People who claim that bringing Ianto back would “diminish the importance of his death”. His death wasn’t bloody IMPORTANT, he didn’t die gloriously or defeating anybody – his death was a f*cking WASTE and nothing else!!!!!
Is that truly so hard to understand?
i admit i don’t have strong feelings towards that statement one way of the other, though i see it a lot and i see a lot of people getting upset about. personally, i’m sad ianto dies, but for jack to be able to do what was necessary he had to be pushed past the point of not caring and that’s essentially what ianto’s death accomplished.
personally i really liked what they did. from a writer’s point of view, they built up the moment really well. jack had been fighting all of series 3 against admitting to himself and ianto what they were. he’d been doing his level best to push ianto away in order to minimise his own future pain, the awareness of which was probably brought on by the death of tosh and owen, reminding jack of the pointlessness and heartache that follows getting attached.
and then finally, when ianto makes him see that there is nothing jack can do that would make ianto stop loving him, that whatever jack has done or will do, ianto will always be there, when jack, finally, finally realises that yes, this man, this man is everything…that’s when they take him away.
jack taking ianto with him to confront the 456 was jack admitting to both of them that this is something more, that this is something he accepts. so of course, what better time to take it all away again?
i mean yes, it basically puts ianto in the position of the “woman who has to die to further the manpain” but to be fair, it was always, to an extent, meant to be jack’s story. we don’t like to hear this because for many of us ianto was the major reason we loved the show so much, but he was basically a side character. he was the love interest doomed to die a terrible death. it may not have been a significant moment in his life, but it was an incredibly and intensely important moment in jack’s, which, i think, is the point.
having said that, there is nothing in this world that will convince me that ianto doesn’t come back and that he and jack live happily forever after.
…. Yeah you’re probably right :/
*deep sigh*
But that won’t ever stop it from hurting, you know? And when people are just like ‘‘c’mon just let him REST IN PEACE jfc’‘…. WELL.
I understand that he ‘had to’ die from a storytelling POV, sure, but I cannot ever help but feel like he was massively underappreciated. Gwen was – is – the a lead character second only to Jack, and he was just… dispensable, ultimately.
ALTHOUGH – I am quite fond of telling myself that at least, it COULD have turned out significantly worse for him (and Jack) – as far as death (& resurrection & ‘legacy’ & so on) scenes go, his was (/were) really rather good. In the most terrible and heart-wrenching kind of way, surely, but – since you rightfully explained that it was ‘bound to happen’
anyways
and at the very least very important to Jack, I guess it was good for what it was??? 😀
And of course we still have fanfiction & our own imagination in which he does have his very happy forever with Jack, and that is ALL that counts in the end now isn’t it 😉
i think all the characters except gwen were massively underappreciated tbh. (except owen who i despise as a human being but i accept him as a character so i guess that balances out.)
i’ve also noticed, when watching and reading cast interviews, everyone involved in the show seemed to be under the impression that torchwood was, largely, about gwen. and i mean, she was the intended audience surrogate, certainly, but i think a lot of it had to do with the fact that the creators didn’t entirely realise that a lot of us (most of us?) identified with ianto way more than we did with gwen. but i’m not sure if that’s just the impression i get or what, but i always felt that gwen was very much meant to be the main character with jack a close second. as you say, the others were there purely to forward the development of those two. i mean i don’t like it (i am very much not a gwen fan) but i think in terms of what we’re given that’s the closest to the truth, and as such the fact that they’re treated as secondary characters can’t come as much of a surprise.
and like i said, they needed jack in a certain mental space and from a purely tragical romance kind of way, ianto dying was the obvious and best solution. and also, i have to look at it like this: if gwen had died and been the one to push jack to that place, i think i would have been resentful. because for me i want ianto to be the most important person in jack’s life at that moment. i love the fact that he couldn’t say i love you but then goes and damns the whole world. i love the fact that he fought so hard to protect himself against more pain and in the end it finds him anyway. and i don’t want to think that he’d fall apart like that for anyone other than ianto.
and yes of course that’s mawkish claptrap but damn it i expect certain things in my over the top romantic pairings!
… Where do I find you and how do I keep you.
😀
No but seriously, you really just fixed me up about this very well thanks time and time again 🙂 🙂 🙂 I can only wholeheartedly agree with you, on here as well on what you wrote on the threat @janto-owns-my-soul started / continued. It IS very well done from a storytelling point of view, you’ve got to give them that.
I like Bernie but If Hillary wins the primary I’ll vote Hillary. I love y’all but if you let Christie or Trump become president because you wanted to throw a tantrum over Hillary winning primaries I will personally punch every other registered voter in the face. I had to suffer through eight years of a republican president I didn’t elect and I won’t do it again.
