 by Michael Jensen |
"Torchwood"'s Russell T Davies on Day 4's shocking plot twist
Warning: This post contains spoilers about Children of Earth including Day 5. Do not read if you have not watched or do not want to know the fate of a main character. Last night BBC America aired the fourth episode of Torchwood: Children of Earth which featured the shocking death of Ianto Jones played by Gareth David-Lloyd. Given that Torchwood is a science fiction show, and that more than one character has "returned" to life in one fashion or another, there is one question fans of Ianto are asking: might Ianto come back should the show have a fourth season? Below is Russell T Davies', Torchwood's creator, unequivocal answer to that question which he gave me during a lengthier interview to be posted later.
AfterElton.com: If there’s a fourth series is there a chance that Ianto would be
back or are you prepared to say unequivocally that Ianto’s dead and
that’s it?
AE: Why did you decide to kill off Ianto? So it [Ianto's dying] was maximum damage to Jack. And it had to be Jack who was damaged because he’s the sort of moral player here. He’s the one that gave away 12 children back in 1965 to these alien gods. So actually he paid the price to damage him, to make this a tale of retribution and perhaps redemption all come around to him, you have to kill his lover.
AE: So Ianto died in order for Jack to make that final decision about his grandson. To be so damaged he could do something so awful?
AE: I understand Ianto dying in order to push Captain Jack to do what he needed to do. But a lot of fans felt like they never got to see Jack and Ianto as the full-fledged couple that they wanted to see them as. We only began to see that in this miniseries. So how do you respond to viewers who feel cheated that they got the tragic death without seeing the relationship.
That’s proper grief. I think what you’re talking about there is people lamenting the fact they never saw what could have been. That’s grief. I think you’re being polite and part of what you're saying is that it wasn’t a properly sexualized relationship … that we didn’t show enough details … I think that’s absolute nonsense. [Editor's note: I wasn't referring to their sexual relationship, but their romantic/emotional one.] I think their relationship was beautiful. And it lasted as long as any relationship you see in Torchwood. It’s funny because I know a lot of those people complain in the same breath that you get to see Gwen and Rhys being happy. But equally in the same breath, those same people say they don’t like Gwen and Rhys. So clearly they don’t like the happy characters. So why do they even want the gay people to be the happy characters? I don’t know because the happy characters aren’t the ones they are latching on to. It’s a show in which the story always comes first. You had fleeting sex scenes of Tosh and Owen and of Gwen and Rhys and of Jack and Ianto. You know for a show that was supposed to be all about sex all the time, it actually had very very few sex scenes at all. I think the details of that [Jack and Ianto] relationship were really beautiful and were really lovely and quite unique with one of them being a formerly straight man, the other being an immortal bisexual, the delicacy of the dance between them. I thought it was beautifully written and beautifully performed. And if you are grieving the lack of more of it — that’s because it was working so well. Submitted by on Fri, 2009-07-24 08:18. |
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Your Blog has spoilers for episode 5 ! shame on you.
You state that the interview contains spoilers about Children of Earth. and not to read "if you have not watched Day 4 or do not want to know the fate of a main character"
BUT the RTD interview you quote has a major spoiler for the final episode, NOT just day 4! . It has a spoiler about what Jack does to his grandson!
I am so sorry about!
huh?
whats with the focus on the sexual relationships in the show?
O_o
Bitch, please.
First, I'll go on record as saying that I've seen CHILDREN OF EARTH in its entirety and I loved it. Absolutely loved it. I hated the first series of TORCHWOOD, appreciated most of the second series, and was riveted by this third outing. THIS was what I've wanted from TORCHWOOD from the beginning. It was intense, thoughtprovoking, and all around awesome.
But I take MAJOR issue with RTD saying: "Yes, he’s absolutely dead. I’m sorry but [bringing him back] would just cheapen the whole experience, I think."
The man has NO PROBLEMS cheapening experiences. Witness: in DOCTOR WHO, he traps Rose in an alternate timeline and makes it very clear that there is absolutely, positively, 100% no way the Doctor will ever be able to see her again... Oh wait, there she is. Witness: The Master takes over the world with a bunch of flying head balls, Martha Jones spends a year traveling over the world to muster a resistance...then the Doctor starts to glow and fly, we hit a magic reset button, and that year of hell was all just a bad dream.
