Torchwood - Jack (and the Doctor)
Mar. 31st, 2008 03:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tencrushI 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.
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 02:53 pm (UTC)And I think the Doctor has regenerated more than once a decade since he started, if that counts.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 03:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 03:21 pm (UTC)He's been back on Earth since 1869, but the 1392 deaths are measured starting in 1898 (or 1899, depending on when you think the Torchwood Bitches met up with him)
so ... that should be about 12/13 deaths a year since then
They also said that they knew he had died about 14? times in the 6 months they'd been tracking him ...
no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 03:27 pm (UTC)I don't agree, because
a)He's a very sexual being
b)His time spent on Earth after the Game station is at least twice as long than he lived before that (I have, of course, no idea how old he is ... but I'm taking John's age as an example.), which meant he probably had more sexual encounters after than before.
c) I doubt Jack would only rehash sexual encounters from over a century ago. Unless they were really spectacular, and a comment like 'I had a boyfriend whose nostrils flaired when he lied' doesn't sound spectacular enough to remember after over a century
no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 03:58 pm (UTC)B)Yes, true. But we've been shown that even way back in the 1890's he was a miserable git, pretty much obsessed with finding the Doctor, which is exactly what he STILL was in Season One, a hundred-odd years later. He's not exactly the happy-go-lucky shagmonkey he describes in those anecdotes during that time.
C)Also true, but to be fair it's not really a spectacular enough fact to remember after a year or two. It was a specific reference to a body language cue, that really had nothing to do with whether or not it was his boyfriend. It could have been his cousin, it's not really relevant as a sexual anecdote, just as an "I once knew someone"-type of anecdote.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 04:23 pm (UTC)Yes, Jack has a twinge of jealousy for Rose, but he loves her far more than he resents her. I don't think Jack would ever feel resentment over the fact that the Doctor loves others more, especially when that other is the only other living Time Lord. Jack knows loneliness, and he knows that the Doctor's loneliness is an endless blackhole.
Let's also keep in mind that Jack *volunteered* to stay with the Doctor rather than running off with Martha and that at no point did Jack say or do anything in the last eps of season three of DW or in season 2 of Torchwood that indicates any resentment of the Doctor.
There have been indications that he's still sensitive to the plight of a chained and tortured creature ("Meat"), but he left the Doctor in "LotTL" quite happily having found closure. Now that he understands *what* he is, Jack is free to find a new purpose in life.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 04:55 pm (UTC)I recently rewatched The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, and I'm not all that convinced that the Doctor would have rescued Jack at the end of TDD if not for Rose. For the Doctor, everything is for Rose - on the Game Station, he gets pissy at Jack when they find each other because Rose is still not safe - he snaps at Jack, somewhat unfairly, but expected given the circumstances, for saying hi to Lynda while Rose is still missing. I think the Doctor set fairly strict guidelines for Jack traveling with him and is only allowing Jack to do so because for some reason Rose likes him.
The Children in Need special that aired before The Christmas Invasion and Season 2 of the new Who has a throwaway comment that would suggest the Doctor knew Jack was alive on the Game Station when they left. Rose asks about Captain Jack and the Doctor says oh, he's busy, has things to do, has to rebuild the Earth.
In some ways, Ten reminds me of earlier Doctors, such as the First, who was not a very nice being.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 04:58 pm (UTC)Instead, the pixie says "meh." Now I don't doubt Jack DOES forgive him that, pretty quickly. What I'm saying is, from there on in, Jack's purpose is his own.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 05:14 pm (UTC)As for the 14 deaths (or 13?), the ladies specifically said 'in the last six months'
no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 05:18 pm (UTC)He is a violence magnet!
no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 05:25 pm (UTC)I have no idea
no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 05:57 pm (UTC)b)Yes, he was a miserable git, but I'm not convinced he didn't revert to his flirty ways (or the happy-go-lucky shagmonkey), every now and then. He's a 'man with needs' (to revert to clichés), and, imho, unless the sex he had in those hundred years was really bad, or he abstained from sex during that time (which I really really doubt), he's bound to have some anecdotes from the past century
c) You have a point there.
Still, he specifically said boyfriend and not cousin. And if he remembers him enough to use him as an example in the nostril thing, he might also have told sexual anecdotes about the same boyfriend. And there is no evidence to suggest the boyfriend was from before 'the game station' (or after, to be honest)
IMO, even though he had a hard time of it after finding out he couldn't die, and craved meeting the Doctor to explain, fix, whatever, I don't think there is any reason to think his flirty nature, his sex-capades were non-existent in the last 100 years, or that all his anecdotes stem from before the game station.
