thinky thoughts about Buffy & CoE
Feb. 7th, 2010 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmRight, 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.
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 08:28 am (UTC)What I got from watching the deaths in Buffy was.. I don't know.. a feeling that we aren't all alone, that we all hurt and we all go through things that are pointless and awful and yet we keep going. We mourn, we make mistakes and we have shitloads of trouble trying to get over loss. I find Buffy treats 'love' in almost the same way, breakups also. The thing that's different I guess is that when those people died, it was to showcase those things. To move story or character or audience.
But with none of them did I feel the way I felt after Day 4 of CoE. CoE felt like a betrayal, not a commiseration. And that's what I can't get over. I guess when I enter into a relationship with a tv show I expect it to be a two way street.. for their to be care of me as I care for it. That's probably ridiculously naive, and perhaps unjust.. perhaps one can't ask anything of someone else's creation - that is not how I felt about episodic tv though, certainly not tv that had been cracky and fun for all it was dark and morbid. But I never knew I had to guard myself from that before CoE. Maybe I will from now on, though I kind of hope I don't. I guess it's also that I didn't feel I *learned* anything from Ianto's death.. it was like shock journalism.. not for a point but a bang, and that, to me, was so far beneath the show I had been watching that it wasn't even on my radar. Don't get me wrong, Ianto could have died in CoE and I could still have loved it.. but the way it was done? (on and off-screen, acting and producing) it just didn't work for me in the way in which I know to watch television.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-08 08:52 am (UTC)When I watched Buffy, I had this sense that every single death was done with great care for both the characters and the audience (even, as you say, when there were deaths that I disagreed with). With CoE I got none of that. Ianto's death was like being punished for loving the character.