I went through the emotional wringer when Rose was trapped in another universe and it SIGNIFICANTLY cheapened my experience when they found a way to bring her back (oh, and leave her with a copy of the Doctor to use as a sex toy). I spent most of the series two finale excited at how the show would continue now that humanity had been enslaved only to have those dreams dashed with the magic reset button.
Killing Ianto was heartbreaking, as the deaths of Owen and Tosh had been the series before. I hope that this interview means that RTD has indeed learned his lesson about cheapening experiences because if this is the new Torchwood, I'm totally on board.
After all that... I have to admit that I'm still holding out hope for the resurrection of Dr. Rupesh. Holy crap, he was hot!
All I can say is
I Must Be A...
...glutton for punishment. I love Russell T's death scenes; they're gut wrenching. And to the criticism that compares Torchwood to Doctor Who, I say that Russell is right. The concept of Torchwood was the dark, gritty, sexy side of the Who-niverse, and miraculous rescues does not fall into that category. If you want everyone to be safe and sound, turn over to the Ceeb for The Sarah Jane Adventures.
In conclusion,
Joss WhedonRussell T. Davies is my master.It's not a question of
It's not a question of wanting everyone safe and sound. I for one would have been happy to see this, or at least a version of it with fewer plot holes, if it had happened in a hypothetical season 5 or late season 4 -- after we'd had time to see the relationship develop properly. Then it would have been even more devastating for Jack and far more dramatically satisfying for us as viewers. Yes, he's Torchwood -- Ianto, Jack, and we all knew he was going to die young. Instead, what we got was him dying for stupid reasons without the relationship ever being given the same status as a het relationship -- in fact, the relationship taking a step back from where it was at the end of last season.
We also lost the chance to see Jack ever be happy for more than a few seconds at a time; yes, he's a tragic character, but without some respite in the misery, the character becomes unbelievably cardboard. It's one thing to have "neverending" misery in the life of a mortal character, but for Jack to stay sane through centuries of trauma without a year or two of healing once in a while just isn't believable. We've seen him be traumatized and pretend to bounce back and be fine, we've seen him be traumatized and struggle not to fall into darkness afterward. This season, after the trauma of "Exit Wounds", we wanted to see him finally have a chance to heal. The relationship with Ianto could have given us that; instead, we just got another anvil to the head.
Good for him
If seeing the true
If seeing the true relationship between the two means just wanting to see the sexual nature, than sure I'll agree. However, I could actually have gone without the sex and have been content with just the kisses. What I really wanted to see was Jack actually giving a damn, and not making a joke of the relationship. We got to see the "love unspoken" between Gwen ALL THE TIME from their stares, banter, and how they interacted, they seemed like more of a couple emotionally than Janto ever did. That's what I was hoping and expecting to find in this season, and we finally began to before RTD kills off Ianto. I suppose Jack's reaction to the death proves he loved him, but my gut tells me had it been Gwen he would have been more torn up as she was played out to be his soulmate.
As for him saying there is no way he'd bring him back, that's sad. Yeah, I agree compared to Doctor Who which makes it's premise on changing history, Torchwood is a much more real world experience as they don't have the Tardis to take them whereever, but I guess I'll have to accept it. Perhaps he'll change his mind and bring him back for an episode or two like they did with Suzie. It may not be a sunset ending, but it'd be nice to have some closure. Hell, the Doctor and Rose got that oppurtunity as they were a popular "couple," so why not Janto?
I Concurr With RTD
Torchwood has always been about hard choices.
Ianto was, well, it was heartbreaking, but from the outset, Torchwood has been a show where dead means dead. Like Suzie. Like Owen. Like Tosh.
To pull off an eleventh hour resurrection WOULD cheapen it, even if it would make me happy personally.
Because not everything should treat death as temporary. It's too DC Comics.
Wait... dead means dead?
Are we watching the same show? Susie dies in episode S1E1, and comes back for an episode later in the season. She nearly kills Gwen as a result.
And are we forgetting that Owen spent half of Season 2 as a walking corpse?
Thank the deity of your choice we've gotten rid of the Resurrection Gloves. Those things that prove dead isn't exactly dead. It's in the first scene of the first episode of the series. They're buried underruins right now.
