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(Note: review contains spoilers for Children of Earth)
A very long time ago – on 31 July 2007 so just over two years ago – I took part in a 'pay it forward' meme and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
becky_h requested from me a review or commentary of End of Days. I never got round to it, mainly because when I finally was able to rewatch it, it was during a hurried rewatch of the whole of S1 before S2 aired and I didn't feel able to form any interesting thoughts about it.
However, I watched it again last night (as part of another rewatch of Jack's whole story which will hopefully lead to me actually being able to watch Children of Earth again by the time I get there) and found I did have a few thoughts, so here's my review, two years late but better late than never!
I was a little underwhelmed by this episode. It was always going to be difficult to top the fantastic Captain Jack Harkness, which would have been perfectly fine as a season finale for me, but of course RTD wants big explosions and huge amounts of angst (even huger than CJH) and ridiculously enormous CGI monsters for a season finale so we got End of Days instead.
Jack's motivation
Watching very much from Jack's POV (because this rewatch is about re-establishing his canon in my head for RP/fic purposes), I found myself extremely unsure about his motivation in this episode. We saw the story very much from the POVs of his team, because it was they whom Bilis was trying to convince to open the Rift, and we the viewers had to be made to want the Rift opened too. And I have to say that killing off Rhys definitely made me want to open the Rift, because I love Rhys and it's hard to imagine S2 and especially S3 without him.
Anyway, it was hard therefore to try and work out why Jack didn't want the Rift opened. Yes, it was dangerous, but so was what was already happening, with people falling through the Rift left, right and centre and bringing the plague and so forth through into our century. But he admitted he didn't have any answers to how to solve that, so surely opening the Rift, which had a chance of solving the problem should have been the obvious thing to do. He didn't have any other options!
He also seems strangely distracted through of this, somehow distanced from what's happening. Almost as if he's given up. While the others rush around and panic about things, Jack just seems to stand and watch. I'm not sure how this ties into Captain Jack Harkness – perhaps he feels fatalistic and what will be will be after falling in love with his hero knowing he's going to die the next day, or perhaps he's starting to feel his immortality, that everyone on Earth could die but he'd still be there watching them go – but it doesn't seem like the normal Jack who takes the weight of the world on his shoulders and tries to protect everyone.
Jack/Ianto
Having now rewatched it all, I can totally see how I got very nearly to the end of S1 without realising that Jack and Ianto were (apparently) shagging – in fact, without even knowing Ianto's name! As far as I can see, there was the stopwatch scene in TKKS, which came completely out of the blue as far as I was concerned, and then nothing until this episode, when suddenly Ianto's concern for Jack when Owen's shot him and then the coat-sniffing business when Jack's really dead finally looks like something more than just doing his best for the job and more like a crush on his boss, and then, even more weirdly, when Jack revives at the end Ianto goes to shake his hand but Jack hugs and kisses him! And this is even more out of the blue considering Jack's assertion to the real Jack that "there's no-one."
The only way I can make this work for myself, from what I see on screen, is that Ianto perhaps started crushing on Jack after Cyberwoman, in a weird almost Stockholm way, and that perhaps Jack had given him a few shags to try and ensure his loyalty. The relationship definitely comes out as extremely one-sided right up until that kiss at the end of in End of Days. That kiss, then, is perhaps Jack realising, in the aftermath of everything, that he's not alone, that he has people who care about him (he's very huggy with all of them in that moment) and that maybe he ought to actually give some of Ianto's devotion back to him.
Which of course he then immediately goes back on by chasing off after the Doctor, but that's the only way I can read that scene, I think!
