Thoughts

[tencrush]

The reason I didn't post earlier about the Golden Age was because I HATED IT. I thought it was awful on so many levels, I don't even know where to begin. Well, no, I do, it was mostly the Duchess. I hated the woman, her acting was stunted, her voice annoyed me, the whole idea of her and her blunderbuss just rubbed me up the wrong way. As did the story, it didn't engage me in any way. I've said before I have a lot of trouble with radio plays, I find them very hard to get into and this one, I just had no idea what was going on, why it was going on or indeed why I should care. As a result, I don't really have any idea what happened, and I think I may have missed a few vital plot points, or at least misunderstood some of the technobabble surrounding why they were setting up broadband or whatever it was they were doing. It all turned out okay in the end, and there was a lot of running away and shouting and such, and the thing about radio plays is that I can't quite get into any of this actual action business. As soon as there's running and car chases and things blowing up, I just veer between losing the plot alltogether and laughing myself senseless. The major problem I had with this one was the amount of visualspeak that was required to set the scene. That whole thing of "we're in India, it's a 1920's style gentleman's club with loads of marble and there's a chick with a blunderbuss", all of these things require the characters to turn into Basil Exposition and very quickly it feels like you're listening to a schoolteacher. When it comes to scene-setting on the radio, I find that it's best to not be too ambitious. So yeah, this one didn't work for me at all. 1 out of 10. On the plus side, Ianto was l33t haXX0r.

And the there was The Dead Line. Which was utterly brilliant. And now of course you'll be thinking yeah, Whelk, you liked the Jack/Ianto stuff, and yes, admittedly, I did, but leaving that aside, it was still brilliant. The retro phone as an evil device was probably the best made-for-radio bad guy ever thought up, and the story just took place. All this bollocks about precisely where the story took place and what the buildings or the people looked like was waved away, leaving room for the actual story to actually happen. Personally, I think this kind of clue-gathering, mystery solving tale is much better suited to the radio than all that running around blowing things up business, but maybe that's just me. Also, the denouement made me laugh, in as much as it was Ianto (do we actually NEED a new Tosh, dudes?) technobabbling some sort of EMP-related solution, the details of which were SO UNCLEAR that it became kind of hilarious. It could have involved various machines and loads of wiring and flashing lights, or it could have just been him tapping away on his PDA, we just don't know. And that's my point about this play, it didn't really matter.

As an aside, I've waited a while to post about this one, because I'm having a hard time working out if I enjoyed this one so much because Jack was out of action. I didn't think JB had improved much, radiowise, since Lost Souls, so after two plays I was quite glad to be rid of him. So, yeah. I don't really know how much of it was that.

Then of course there was the Jack/Ianto stuff. Yeah. I have to say, I thought GDL's speech was utterly brilliantly delivered. Ianto knows what he's getting himself into (I've waited so long for someone to tell me that Ianto's not the lovesick idiot some make him out to be, and I'm glad that in the end it was Ianto himself.) but fuck it, he'll take it. I've never really wanted it to be any more or less than that, so... yeah. Result.

rexluscus said this on my friendslist a bit earlier, and it's about Romeo and Juliet:
... while both of them are passionately in love, only Juliet understands what that really involves. Romeo is still wrapped up in his ego, but Juliet understands that being in love means a profound loss of control, an ecstatic dissolving of selfhood, which she embraces but Romeo never quite gets to. Anyway, Jack and Ianto aren't Romeo and Juliet, but it seems that their dynamic is a bit similar insofar as Jack is and will always be all about Jack even when he does fall in love, whereas Ianto, despite his hesitancy to say it out loud, has abandoned himself to being in love. And he can do this because he's mortal; Jack can't because he's not. So while Ianto is the woobie in the equation, Jack is the more tragic character.
This kind of sums it up for me, it's certainly put better than I could ever put it. And while on the one hand it does make Ianto the woobie in the equation, it also makes Ianto one hell of a realistic, pragmatic and hugely brave man. Which is a pretty okay outcome from where I'm standing.

IS IT MONDAY YET???????