And then there's Jack. The lead protagonist. Who is immortal. And a TIME TRAVELLER.
Between the Rift, and Jack's probably repairable TIME AGENT wristband, Billis, and any number of other plot devices... I'm sure we can work something out here.
dead?
YES!
Well, by denying the
Like "True Blood" and the various other soap operas ...
All the straight people's relationships are fully displayed and fully realized.
I guess the reason why I think this Ianto death is such a cop-out is because Russell Davies is gay. Why reduce gay visibility any further?
In "True Blood", THERE ARE ONLY STRAIGHT RELATIONSHIPS in the show. There have not been and there currently are not any gay relationships on the show. Also, Alan Ball is gay as well.
So, why are all these gay TV show creators playing down gay visibility?
As much as I am going to
Let's call it what it is
The issue isn't a freepass from tragedies but equal presentation. Let me exsplain the relationship between rhys and gwen was kept to the fore front every week we got pictures of gwen in bed with rhys eating breakfast and having sex going out together holding hands out on pic nics. (normal couple things) when we look at jack and ianto's relationship there in a dark hub in a closet or some other room out of the way you see the little looks maybe a comment but nothing (normal couples do) always hiden and kept as a back story. Throughout TV history we (gays/lesbians) have always been the back story if we are in the story at all. When we are in the story we are portrade as disfunctional, over sexed and girly and unable to be in a long term relationship.
The relationship between jack and ianto was a work in progress with room left to grow and mature like any other loving relationship.
The killing off of ianto was a message from the writer and I believe it was received loud and clear that our relationships have no value and no importants and disgarded with out issue. Eva myles when asked about the death of ianto her response was " ianto had no real importance to the show he was just jack lover he will not be missed and the fans can just get over it charactors die". When RTDwas asked about ianto his statement to ET was if the fans don't like it they can go watch Supernatural. (Maybe we need to show him how much we don't matter)
In season 1 and 2 we see rhys brought back at least 4 times he's been shot,stabbed. we see sussie brought back 2 times, owen 2 times, gwen herself as been shot, stabbed and brought back. Now when it came to tosh who had a lesbian relationship killed 1 time died and ianto gay relationship killed 1 time died.
I don't exspect writers to give us a free pass because of our orinentation. But I do exspect that a relationship that is functional responded to by the views very well and proclaimed the best new relationship on television and nominated for several awards not to be discarded as rubbish just because it's jack and ianto and not gwen and rhys.
Now torchwood season 4 has been writen but not picked up yet and gwen is going to be the head of it . Do really need another program showing us a happy straight couple or should we have been left with jack and ianto a happy gay couple just being real.
and please over look my type o's. Now these are my points of view
Because they're in the entertainment industry
Some clever person commented on one of the other message threads that killing Ianto wasn't actually that daring. What would really have been daring would have been killing pregnant Gwen.
This is very true.
I think that a lot of our love of Torchwood was not rooted in what we were actually seeing onscreen with Jack and Ianto, but what we hoped we would see in some future series.
Instead, they never really got there. Instead even in this series, right before killing off Ianto, he and Jack were depicted as being in a very iffy relationship that neither of them was really sure what it was. This was sharply contrasted to Gwen and Rhys, who were flagrantly showing off their marriage and Rhys's excitment over Gwen's pregnancy. While Jack and Ianto were debating if they were even a "couple", Gwen and Rhys were shopping for a house and picking out baby names.
This is the double-standard that even gay producers and directors readily put onscreen. Even with them, gay relationships aren't quite as "real" as straight ones. Straight people fall deeply in love, show commitment and start families. Gay people just struggle with whether they're even really a couple or not.
In this regard RTD perpetuates anti-gay imagery as much as anyone else. Gays are not committed to our relationships and are expendable when compared to heterosexuals.
This is because they're still pandering to the straight audience. Killing pregnant Gwen, or even making her lose her baby, would have been truly shocking to most audiences. Too much so in fact. So they defaulted back to the "safe" old school option of killing off the gay. It's not a coincidence that they felt the need to put in a scene where crazy old guy uses his super-smell powers to verbally identify Ianto as a "queer".
Ianto was "queer", and in keeping with old tropes he was a queer who was about to punished and killed for being a queer. His empty-headed prettyboy lover (not partner) was going to lead him to his death - by a virus it should be noted, for those that question subtext!
