thinky thoughts about Buffy & CoE

[rm]

Right, so in the great Buffy watchathon, we just watched "Passion," which actually makes me want to talk about Children of Earth.



So in Buffy, a main character's romantic interest dies, and it's fucking awful, and he hares off alone to deal with it, and then his friends come after them and he tries to push them away and they say "No."

Whereas in Torchwood the wounded man gets away.

Of course, there's no real way to stop Jack from getting away and his wounds are more significant (that whole thing with Stephen), but there are similarities:

- romantic loss
- of a romance where chances have been wasted
- sex deferred
- involving a surviving party who arguably had tried not to get involved.

Here's the thing, I think "Passion" works marvelously. And, in the way it resolves, there's this balm -- not of healing, but of this sense of enduring and healing (of course, the graveside moment helps).

In CoE, which I also thinks works marvelously, there is no balm to speak of, and the thought of Jack's endurance is nausea-inducing, because it seems as if this moment will be forever.

It's much easier for me to understand now, having seen "Passion," why and how people are so angry with how CoE was handled (although I also understand that that's about a whole slew of other things too in various combinations, I'm just looking at this one little sliver).

And yet, for me and my interests (narratively and emotionally and academically), the Buffy episode actually speaks to why CoE _also_ works for me.

It is, as Angel says in that voiceover that somehow manages to work by the skin of its teeth (it wouldn't without the death, just the way the slo-mo stuff in Day 4 wouldn't without Ianto's death), about "the ecstasy of grief."

Ecstasy, of course, is the key word. It's exactly right. God, I _hated_ how I fetl in the immediate aftermath of Day 4, but it was also amazing. I remember it, and the thought of watching the episode again (which I must for scholarly reasons) makes me tense with misery, but that crystal, perfect moment of the initial experience of it was so pure and bright and just vivid. It was like, biting into an orange, I guess. At least in recollection, in the sense of the arc of emotional sensation for me. Anyway....

"The ecstasy of grief." That's the key really. We can't fuck these people. But we can mourn them. And when the property doesn't (among other things); we do.

This, mostly written down so it wends its way into my Bristol paper.

Comments

[sahiya.livejournal.com]

People are critical of the little things, I think, because they don't like the big things. I'm much less inclined to nitpick Moffat's scripts, for example, because I like what he does overall. I don't like RTD's big picture, so the little things annoy me more, too.

What was interesting to me were the bits about the trouble Day 5 gave him. Honestly, it sounds like he had way too much going on at the time and none of it got his full and proper attention. Would him having more time for the script have saved Ianto? Probably not. But it might've meant a better send off and less craptastic end to the serial.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

People are critical of the little things, I think, because they don't like the big things.

Yeah, I think this is true. I know that with most of RTD's work, I don't give a crap about plot holes, etc, because I enjoy the story anyway. With CoE, however, the plot holes annoy the shit out of me, because I don't like where he went with the story -- in that he was trying to make Torchwood all SRS BZNS, even though it had just as many flaws as S1 and S2.

The thing that gets me about Day 5, along with the comments that I made earlier (and then deleted) about Steven not having enough emotional resonance with the audience, particularly after Ianto's death, is how they basically pull a solution out of their asses, and then, of course, RTD tries to claim that Ianto's death was a necessary part of that solution (an argument that I find wholly unconvincing).

[sahiya.livejournal.com]

Yes, I imagine that he wanted Ianto's death to be part of that solution, but Day 5 was this huge gaping hole (or so it appears from what I read at BtS) and it just didn't come out the way he wanted it to.

*sigh* I think I just like tight scripts that make sense and RTD's are - by his own admission - not that.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

See, if Ianto had actually sacrificed his life to save someone -- even just one person -- I think I could have eventually reconciled myself to it. Especially if it had been something like, if Ianto had been able to save all the other people in Thames house be re-routing the virus to Floor 13, which then went into lockdown -- I'm sure I would have still been really upset, but it would have felt more appropriate for his character.

Or, better yet, if Jack had had to somehow kill Ianto, rather than Steven (or maybe both of them) in order to destroy the 456 -- and Ianto forced him to do it (after some adequate relationship development, which we never got) -- that would have been powerful, and I think that I eventually would have liked it.

[sahiya.livejournal.com]

I like both of those ideas. The latter, in particular, might have ended with Jack in the same place psychologically as we get him at the end of Day 5, but without the sense of nihilism that so many people found so unbearable.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think that if Ianto's death had been meaningful and compellingly necessary in a Watsonian sense it wouldn't have seemed so bleak. (Though honestly I think that there would have been ways of getting Jack to that point psychologically without killing Ianto at all -- for instance, if Ianto had HELPED Jack kill Steven. However, if Ianto did have to die for whatever reason, there were been better, more satisfying ways of doing it.)

[miss-jutta.livejournal.com]

Or if the available kid had been one of Ianto's nephews? Can't think of a more extreme way to end that relationship.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

That would have been great.