I’ll have at least four years to work my way through a punching list don’t think I won’t try it.
But Obama isn’t republican..unless you’re talking about a different president?
yes dear child, I was alive during the years 2000-2008, when President George W. Bush was president-elect. I don’t say this to be rude because you’re 16, and you don’t know, because you couldn’t have known, but now it is my faithful duty to tell you so you are informed as to why we (I) hate Republicans. You may not know him very well, but here’s a picture:
It’s an understatement to say that the Mission, was in fact, not accomplished.
He’s the guy that Obama replaced in large part because everyone hated George W. Bush. Why?:
Despite extensive warnings of incoming threats, Bush took no action to prevent 9/11 from happening, leading several respectable political science scholars to indicate that Bush was at least partially responsible for the attacks actually occurring (if not wholly responsible for not preventing them)
actually let’s remember that when he was immediately alerted to the attack, he continued to read a children’s story to elementary schoolers and then Air Force one and himself were gone for several hours after the attack.
he turned an inherited budget surplus into a 1.2 trillion dollar deficit.
a small deficit is one thing! 1.2 trillion dollars is NOT SMALL. Bill Clinton did have some part in the lead-up to a failing economy but Bush….Bush destroyed it.
The entire 2008 collapse began while he was still in office and basically did nothing about it. This wasn’t just an American collapse. This was a world-wide financial collapse that happened because American banks were failing (in large part due to massive amounts of tax-cuts and de-regulation put forth by Bush!). It triggered a world-wide collapse. He was partially responsible for our country’s second great depression.
He is 100% responsible for the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and the guy Kanye West was referring to when he said “George Bush hates black people.”
the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the “war on Terror”
LAUNCHING WARS WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL
the entire existence of Guantanamo Bay
the Patriot Act
his own party wanted nothing to do with him in 2008
heckuva job, brownie
waterboarding
….he literally stole the election in 2000
pulled us out of the kyoto protocal to deal with global warming problems
US troops given faulty, or unsafe gear
Abu Gharib prison and all other crimes of war already mentioned here or not mentioned
War profiteering! The list of top Bush administration officials whose former corporate employers made billions in Pentagon contracts starts with Vice-President Dick Cheney and Halliburton, which made $39.5 billion, and included his daughter, Liz Cheney, who ran a $300 million Middle East partnership program.
cutting veteran’s health care benefits
pardoning Scooter Libby
cut and froze pell grants for poor students
no child left behind act is the reason why you probably have to take those god forsaken dumb standardized tests for no real GOOD reason
Reporters analyzing Bush’s record found that he took off 1,020 days in two four-year terms—more than one out of every three days. No other modern president comes close. Bush also set the record for the longest vacation among modern presidents—five weeks, the Washington Post noted.
i could keep listing shit for days honestly but i won’t
suffice to say: George W. Bush is the worst president I lived through, he is the worst president in the last 50 years, and his blatant incompetence and failures are why the Republican party is rapidly devouring itself like a crazed ouroboros and might try to elect Trump. He is the reason why Stephen Colbert parodied the right as satire – why The Daily Show gained huge amounts of relevance, why the rest of the world hated us for a good eight years solid, why huge amounts of various civil and constitutional rights were literally eroded and denied to us, why we’re so in the debt hole even now, and why i registered Democrat when I turned 18, because honestly fuck the entire Republican party. Burn it to the ground and salt the earth.
I’ve been reading through “Between Each Beat Are Words Unsaid” and when I read chapters 10 & 11 it reminded me of how my interpretation of that scene is often a bit different than the rest of the fandom.
Ok so I know the scene in “The Blind Banker” where John corrects Sherlock about being his “Colleague” instead of his “Friend” gets a lot of mileage, and this idea has probably been posted before, but most of the time I see it from the “Poor Sherlock” standpoint.
I feel sad for BOTH of them in this scene. They are still trying to figure each other out, and as the show will establish, they are both absolute SHIT at feelings. Remember what happened right before this scene, John ran out of money at the market, and had to ask Sherlock for money. He’s embarrassed and wrong-footed.
They hardly know each other at this point. A month, maybe two. (Just checked John’s blog, only two months.) They haven’t “worked” together much if you go with the assumption that John would have blogged about it. (He had only blogged about “A Study in Pink” and a few other random things at this point)
One interesting thing I noticed is that during his write-up of ASiP he says:
“We arrived in ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ where, to my surprise, he introduced me as his colleague. The police seemed surprised by this as well I get the impression he’d not had ‘colleagues’ before.”
That is such a loaded statement. John is surprised that Sherlock views him as a colleague and that is important to John. We know this now because John skips so many details when writing up the cases, and the ones that make it are the ones that stick in HIS mind.
