling killed the guy off. I'm not sure what they would have said, but I'm sure it would have been far more interesting and significant than Snape's pensieve. And as for Draco, the fact that he faded into the background almost immediately after the focus on him throughout book six was ridiculous. He could have been a lynchpin in the story, and could have shaped a much better plot in book seven.

Oh, yeah, and the "off-screen" kill of Remus and Tonks reminded me all to much of the fact that when Sirius died in book five, I didn't even notice until TWO CHAPTERS LATER. Rowling did a great job with Fred's death scene, but she has a habit of not giving enough importance to death scenes involving characters Harry cares just as much about.

[wordswoman.livejournal.com]

Kreacher always brought to mind for me a child raised by KKK members--seething with hatred and bigotry that's as natural for him as knowing fairytales is for a normal kid.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

Wow, it says something about what an exasparating book Deathly Hallows was that her treatment of Slytherin (one student panicked because of *Voldemort*- that's it, everybody out of the pool!) didn't make the top 5 (and mind you, I agree with all your choices. Fully listing Book 7's irritations would be... Book 8.)

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

Well, (1) since Hart is a fellow (ex-)Time Agent I figured they would have been taught in past eras’ gender roles and appropriate behavior so they could pass, and thus could and would joke about such things; and (2), do we know for certain if Hart is also from the 51st century?

But yeah, it could be I’m letting my own hopes for the future color my expectations.

[woogledesigns.livejournal.com]

, 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.

What's this one about?

[rm.livejournal.com]

For a country with a visible and significant South Asian minority, it seems a little fucked up that the only South Asians on Torchwood are invariably villains (Suzie, Rupesh, the random guy in CoE helping get kids onto buses -- I think there are more, but I've forgotten the others). India and Pakistan both feature in sub-plots in the show and in tie-in materials in really unnecessary negative ways as well.

[woogledesigns.livejournal.com]

I was going to say it's Wales- its the cold, rainy season. Actually, this last week has been unrelentingly sunny up here in Chester. Are you British, then?

[thessalian.livejournal.com]

I am, I'm currently a bit north of London. We've had mixed weather, but to be fair, if the temperature wasn't gaugable, I'd have a hard time determining whether it was summer or winter or autumn or what.

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

Hee! There’s a TW fanfic that makes the lack of seasons in Wales a plot point — Ianto gets caught in a time warp and doesn’t realize that he’s been missing for several months, because the weather feels the same as when he left.

[woogledesigns.livejournal.com]

a visible and significant South Asian minority

I'm not going to dispute that (I'm hardly going to say that people with South Asian families or heritage in Wales are insignificant or invisible) but I do wonder where, as a New Yorker, you get that from.

I think it's hard to say if Suzie was South Asian: her surname- Costello- was Irish. If she was then the implied abuse by her father that produced her nihilism might be read as a broaching of the topic of hidden abuse among South Asian families and communities in the UK, which is a difficult and thorny issue in contemporary British culture.

With the reduction of the TW crew to three, and now two, white Anglo-American people a more ethically diverse cast might be a very good thing, but that requires hard work to avoid tokenism or stereotyping. Tosh, after all, was the scrupulous, conservative computer pro, and of course was Asian.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Among other things, see icon; my co-writer is Bengali (well, I mean, she's from New York, but she's lived in India and has lots of family there and spends time there and so forth).

We still can't figure out _what_ was going on with the Suzie casting. Indira Varma plays arguably non-Indian characters a lot (see ROME, but that's another case of non-clarity... so maybe; they did do a reasonably good job of trying to get the very multi-ethnic look of the emerging empire in in that show), and "Costello"... as you say. The hidden abuse thing is interesting, I think since we're not actually British (although she has a lot of family in Britain and spends time there) that probably didn't factor into our "huh, what?" line of reasoning, but it's a good point.

And the issue isn't about having leads on the show who are South Asian. The issue is not having them be so many random villains, or every mention about India or Pakistan being about how supposedly fucking awful those places are. Golden Age, one of the radio plays, tried to address its own colonialism issues and then sort of failed but then sort of made sense in light of some of the issues in CoE, and it just sorta left me wanting more clarity and care; it's something I wind up feeling like I have to clean-up after in fanfiction a lot.

[woogledesigns.livejournal.com]

I think the only person who can really comment on the significance, visibility acculturation and self-definition as a minority of South Asian people in Wales is a South Asian Welsh person. And since you can only supply a South Asian and I can only supply a Welsh person the point remains obscured, but it is tangential anyway.

The bigger question is just how do you increase visibility of Ethnic Minority characters on TV shows. If 8.4% of all People in Cardiff are non white should one in ten people with lines be non white- and of them apportion one half to be non-white Asian http://83.137.212.42/sitearchive/eoc/PDF/ethnic_minorities_in_wales.pdf?page=17399 ? Do you deliberately ignore real world demographics- and if you do that are you automatically engaging in tokenism? If real world economics and social inequalities generally limit people from certain ethic backgrounds to certain types of job are you compromising the believability of your characters by putting them in situations or occupations they wouldn't likely have the opportunity to enjoy in real life? As a writing team how do you answer all those questions, if I can ask?

[woogledesigns.livejournal.com]

This I when I never leave the house without an umbrella in my bag. I had a polka dot umbrella but it went the usual way to the umbrella afterlife - I left it on a train.

Now I have a purple one. I miss the polka dots but, still yey purple :)

[exbentley]

This may just be a typo, but... Isn't it "the worst creatures you can imagine"? And I sort of thought Boeshane was a place in 51st Century Earth; 3000 years means brighter sun, different plantlife, different names & culture. The world could change a lot in 3000 years.

I love that the TARDIS tops your list.

[rm.livejournal.com]

It's a typo. thanks, I'll fix.