The lover thus proves his moral bankrupcy while the heteros carry on to have their proper family. Homosexuality is punished and heterosexuality is vindicated.All under the watch of gay entertainment players.
Just like in the 50's.
I think
It was too unecessary
If anyone could have gotten to day four of this thing without realizing that Jack and Ianto were having some kind of relationship then they were clearly brain dead. Also keep in mind we had already had the (somewhat better humored) "gay boy" remark from Ianto's brother-in-law on day one.
However, we'd also had Ianto's denial that he was actually gay, as opposed to just being into Jack. And he and Jack really didn't do much except bicker over the word "couple" and get bean-blocked from having sex "blokes do cooking" star Rhys. Ianto's status as a "queer" needed a little burnishing before he was sent off to slaughter.
But it leads me back to where I was before. Wouldn't it have been more "tragic" to kill pregnant Gwen? Or would that have just been a little too "edgy" even for RTD? Drawing a firm statement that Ianto was "queer", without actually having much in the way of queerness (for God's sake, Jack and Ianto didn't even hug after Jack was liberated from the concrete block, and having previously been blown to bits!) was essentially to establishing his expendability.
It was not for us
That's a contradiction and an insult
It's a contradiction because if Gwen is the "human aspect" of the show then wouldn't her death be the more tragic one? Especially with a baby on the way?
Secondly, you are again devaluing Ianto, not least because of his sexuality. It's apparently okay to taunt him, demean him and then kill him. He's just not that valuable a person.
Of course, we have verbal play about him being a "gay boy" or "queer" (and the latter was delivered in a decided offensive tone of voice) but not a lot of depiction of it onscreen. This is contrast to Gwen and Rhys cuddling even while on the run, on the back of a fruit truck, and discussing baby names. The message being that he can be "gay", just not that it can really go anywhere or be allowed to develop into anything. That privilege is reserved for the straight characters.
The gay characters (yes, Jack too really) are denigrated at the same time that your "human aspect" Gwen is being elevated. Ianto's purpose is to die, and Jack's is to do horrible things, all so that Gwen can live happily ever after.
Note that this extends to Owen and Tosh too really. Owen was apparently a casual bisexual and Tosh perhaps a more serious one. They're both dead now too. Gwen, in contrast, had one same-sex kiss while under the influence of alien pheromones. Otherwise she's scupulously straight as an arrow. Funny that she survives.
Not even close to being a gay-friendly message!
Didnt
Follow the thread
I was
Then I invite you
Then I invite you to go back and compare how Jack and Ianto's relationship was depicted versus how Gwen and Rhys's was. There was a HUGE disparity in the levels of emotional and physical intimacy, and even warmth. There was a similar difference in how the relationships were handled in context, premise and even potential. The message seemed to be:
Gwen & Rhys (straight): destined to succeed
Jack & Ianto (gay): guaranteed doom
But
Once again...
...because you seem to be having a very hard time grasping this concept: this site is all about how gays are handled in the media!
You might as well question why it mattered that there were almost no gay characters on television all that far back history. There is not such an abundance of gay characters, much less couples in same-sex relationships, on TV that it's a trivial matter for some of us.
Gwen and Rhys are literally just one out of thousands of heterosexual couples on television. A literal drop in a bucket. It's not as if straight people would have nowhere else to turn if they wanted to see n opposite couple on a TV show, or even if you narrowed the category down to sci-fi drama!
So of course some of us find this a major annoyance. Because what do we have to take Janto's place in the sci-fi genre? Do we have any such characters at all?
And once again
You're right
Let's just have them kill off every gay character on TV! After all, we have no right to expect any gay characters by your logic!
Which is uneven logic at best. Again, why are the straight characters immune? Why is gwen still here? Because she's so wonderful? Or because she's the morally-virtuous "heart" of everything and thus impervious to fatal plot devices?
You misstunderstand
No Suzy was just friggin
No Suzy was just friggin nuts :P
Hmm...
Not to jump into your
Not to jump into your discussion really, but the way you summed up the two relationships was spot-on for me. Rhys is killed in the end of the Series one and is brought back by the end of the episode, but Ianto is dead.period.done.
