I tend to look at the whole cyberwoman thing as a long, bizarre metaphor for drug abuse or alcoholism and what it will do to a relationship. You can have attraction through the booze or the drugs, genuine feeling, blah blah blah, but there is always that next fix and what you have to do to get your next fix and the next fix will always, always, always come ahead of your partner. I dumped the guy I was sure I'd marry at one point because he was a drunk. I KNOW. It's crushing when you finally figure it out.
So there you are, desperate to get your next fix, and then one day something happens and your addiction gets pulled out into the pitiless light of day and all sorts of bad shit happens before you go into rehab...it's painful, it shatters you. The kind of manipulation that Ianto does, about "I just clean up your shit?" Classic manipulation that an addict does. Then the denial. Then the threats. Then the pleading. Then you wind up in rehab drying out (or a 30-day suspension from the office).
If you think of Ianto as an addict (with Lisa being the drug), in Fragments he's just doing what he has to do (damn near whoring himself) to get his next fix. Jack got played, played hard core, but that doesn't mean there can't be genuine attraction and/or affection there. It just got buried under the drugs. And the stopwatch thing? He's out of rehab and doing better and so the relationship starts to come back. Whatever they have going on is still eight shades of fucked up crazy, but it's not at all surprising to me.
In the immortal words of Bowling for Soup, Life after Lisa's not so bad at all.
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So there you are, desperate to get your next fix, and then one day something happens and your addiction gets pulled out into the pitiless light of day and all sorts of bad shit happens before you go into rehab...it's painful, it shatters you. The kind of manipulation that Ianto does, about "I just clean up your shit?" Classic manipulation that an addict does. Then the denial. Then the threats. Then the pleading. Then you wind up in rehab drying out (or a 30-day suspension from the office).
If you think of Ianto as an addict (with Lisa being the drug), in Fragments he's just doing what he has to do (damn near whoring himself) to get his next fix. Jack got played, played hard core, but that doesn't mean there can't be genuine attraction and/or affection there. It just got buried under the drugs. And the stopwatch thing? He's out of rehab and doing better and so the relationship starts to come back. Whatever they have going on is still eight shades of fucked up crazy, but it's not at all surprising to me.
In the immortal words of Bowling for Soup, Life after Lisa's not so bad at all.