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Torchwood - Jack (and the Doctor)
I was reading the scene analysis of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
antelope_writes I linked to in a earlier post and I came across this take on Jack's time with the Doctor in Utopia-The Sound of Drums-Last of the Time Lords:
When he saw the Doctor again, the being who had quite literally saved his life and inspired his love (and I'm convinced that on some level, Nine loved Jack in return) was gone, replaced by a different man who would just as happily throw Jack out with yesterday's garbage. He subjects Jack to all kinds of great and petty insults, from leaving him lying dead on the ground after the TARDIS stopped at the end of the world (with the strong implication that he'd abandon Jack again right then and there had Martha not stopped him) to reviling Jack's involvement with Torchwood. When Jack fires right back at the Doctor about Torchwood and what Jack has done since Canary Wharf, the Doctor doesn't apologize, even when Torchwood's Archangel Network eventually becomes the mechanism to save the Doctor and the world. In the meantime, Jack gets chained in an engine room--I work on ships for a living, and trust me, there is NOWHERE worse to be than the hot, filthy, noisy, smelly confines of an engine room. That alone means that he will never have a moment of silence, enduring pain that can be eardrum-shatteringly loud, subject to noxious fumes, and dealing with near-constant sweltering heat. It's one more layer of torture the Master inflicted on Jack. After Lucy shoots the Master, after Jack has dealt with all this and the emotional trauma inflicted on Tish and Martha and all, he gets to watch the man he literally died for once and a thousand times cry over the body of a man who would have destroyed the world.
Imagine that--somebody you love enough to throw your life away, telling you and showing you in the most irrefutable way in the universe that you don't matter enough to even consider what you've been through. He's just had the one long-term emotional commitment of his life get shattered in a heartbeat. He was physically abandoned at the Game Station; he was irrevocably emotionally abandoned by Ten on the bridge of the Valiant.
Wow. Harsh, eh? I've mentioned before that I think Ten is a dick, and I sometimes wonder how much of that perceived dickness comes from the fact that Torchwood makes you view Doctor Who from a more adult perspective. If we approach the Doctor from Jack's point of view, taking into account everything we've learned from Torchwood about Jack and his history since the Game Station, the Doctor really does come off pretty badly. Worse, even, than he comes off for the way he treated Martha. I'd like to talk about that some time, but at the moment I fear it may depress me way too much for the start of Season Four, and I'm trying to build up some squee. Somehow.
For the moment, I'd like to think about Jack, specifically. I've always had trouble putting my finger on just exactly what it was Jack WANTED from the Doctor, and why he was so adamant on tracking him down. Did he just, simply, think the Doctor could fix him and make him mortal again? It seems from Fragments that that's how it started, he really just seems at that moment to be looking for a fix. But, then again, wait over a hundred years for someone and your perspective will change, surely. I personally think that the importance of the fix Jack was after started to diminish as time went on. One would have to assume that Jack started to learn to cope with his immortality better and better as he died more and more often. So what was he after?
rowanswhimsy says this about Jack, and I tend to agree: Jack is, of course, damaged by virtue of his immortality because he continues to live while those around him die. Also, I would say that the details he's revealed about his childhood indicate that he may have had issues forming personal attachments since the destruction of his biological family and his protective suppression of the pain and guilt associated with those events. Jack has displayed a tendency to romanticize people that he can't have (e.g. the Doctor, Rose) and/or create reasons why he can't have people (e.g. protecting Gwen from himself so that she can have a 'normal' man). I think she's right here, and the way I see Jack is like this: He's a guy who doesn't really form deeply commited relationships, for whatever reason, but probably something to do with his family, yeah. He hops around time and space having loads and loads of non-commited sexual flings. (Am I the only one who believes, firmly, that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the sexual anecdotes Jack has ever told dates from before the Game Station? Surely not.) And then he meets the Doctor and Rose, and from here onwards he starts on his path of redemption. Unfortunately, he's abandoned, immortal, on the Game Station, leaving no-one around to witness or validate that redemption. He starts looking for the Doctor, at first to provide him with answers regarding his immortality, but also, as time progresses to give him MEANING, to tell him he's on the right path, to validate what he's been doing. Reshaping Torchwood, he states quite clearly, IN THE DOCTOR'S HONOUR. I don't think he's romanticising the Doctor as a love interest, per se, but as a hero, as a father figure, the instrument that brought about Jack's transformation and the guy whose approval he needs to continue on his mission, however unclear and improvised that mission might be. (And maybe also a guy who can, if he can't fix him, at least empathise with the whole longevity thing, and maybe even offer some moral support.)
