I'M WORKING ON IT...

[tencrush]

Just rewatching some episodes to get some inspiration re. Ianto and what I am now calling his alpha-in-training-ness. Wow. He is the weirdest character, dudes. He's never on screen, he's always physically reserved and he doesn't say much, but when he does he COMMANDS attention, it's way more blatant than I thought it would be.

But anyway, I'm getting a bit distracted, so I'll just post random things in the meantime.

Watch this scene from Day One again.
"None of you have partners?" says Gwen. And LOOK! Jack was totally going to say something and then he shuts his mouth and changes his mind.



He's so doing the teaboy already at this point in time.

Comments

[antelope-writes.livejournal.com]

how much of all the subtle complexities we are seeing is intentional, and how much is just fortuitious coincidence?


I think it's a bit of both. The writers are people, and so any stories they tell will be stories of people. The stories that draw us in the most will be the stories of things that we the audience can connect to. We don't love To The Last Man because we understand a rift break between 2008 and 1918, we love it because we identify and empathize with Tosh and Tommy and them both giving up something they want for something they both know they need. We've all had to make a choice like that sooner or later, and so we get drawn into the story. I think S2 had a bit more coherent season-wide story arc (meta forthcoming after I finish the fic I'm working on), and so we would get more intentional nuance and shading there.

At the same time, once the script leaves the writers and gets into acting/direction, the actors and directors add all sorts of things that the writers may or may not have intended. Some of them are good, some not, some just unexpected. Case in point: Ianto. Aside from Cyberwoman, he was at best a bit role in the written script for S1. Once the shooting started, an unknown young actor with massive screen presence that *nobody* expected turned him into a powerhouse role. There is no way the writers could have known that would happen, but it worked out well in the end.

[nightspring.livejournal.com]

So true about actors/directors adding things writers didn't intend or expect, and I don't think anyone could have expected Gareth -- he seems like one of the seven wonders of the world or something. :D

And to bring this back to tencrush's suggestion that Jack in Day One had been about to mention himself and Ianto when Gwen asked if any of them had partners, do we know when Jack/Ianto was conceived as a possibility in the mind of the production team? Could John Barrowman have had that possibility in mind when he acted that scene, or was he maybe thinking of Jack as about to tell a joke (probably a crude one) and changing his mind? Not that the presence or absence of "authorial" intent should prevent us from interpreting that scene as Jack already doing Ianto, of course, but I'm just wondering...