Actually, I think he might have even dialled it up a notch. Losing himself in sex to forget how miserable he is, seems just his thing. (at least for a while)
A hundred years is a long time to be miserable, and, judging from series one, he had his ups and downs, but he didn't show signs of being completely depressed or unhappy to me.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 05:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 06:06 pm (UTC)I think MOST of Jack's stories were pre-immortality, but not all of them. He probably had less of them, but something tells me Jack did occasionally sleep around, and not just have those two relationships.
I always found it amusing that considering fans keep thinking that Jack just has sex all the team, he only had ONE 'relationship' or sexual encounter during the two season. All the others had more than him- Ianto had two, Gwen had two, Owen had two and Tosh had three.
I think Jack may have had a bit of a death-wish. I mean it took him 23 years to figure out he was immortal,. so I'm guessing he didn't die all that time. SINCE then? Is another story. Plus it depends if we count the Valiant and the amount of times he probably died there and he could have died several times during the wars. I can just imagine Ten making it a contest of who dies the least, lol.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 06:41 pm (UTC)Yeah. Jack and Ianto are the only ones who have never actually had a casual sexual encounter on the show, unless you count a particular stage of their relationship with each other as casual.
I forgot about the Valiant. I guess it could be argued that he died hundreds of times there. Still can't believe it would have been anywhere near even 1000, though. I'm sure the Master had better things to be doing than killing Jack, like, three times a day. It must get old.
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Date: 2008-03-31 09:46 pm (UTC)If you look at it another way, our time-traveling homeboy got some poor girl knocked up and left her after the kid was born. Years later, kid goes off looking for his old man, hoping to learn something about himself and fill in the gaping chasm in his life left by his lack of a father. Old man doesn't give a damn and brushes Jack off in the most hurtful possible way. Telling Jack he was wrong and shouldn't exist is just like telling a kid that he's a mistake and wishing that kid had never been born. Kid shows the old man his science project, which is pretty darn cool, and old man reacts with disgust and pushes kid away even more. Kid fights back, telling daddy dearest that he modeled his entire life's work in the Old Man's image. Then kid sacrifices his life over and over and over again, hoping daddy will notice and think his kid is worth something.
Sound about right? That's our Doctor, the intergalactic deadbeat dad.
Back to Torchwood, Jack makes the same mistake with Owen that the Doctor makes with Jack, that whole eternal life/death thing, only Jack sticks around to take care of what he created. It's that kind of thing that makes us respect Jack, no matter how messed up he is. The Doctor makes mistakes but doesn't stick around to fix them. Jack makes mistakes and sucks it up and takes the consequences.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 09:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-31 09:57 pm (UTC)All I can say for sure is that starting at KKBB, he's got exactly one person in mind. There is zero sexual interest on his part for Gwen (which is why Nostrovite!Jack stands out so much), and he follows Ianto around with his eyes pretty much all the time starting in Meat.
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Date: 2008-03-31 10:27 pm (UTC)And I don't think 1869 was a mistake-- remember 1869 was the year that Gwenyth closed the Rift in The Unquiet Dead; my theory is that Jack's Vortex Manipulator locked onto the Rift activity, and that's why it took him there instead of the 21st century like he wanted. I suspect that Jack arrived in Cardiff just after the Doctor and Rose left.
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Date: 2008-03-31 10:38 pm (UTC)Having said that though, while I do believe that Jack shagged his way through the twentieth century, I do get the feeling that he tends to only have sex with people that he feels some level of emotional connection with-- even if it's only a one night stand. That was the impression I got from Ianto's bit of Fragments: Jack finally responded to Ianto's flirting, not because of the suit, but because he connected with him on an emotional level. As such, when Jack does refer to past lovers, there is always affection there.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-01 12:52 am (UTC)Jack's journey for personal redemption and his immortality mark him as 'Other' and set him apart. But I think Jack desperately needs to connect with others and in a deeper way than the traditional Companions, so he seeks out the Doctor who he perceives to be more like him than anyone else. However, instead of embracing Jack, the Doctor essentially rejects Jack as wrong or 'Other'. I think that was likely devastating to Jack. The Doctor might not mind being (maybe) the last of his kind but I'm not sure Jack really wants to be so alone and so separate. I think Jack wants to be part of a community. So now Jack is starting to create his own set of Companions but cast in his own image of what that relationship should entail, which includes all things physical, emotional, mental, and sexual with, of course, the exception of the things Jack is afraid to reveal about himself.