What does he get? A kind of pissed off Dad figure. He gets told off for flirting and essentially being himself, gets told he's ALL WRONG, he gets smacked down for being involved with Torchwood, and after suffering for a year at the hands of the Master, he gets, basically, zip. It's no wonder he runs back to the Hub as fast as he can. He's just wasted 100+ years of his life waiting for some guy who is just that: SOME GUY. The Doctor doesn't have any answers, he can't help Jack find any meaning and he can't even bring himself to be particularly nice. Ouch. Sure, the Doctor's a hero who saves the world and stuff, but even that he only does BY VIRTUE OF THOSE HE HAS GATHERED AROUND HIM. Funnily enough, though, that realisation seems to be just what Jack needs to snap him out of his funk, because, let's face it, in TW S1 he was a miserable git. And he HAS learned a few things, like I said after KKBB, the most notable seemingly being that you can't use your longevity as an excuse to keep yourself isolated from people, it doesn't work that way and it makes you turn into the aforementioned miserable git. And you can be a hero all you like, but you need the support of people you can trust around you or you'll still end your days as a troll in a birdcage.
So what kind of guy is Jack now? Well, like I said, I think the omnisexuality card is played WAYYY too often by the fans. There's no evidence to support that Jack has had ANY casual sexual encounters since the Game Station, apart, possibly, from Ianto, depending on how far you think that relationship went before Cyberwoman (You know my view, I think it went pretty far, I think Jack was way too hurt and betrayed by Ianto's actions to purely have it be about the deception. I think part of Jack's hurt was simply about the fact that THERE WAS SOMEONE ELSE.) He's had two serious relationships that we know of, with his wife and Estelle, both of which, it can be assumed, involved partners who knew nothing of his origins or his longevity. (I think it's interesting that in Fragments we were immediately shown that Ianto, from their first encounter, knew all about Jack's origins and possibly even something about his longevity. Ianto is THE VERY FIRST PERSON Jack can totally be himself with. EVER.) We know Jack pretty much IS Torchwood at this stage of the proceedings, and he seems ready to forge his own path, and not one that is guided purely by his desire for approval from the Doctor. That goes some way to explaining his actions with Owen and his desire to keep his team together even in death, he's building something new now, on his own, and he has a clear view of who he needs around him to help him do it. (Yes, even Gwen. She's an idiot, but she questions him and approaches things from such an acutely different angle than he does, that he needs her around, if only to stop him taking his position as immortal superhero slightly too seriously. And yeah, Ianto does that too, but much less agressively.) It makes me wonder what sort of interaction Jack will have with the Doctor when they next meet. Knowing Rusty it'll be all fawning hero worship again, and I'll be proven entirely wrong. Oh well.
Oh, and as an aside, am I the only one hugely amused by the revelation that, in his time as an immortal being, 150 years or so, Jack has managed to die on average about ONCE A MONTH? I mean, if the Doctor wanted to lord anything over the guy, at least he could have dropped in that he's managed to only do that about ONCE A CENTURY.
antelope_writes I linked to in a earlier post and I came across this take on Jack's time with the Doctor in Utopia-The Sound of Drums-Last of the Time Lords:When he saw the Doctor again, the being who had quite literally saved his life and inspired his love (and I'm convinced that on some level, Nine loved Jack in return) was gone, replaced by a different man who would just as happily throw Jack out with yesterday's garbage. He subjects Jack to all kinds of great and petty insults, from leaving him lying dead on the ground after the TARDIS stopped at the end of the world (with the strong implication that he'd abandon Jack again right then and there had Martha not stopped him) to reviling Jack's involvement with Torchwood. When Jack fires right back at the Doctor about Torchwood and what Jack has done since Canary Wharf, the Doctor doesn't apologize, even when Torchwood's Archangel Network eventually becomes the mechanism to save the Doctor and the world. In the meantime, Jack gets chained in an engine room--I work on ships for a living, and trust me, there is NOWHERE worse to be than the hot, filthy, noisy, smelly confines of an engine room. That alone means that he will never have a moment of silence, enduring pain that can be eardrum-shatteringly loud, subject to noxious fumes, and dealing with near-constant sweltering heat. It's one more layer of torture the Master inflicted on Jack. After Lucy shoots the Master, after Jack has dealt with all this and the emotional trauma inflicted on Tish and Martha and all, he gets to watch the man he literally died for once and a thousand times cry over the body of a man who would have destroyed the world.
Imagine that--somebody you love enough to throw your life away, telling you and showing you in the most irrefutable way in the universe that you don't matter enough to even consider what you've been through. He's just had the one long-term emotional commitment of his life get shattered in a heartbeat. He was physically abandoned at the Game Station; he was irrevocably emotionally abandoned by Ten on the bridge of the Valiant.
Wow. Harsh, eh? I've mentioned before that I think Ten is a dick, and I sometimes wonder how much of that perceived dickness comes from the fact that Torchwood makes you view Doctor Who from a more adult perspective. If we approach the Doctor from Jack's point of view, taking into account everything we've learned from Torchwood about Jack and his history since the Game Station, the Doctor really does come off pretty badly. Worse, even, than he comes off for the way he treated Martha. I'd like to talk about that some time, but at the moment I fear it may depress me way too much for the start of Season Four, and I'm trying to build up some squee. Somehow.