Thank you, and an excellent point
Rhys shares in Gwen's invulnerability. The Davies Ex Machina got rolled out after that cheesy finale of series one (a godzilla-sized CGI demon, seriously?!) and everything was snapped back to the way it was before and Rhys was alive and fine. That "potential" (to borrow RTD's choice of word) for Gwen and Rhys's relationship could not be lost.
Ianto, on the other hand, expendable as a cheap suit.
Cheap Suit and "Bloody beans...."
I love Ianto's cheap suits. They are so low-rent that they are almost characters in the series. When he first accosts Jack he is in street mufti and could be any bloke in Cardiff. He puts on the suit and it transmogrifies him into Coffee Colossus. He adds the armo(u)r of a vest in series 2.
Having now seen the entire series, I understand that Jack had to leave to escape the horror of his actions, and his mortal BF could not go with him.
I feel we only got a glimpse of their home life and the way Ianto always called Jack "Sir" reminds me of an old slaveboy I used to own. No "Sir" no supper.
It doesn't stop the tears and anguish I feel rewatching Ianto die. "If you believe in fairies, clap!"
"Love me less, but love me a long time" Les Chansons d'Amour
'I think people are just
'I think people are just seeing things that are not there.'
You seem to have a somewhat archaic view of media.
Just because the RTD did not intend for his work to have a homophobic reading doesn't mean that it doesn't. There is both a preferred reading (i.e. how RTD wants the audience to view the media text) of a media text and the oppositional reading(s) (the audience rejects the preferred reading, and creates their own meaning of the text based on technical and cultural codes etc).
Basically, it isn’t possible to see things ‘that are not there’ since the very fact that the audience has read the text that way means that they’re there.
I work
QaF isn't a free pass
Qaf set up a new landscape in British TV. But it doesn't give RTD a free pass. When he's dealing with gay topics in drama he's a contrarian (see Bob and Rose) and there were a tremendous number of rumours that his next drama was going to be about middle-aged men dabbling with very young boys. God alone knows what that will do to gay visibility if and when it comes to fruition.
He's a sensationalist. He may put gay topics front and centre, but he shares the same idea of it being shocking as any Daily Mail or Sun hack.
You're mistaking RTD as some kind of champion of gay rights rather than an explorer of them - and, actually, just because he was the first writer to bring rimming to the consciousness of mainstream television, that's not a defence against him bringing internalised homophobia to his later work as well. Queer as Folk wasn't his definitive statement on gayness.
I never said
Not a self-hater
Agreed, I don't think he's a self-hater. However, I do think he comes across as one of those smug, self-satisfied queens who holds court in a gay pub because he's a successful estate agent who's mixing with plumbers and plasterers.
There's nothing wrong with pushing boundaries - in a lot of ways it should be encouraged. But killing off Ianto wasn't pushing any boundary. It was a cheap and not terribly well-written plot device. If you enjoyed it fair enough, but if that's your level of dramatic excellence, I suggest you look at Hollyoaks if you want to see better writing. Seriously - two guns and a speech against space aliens? That's good drama and writing? You mentioned the Sarah Jane Adventures earlier - even she'd have come up with a better plan than that.
The pushing boundrys
Hilarious
Of course, we have verbal
Of course, we have verbal play about him being a "gay boy" or "queer" (and the latter was delivered in a decided offensive tone of voice)
I believe you Americans were spared the lovely line "you take it up the arse" said to Ianto by his brother in law.
We Europeans "enjoyed" the full treatment.
Brain dead? Ouch!
If anyone could have gotten to day four of this thing without realizing that Jack and Ianto were having some kind of relationship then they were clearly brain dead...
Yipes I never thought of myself as brain dead! While I could see that Ianto was [wanting to be] in a relationship with Jack, it wasn't at all clear that Jack was on board.
What can I say? I disagree with RTD when he says we wanted to see sex. What we wanted to see, I think, is the two men, in a relationship, caring about each other. We all know Jack can do flirting and casual sex. We've seen evidence that he can really care about women. I think what we wanted to see was that level of caring for a man. Not sickeningly sweet declarations of lurv, but a simple mutual caring relationship. You saw it. I didn't. Still, I don't consider myself brain dead... maybe my skull is just thicker than normal?
That said, I liked the first 3.75 days of Children of Earth...it's fun to watch and full of suspense. We'll see how it ends.
