Top posted shorter version of Torchwood CoE reaction

[neadods]

Now that I've had a night's sleep, I'm slightly able to more distill my main objection to CoE. It's not Ianto's death. It's not the death of the Frobisher family. (I found that quite effective, actually.)

It's that after using the power of suggestion with the Frobishers, I was then asked to watch the lengthy death of a child. It's as if I went to rent an action film and found a snuff film in the box. Making me watch that makes me feel soiled.

And then I was supposed to feel for the pain of the person who killed him. Feel bad for poor widdle feelings of the man who did it, who made everyone around him feel *worse* because it was All About Him and not actually about the lover who died never hearing "I love you," the daughter forced to watch her son die instead of being mercifully knocked out, the confused and frightened boy being fried without even a quick "I'm proud of you. You're saving everybody" that might have let him go into his last moments confused but calm.

Cry me a river, Jack Harkness. They felt something too, but in your sudden and uncharacteristic monstrous selfishness, it's as if you don't realize that they're actually people too. Even Gwen and Rhys, the one consistent bright spot of CoE, get blown off because other people have nothing worth saying. It's All About You.

I miss the Jack Harkness who was admittedly shallow and selfish, but who made a point of telling the Doctor that he never, ever hurt people.

That said, I'm surprising myself by making Torchwood fic recs. Both are CoE epilogues, so spoilers for the entire miniseries.

wendymr's Seventh Circle of Hell
dark_aegis' Damaged Goods

Comments

[mondyboy.livejournal.com]

"We don't NEED to see it. We can see it ANY time we want to by turning on the G*dd*mn NEWS of the Middle East! Every day brings us new headlines about how many civilians/bystanders/INNOCENTS were slaughtered today by walking/driving bombs. The news is FILLED with men and women wailing over the bodies of their loved ones, their own hearts torn out and their own souls destroyed."

I think there's an interesting argument and debate here about the role of escapist fiction. I'm currently reviewing the SF work of Thomas Disch on my LJ, and it was quite clear from his stuff that he used SF to comment on the world - in his case Vietnam, the Cold War etc - and his feelings about life in general. His work is grim and sad and disturbing and death play a major role. Algis Burdrys and others, who believed that SF should be about hope and the future, hated his work.

Personally, I think good drama, whether it be Torchwood or Doctor Who, should, sometimes, be confronting and hard to watch. But that's me.

"and I hope he brings a rain slicker to Comic-Con, for the rotten tomatoes they'll be throwing at him."

And I hope that doesn't happen. It's one thing to ban someone, but it's another to vilify someone in public over what is, at the end of the day, a TV show. He's not George Bush, and there should be throwing of shoes.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I think good drama, whether it be Torchwood or Doctor Who, should, sometimes, be confronting and hard to watch.

I think that there is a line between drama and escapism, and that Torchwood and Who, both of which have a fairly well established reputation as escapism - sometimes with bite, but always escapism. If I wanted confronting and hard drama, I'd be watching something else.

[mondyboy.livejournal.com]

Agree with you on Who.

Torchwood I'm not so sure. But that's only because I don't think the show has ever had a steady direction. It's always been all over the place. I mean, it's not a hard stretch to think that a show that did a story on human cannibalism, or mind rape might do one which has a child dying painfully. Or maybe not.

But that's why I don't think children of Earth was actually Torchwood anyway.