For the moment, I'd like to think about Jack, specifically. I've always had trouble putting my finger on just exactly what it was Jack WANTED from the Doctor, and why he was so adamant on tracking him down. Did he just, simply, think the Doctor could fix him and make him mortal again? It seems from Fragments that that's how it started, he really just seems at that moment to be looking for a fix. But, then again, wait over a hundred years for someone and your perspective will change, surely. I personally think that the importance of the fix Jack was after started to diminish as time went on. One would have to assume that Jack started to learn to cope with his immortality better and better as he died more and more often. So what was he after?
rowanswhimsy says this about Jack, and I tend to agree: Jack is, of course, damaged by virtue of his immortality because he continues to live while those around him die. Also, I would say that the details he's revealed about his childhood indicate that he may have had issues forming personal attachments since the destruction of his biological family and his protective suppression of the pain and guilt associated with those events. Jack has displayed a tendency to romanticize people that he can't have (e.g. the Doctor, Rose) and/or create reasons why he can't have people (e.g. protecting Gwen from himself so that she can have a 'normal' man). I think she's right here, and the way I see Jack is like this: He's a guy who doesn't really form deeply commited relationships, for whatever reason, but probably something to do with his family, yeah. He hops around time and space having loads and loads of non-commited sexual flings. (Am I the only one who believes, firmly, that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the sexual anecdotes Jack has ever told dates from before the Game Station? Surely not.) And then he meets the Doctor and Rose, and from here onwards he starts on his path of redemption. Unfortunately, he's abandoned, immortal, on the Game Station, leaving no-one around to witness or validate that redemption. He starts looking for the Doctor, at first to provide him with answers regarding his immortality, but also, as time progresses to give him MEANING, to tell him he's on the right path, to validate what he's been doing. Reshaping Torchwood, he states quite clearly, IN THE DOCTOR'S HONOUR. I don't think he's romanticising the Doctor as a love interest, per se, but as a hero, as a father figure, the instrument that brought about Jack's transformation and the guy whose approval he needs to continue on his mission, however unclear and improvised that mission might be. (And maybe also a guy who can, if he can't fix him, at least empathise with the whole longevity thing, and maybe even offer some moral support.) What does he get? A kind of pissed off Dad figure. He gets told off for flirting and essentially being himself, gets told he's ALL WRONG, he gets smacked down for being involved with Torchwood, and after suffering for a year at the hands of the Master, he gets, basically, zip. It's no wonder he runs back to the Hub as fast as he can. He's just wasted 100+ years of his life waiting for some guy who is just that: SOME GUY. The Doctor doesn't have any answers, he can't help Jack find any meaning and he can't even bring himself to be particularly nice. Ouch. Sure, the Doctor's a hero who saves the world and stuff, but even that he only does BY VIRTUE OF THOSE HE HAS GATHERED AROUND HIM. Funnily enough, though, that realisation seems to be just what Jack needs to snap him out of his funk, because, let's face it, in TW S1 he was a miserable git. And he HAS learned a few things, like I said after KKBB, the most notable seemingly being that you can't use your longevity as an excuse to keep yourself isolated from people, it doesn't work that way and it makes you turn into the aforementioned miserable git. And you can be a hero all you like, but you need the support of people you can trust around you or you'll still end your days as a troll in a birdcage.
So what kind of guy is Jack now? Well, like I said, I think the omnisexuality card is played WAYYY too often by the fans. There's no evidence to support that Jack has had ANY casual sexual encounters since the Game Station, apart, possibly, from Ianto, depending on how far you think that relationship went before Cyberwoman (You know my view, I think it went pretty far, I think Jack was way too hurt and betrayed by Ianto's actions to purely have it be about the deception. I think part of Jack's hurt was simply about the fact that THERE WAS SOMEONE ELSE.) He's had two serious relationships that we know of, with his wife and Estelle, both of which, it can be assumed, involved partners who knew nothing of his origins or his longevity. (I think it's interesting that in Fragments we were immediately shown that Ianto, from their first encounter, knew all about Jack's origins and possibly even something about his longevity. Ianto is THE VERY FIRST PERSON Jack can totally be himself with. EVER.) We know Jack pretty much IS Torchwood at this stage of the proceedings, and he seems ready to forge his own path, and not one that is guided purely by his desire for approval from the Doctor. That goes some way to explaining his actions with Owen and his desire to keep his team together even in death, he's building something new now, on his own, and he has a clear view of who he needs around him to help him do it. (Yes, even Gwen. She's an idiot, but she questions him and approaches things from such an acutely different angle than he does, that he needs her around, if only to stop him taking his position as immortal superhero slightly too seriously. And yeah, Ianto does that too, but much less agressively.) It makes me wonder what sort of interaction Jack will have with the Doctor when they next meet. Knowing Rusty it'll be all fawning hero worship again, and I'll be proven entirely wrong. Oh well.
Oh, and as an aside, am I the only one hugely amused by the revelation that, in his time as an immortal being, 150 years or so, Jack has managed to die on average about ONCE A MONTH? I mean, if the Doctor wanted to lord anything over the guy, at least he could have dropped in that he's managed to only do that about ONCE A CENTURY.