i imagine ianto’s apartment to be like chaotically neat, you feel? like, he’s not there often, and he doesn’t have that many possessions in the first place, but what he does have is placed strategically in such odd places, that it wouldn’t make sense to anybody but him.
like, whenever tosh comes over for movie night she’s always sitting on top of whatever book ianto’s reading in his tidbits of spare time (voltaire, usually), and no matter how many times it happens, she just doesn’t learn.
and gwen has constantly tried to re-organize the small abode, but ianto has learned to keep a close eyes on her, and swat away whatever her wandering hands may be working on (she’s taken to shoving his mugs in the cupboard, much to ianto’s dismay).
owen isn’t over much, but when he is, he exaggerates the state of the apartment, lunging through the neatly folded piles of blankets on the floor as though they were made of lava. it bothers ianto to no end, and if owen’s coffee tastes a little salty the next day- well, ianto has absolutely no idea why.
jack loves ianto’s apartment. he’s been living at the hub for years, and isn’t used to how regular people actually live. and when they finally upgrade from casual office hookups to a Real Relationship™ (or as real as the two of them can get at least) he finds the quirkiness off ianto’s apartment to be rather a lot like ianto himself; a quiet storm.
(he just wishes he’d stop tripping over things. it messes with his ‘cool.’)
And some more Torchwood thoughts
… because it’s the middle of the night and I simply cannot read any more articles for work and I cannot sleep and I’m somehow both hyper and down at the same time. I’m too stressed.
Anyway.
1. I keep thinking about what would happen if one were to use both resurrection gloves at the same time. Because that’s gotta be the way they were designed to be used, right? Maybe the one that brought Owen back makes one undead and then the one used on & by Suzie somehow makes them alive? Maybe a connection is established between the undeadness (undeath?) and the limited back-to-life status, i.e. the consequences of both gloves and then the patient (?) becomes truly alive again? Or maybe somehow the energy is drained from the undeadness and poured into the actual bringing back? And how does the knife play into it? Also, it’s entirely possible that all the side effects of using each of the gloves and the knife have to do with the fact that they might have always been used in the wrong way by Torchwood? Do they come from the same dimension as the weavils? How did Jack know exactly how long ago the first glove came through the rift? Did he watch it fall into the Bay all that time ago? So many questions. Any thoughts? I’m genuinely curious. If you’ve got any suggestions, I’m all ears.
Also, Life Knife? It kinda brings death and misery, so I would’ve gone with Strife Knife.
2. I’m not entirely sold on Jack’s kiss of life thing. I don’t think it’s anything other that Barrowman’s headcanon. If it works, why didn’t he try it on Owen, or Tosh? Or anyone other than Ianto? (Maybe he did, and I forgot about it. There are loads of episodes I’ve only seen once, so it’s entirely possible I don’t remember something.) Speaking of, I don’t think Ianto was anything other than unconscious when the cyberwoman threw him on the ground. For one thing, Jack tried slapping him awake, which you don’t do with dead(ish) people. (Well, you hopefully don’t. If you do, what the bloody hell is wrong with you?) I think he kissed him to keep him silent when he woke up, which is kinda exactly what happened. (And also because he’s not above using any chance to grope and otherwise inappropriately behave towards people, so that’s not surprising at all.)
3. If the Doctor hadn’t messed with Jack’s teleporter / vortex manipulator, Jack could’ve used it to teleport Ianto out of the Thames House. Thanks, Doc.
4. Gwen is a much better team leader than Jack. While she was leading the team, they seemed to be more of a unit. She wasn’t keeping secrets from them. They actually seemed happier. She made Ianto a field agent and made the point of asking him to do the clean-up instead of just expecting it. (I firmly believe that him becoming more confident between series 1 and 2 has to do with Gwen and her gentle leading and friendship.) Even Owen seemed to be less of a prat under her leadership. Maybe it’s because they actually chose her? Because Jack was made leader simply because there was no one else left, and his leading amounts to not letting anybody question his decisions and keeping secrets from his team. And looking the most impressive of the lot, but that’s beside the point.