That's my point
But perhaps I should have stated it differently. The only way you could have gotten to day four without realizing that Jack and Ianto were in some kind of relationship was if you'd been watching with the Mute button on.
They talked about it a fair bit. Jack and Ianto, Ianto and his sister, etc. Indeed, there was more than a little talk.
But there was nothing else, and that is the ugly homophobic contrast that was drawn between "real" love (Gwen and Rhys) and "queer" relationships. Gwen and Rhys acted like a couple. Jack and Ianto acted like they didn't really know what they were, or whether they even wanted to be anything. It was hard to tell because after a brief surge on day one they were subsequently frigid towards each other right up until the moment of Ianto's death on day four.
This is my major complaint. Their "relationship" was not really depicted at all. Ever. We have always had to settle for innuendo about their relationship, even in series two where it was very explicitly clear that they were having a relationship but in which the details of that relationship were entirely off-screen and left up to the viewer's imagination (starting with Jack asking Ianto on a date we never saw).
That is a sharp contrast to Gwen and Rhys, where nothing could be left to the imagination and their relationship needed to be played out explicitly onscreen, right down to the arguments, domestics and waking up ung over in bed together.
If it wasn't clear that Jack was on board, that is largely because the writers went to some trouble to not depict anything more than the bare minimum they had to about the relationship beyond the fact that it was there.
As for "suspense", sorry, I didn't see that either. CoE was a macrame of tropes with virtually no originality. If anything, days two and three were just tedious because they were blatantly filler meant to keep things stringing along even while shoving the main action in days four and five.Everybody was running around like idiots mostly because the plot (a term I use very loosely here) required that Torchwood act like incompetent amateurs, the British government and military act like pathetic wimps and UNIT to have all gone off with Martha on her honeymoon.
That they planned to kill Ianto was blatantly obvious from day one, what with the heavy-handed foreshadowing stemming from his relationship woes with Jack and the point being hammered home that the people Jack loves always die on him. There was no subtlety here.
I think that part of the "innovative" aspect that has awed everybody is just that this was so different from any regular Torchwood episodes, where they were in their little Cardiff fishbowl and nothing they did seemed to have a noticeable effect beyond the borders of Wales. This gave it a "big budget" feel. The more so as the five stories were connected, rather than the fragmented approaches of series one and two.
What can I say? When they kill off the one thing that made the show enjoyable it should hardly be surprising that some of us stop forgiving all the shortcomings we were previously willing to overlook!
Got it
Ah, OK. I think we are, as they say, "in violent agreement."
I'd quibble that even in the dialog, the "relationship" seemed one sided on Ianto's part, which, to my mind, isn't a relationship: Ianto talking to his sister about Jack and admitting he wasn't sure what was going on. Ianto trying to figure out, in some horribly adolescent dialog, if they were a couple. (Note to Ianto: if you have to work that hard to figure it out, the answer is probably no...or that's how it's been in my world, anyway). So even with the volume at normal levels, I didn't feel like I was seeing (er, hearing) a relationship.
Quibble aside, I totally agree with your major complaint and your discussion of it. After all the build-up about how we would get to see their progress in their relationship, CoE left me feeling betrayed. And then to hear RTD say that, as a fan, all I really wanted to see was more sex, I was dumbfounded. Is the man really that dense? Or is he reflecting how he sees men in relationships (all sex, no caring, no depth)? Poor guy, if so.
Oh, and not to change the subject, but I was not pleased with Day 5. Out with a wimper.
RTD in EW
Well, in Entertainment Weekly RTD dismissively decress that if fans want to see a hot gay couple in sci-fi/fantasy they should watch Supernatural.
His absolute contempt for his gay audience is duly noted.
As far as I'm concerned the arrogant bastard is just so wrapped up in his own ego that he simply can't even relate to the idea of anyone disagreeing with him or thinking he's anything less than a genius. Certainly in his interviews he praises himself at length. Humility is obviously not one of his virtues.
He has contempt in spades.
His absolute contempt for his gay audience is duly noted.
Actually, he seems to have contempt for ALL of his audience. Basically if you don't love EVERYTHING he does your a stupid child who just doesn't understand his genius (at least that's how he comes off to me in the various interviews I've read).
Actually, the snide remark