I created gifs of the scene and let me tell you, when you are advancing frame by frame to get the clips correct, these scenes are PAINFUL.
This introduction as “colleague” showed John that Sherlock wanted John to be viewed as an equal from the start. That would be VERY important to someone like John. (He hasn’t yet secured the job at the clinic at this point in the show, and he is very low on money, he is an injured army doctor…he has no PLACE, but he wants it desperately to be with Sherlock)
Also, something I never noticed before, Sherlock introduces Sally as his friend. And John observes how Sherlock treats his “friends” at this crime scene.
BUT given Sally’s reaction to the introduction John can’t help but notice that Sherlock catches the police off-guard with the use of “colleague” so he assumes it means he doesn’t have any/many.
In John’s mind I think he makes the connection that “colleague” is an important word to Sherlock, and “friend” is not, so he choses to use it from then on. He wants to show Sherlock that he is paying attention.
We have to remember that everyone who had met John up to the scene with Sebastian has assumed that he is sleeping with Sherlock, and it’s OBVIOUSLY a sensitive subject for John, so if you look at Sebastian’s creepy/knowing glance at Sherlock after “friend” you can understand why John reinforces it with “colleague.”
I think part of it is to counter the look Sebastian gave Sherlock and reinforce the whole “it’s all fine” vibe he is trying to solidify, and also to show he was paying attention on the last case, and using the word Sherlock picked for them.
See how he smiles at Sebastian in the gif above, and then glances at Sherlock for approval in the gif below. (It happens so fast that I didn’t see it until I was going frame by frame for these gifs.
John can IMMEDIATELY tell he has done the wrong thing, and you can see if on both their faces in the gif below.
This is why my heart breaks for both of them in this scene. They are both trying so hard to figure each other out and prove that they can be what the other needs, but they just aren’t quite there yet.
So I don’t think John was being deliberately mean, I think he was just caught off-guard that Sherlock had friends in uni, (because he determined he didn’t have a lot of friends in ASiP) and as he was processing that, he belatedly heard the intro and corrected Sherlock to show he was paying attention on the last case and that he is WORKING with Sherlock.
(We’ve all done it in our lives. Those cringe-worthy moments where you had the best of intentions but fell embarrassingly flat…)
I think he realizes his mistake in the last gif, but it’s too late to recover because Sherlock and Sebastian have moved on.
The whole scene reminds me of the scene at Angelo’s. John is trying SO hard to make a good impression on Sherlock that it makes him awkward at times.
I feel bad for both of them in this scene. Mostly Sherlock, because he had more to lose, but John also because he isn’t sure of his place by Sherlock’s side yet.
I really dig this interpretation of the scene. I’ve never seen John’s use of “colleague” as mean-spirited in any way–it’s a knee-jerk reaction for sure, but it’s not like he was trying to put Sherlock down by calling himself a colleague rather than a friend–and I like this explanation for why he does that. When you try to assimilate into a new culture, which is essentially what John is doing here as he tries to find his place in Sherlock’s world, you pick up and use the language that already exists there, and along the way, you’re bound to make some mistakes. It’s like learning a foreign language or even like joining a fandom. You try to copy the things you see others doing, use the words they’re using, and sometimes you might not get it quite right because you don’t have the full context and history and connotation associated with it, but at least you’re trying. And I agree with you that I think that’s what John is doing here.
This also fits so well thematically with tbb anyway. The episode is about them finding their groove, figuring out how they work together, how they live together, and how those two halves of their relationship fit with each other. At home, we’ve got Sherlock telling John they’re going out in the evening when John already has plans and Sherlock showing up on John’s date and John not knowing how he’s going to pay his half of the bills. And then for the work, we’ve got John leaving Soo Lin’s side in the museum and Sherlock sneaking into Soo Lin’s flat without John
and John not knowing to run when the cops come for Raz
and Sherlock not realizing John was smart enough to have taken a photo of the cipher. There’s conflict and miscommunication and a sense of feeling each other out in every aspect of their lives because they aren’t in sync yet. And this is another of those places. Sherlock considers them friends, and he wants to show that off to Sebastian. And John doesn’t realize the significance of that term being applied to him here–for all the reasons you mention above. Essentially, he hasn’t learned yet to play along with Sherlock in front of others. He’s learned this by the next episode–he doesn’t call Sherlock out about not having a case in front of Mycroft, waiting instead until Mycroft leaves to say anything about it–but here he doesn’t know yet that part of his role is to play along with what Sherlock says. That’s not to say that he never disagrees with Sherlock, obviously, but that is part of their dynamic that is shown repeatedly throughout the series. Later, John recognizes when Sherlock is either trying to save face or is playing a role for a case and therefore knows to keep his mouth shut, but in tbb he hasn’t learned that yet.