5. That said, he’s the most forgiving boss I’ve ever come across (I’m sorry for that terrible rhyme). You almost unleash a cyberman on the world? Doesn’t matter, you’re totally forgiven. You bring a dangerous alien into the base? Doesn’t matter, you’re forgiven. (If I remember correctly, Tosh didn’t even get a reprimand for that one) You shoot your boss in the head, without knowing that he will come back? Doesn’t matter, you’re totally and completely forgiven. I guess when one lives forever, grudges seem pointless. Also, and now I’m depressing myself, Jack is so desperate for someone to accept him that he’s willing to forgive being killed if it means they won’t think he’s a freak. Also, what it is with Torchwood and shooting their boss in the head? Two out of five people did it. Huh.
6. I admit I have major problems with spatial orientation – I cannot read a map, and I never have any sense of where I am, and it’s so frustrating because in my mind, all the streets are always at a right angle to each other, even though I know it cannot possibly be true – but I can’t be the only one who cannot understand the layout of the hub, can I? I just don’t get it. It’s like Hogwarts.
7. When Ianto propositions Jack with a stopwatch, it foreshadows the fact that their time together will be measured in seconds, as far as the bigger picture it concerned. That is also depressing.
8. I think that they made Tosh and Own too young. They both look older than their alleged age, especially Owen (I don’t know how old the actors are, but I think they are quite a bit older than their characters), and they act it. I don’t understand why they felt the need to make them that young. It can’t have been for sympathy, because there’s not much difference in terms of a sense of waste between someone dying in their late twenties or in their early or mid thirties. It’s still too soon, and the audience would’ve got the point one way or another.
I’ll probably have quite a few more of these. I think about this stuff a lot.
MY FAVOURITE trope is the
“leave all your weapons”
*takes out far more weapons than expected (or logically able to carry)*and then
“i said ALL of them”
*takes out a dozen more weapons from increasingly improbable locations*
And then
*stern look**pulls out one more tiny pistol*
(gif via @torchwoodgifs)
like GOD gray was jack’s brother he was the kid jack grew up playing catch with and fighting over the tv remote with and heckling while he was doing homework and kicking and punching and hugging and having the kind of closeness that only siblings have – and then having that ripped away, realizing the absence of his hand in jack’s when they were fleeing for their lives and the singular instinct was to run, the terrible knowledge of not-thereness stretching from seconds of panic to minutes to hours to years and the sinking, awful knowledge that what was happening to him must have been soul-breaking. gray was jack’s responsibility, his little brother, the first person he ever lost and jack’s only link to home – and more than that, even, jack’s only link to a time when he was normal, when he was alive in a way that didn’t feel unnatural and wrong and unreal, when he was a part of the mundane and the ordinary world. he’ll never have that again.
and we don’t think what gray’s reaction to seeing jack again must have done to him, both in the short term and the long – jack lost gray’s love and he lost his trust, he lost gray’s unique dependence on him as a brother, he looked into gray’s eyes and found in them anger and brokenness and resentment for jack, his own blood, who had let go of his hand, however blamelessly, and condemned him to a fate in which his spirit had been snapped and allowed to fester with hate and blame. by that, by the knowing of that, jack lost whatever he had left of his original personness. he lost whatever remained of his ordinariness. that’s got to be a terrible, terrible blow to weather, especially for jack, who must have clung to the hope that somewhere out there in time and space his brother was alive, his brother was alive and happy and normal (please god, jack might have thought in a moment of weakness, let him be normal) and that perhaps gray looked up at the stars and remembered his brother and thought, wherever you are, i hope you’re all right. i forgive you. gray couldn’t forgive him and you can see the degree to which the loss of jack’s last vestige of his home – more than his home, his family and his childhood and his entire could-have-been life – utterly breaks him.