Gwen
Coming back to S1 after having watched Children of Earth was weird for me, because I'd started to like Gwen in S2 and in S3 I loved her. Yet rewatching S1, I can see why I despised her at first. She's come such a long way from the woman who cheated on Rhys with Owen and then retconned Rhys so she could tell him about it. In S1, Gwen was slipping under. She'd been plunged into this horrific, dark world where suddenly everyone's nightmares were actually true and she couldn't deal with it. She spent the whole of S1 floundering, and clinging to Jack, because Jack was the one who'd got her into it, and Jack was strong and heroic and couldn't die, and – as she says in End of Days - she believes in him. She needs him to come back, even more than she needed Rhys to come back, because to her, if Jack's there then everything's going to be all right.
And because he's come back, she seems strangely calm when he disappears so soon afterwards and she tells the others, "Jack's gone." I think the sheer act of Jack coming back from the dead there, and confirming her faith in the certainty of things, has made Gwen stronger. And by the next time we see her, in KKBB, she's this calm, confident woman who's taken charge of Torchwood in Jack's absence and who isn't floundering any more. Well, okay, there's still some floundering in S2, but she's grown up a lot.
I saw a lot of people complaining about Gwen and Rhys getting a 'happy ending' at the end of Children of Earth, but in a way, I think if anyone has earned a happy ending it's Gwen.
Well, obviously Jack's earned one too, but his ending is still one hell of a long way off. *g*
And finally…
Now that I know the layout of the Hub and the geography of the Plas above, it finally makes a kind of sense that you'd be able to hear the TARDIS taking off, since obviously it would reverberate down the water tower. *g* And the wind that disturbed all the papers etc. would waft down the tower or something…
I do think they needed to make it a bit clearer, though, that a few minutes had passed between Jack grinning crookedly at the hand in a jar and Gwen coming out of his office going, "Jack?" Because he had to go and find a rucksack (and not in his office, because Gwen was in there – perhaps it was Ianto's?) and bung the hand in a jar in it and get it on his back and dash off through the cogwheel and up the stairs, presumably while Tosh, Owen and Ianto were coming down in the lift with their coffee, and all the way round and into the Plas before the TARDIS took off. Still, I can just about make that work in my head. :-)
A very long time ago – on 31 July 2007 so just over two years ago – I took part in a 'pay it forward' meme and
becky_h requested from me a review or commentary of End of Days. I never got round to it, mainly because when I finally was able to rewatch it, it was during a hurried rewatch of the whole of S1 before S2 aired and I didn't feel able to form any interesting thoughts about it.However, I watched it again last night (as part of another rewatch of Jack's whole story which will hopefully lead to me actually being able to watch Children of Earth again by the time I get there) and found I did have a few thoughts, so here's my review, two years late but better late than never!
I was a little underwhelmed by this episode. It was always going to be difficult to top the fantastic Captain Jack Harkness, which would have been perfectly fine as a season finale for me, but of course RTD wants big explosions and huge amounts of angst (even huger than CJH) and ridiculously enormous CGI monsters for a season finale so we got End of Days instead.
Jack's motivation
Watching very much from Jack's POV (because this rewatch is about re-establishing his canon in my head for RP/fic purposes), I found myself extremely unsure about his motivation in this episode. We saw the story very much from the POVs of his team, because it was they whom Bilis was trying to convince to open the Rift, and we the viewers had to be made to want the Rift opened too. And I have to say that killing off Rhys definitely made me want to open the Rift, because I love Rhys and it's hard to imagine S2 and especially S3 without him.
Anyway, it was hard therefore to try and work out why Jack didn't want the Rift opened. Yes, it was dangerous, but so was what was already happening, with people falling through the Rift left, right and centre and bringing the plague and so forth through into our century. But he admitted he didn't have any answers to how to solve that, so surely opening the Rift, which had a chance of solving the problem should have been the obvious thing to do. He didn't have any other options!
He also seems strangely distracted through of this, somehow distanced from what's happening. Almost as if he's given up. While the others rush around and panic about things, Jack just seems to stand and watch. I'm not sure how this ties into Captain Jack Harkness – perhaps he feels fatalistic and what will be will be after falling in love with his hero knowing he's going to die the next day, or perhaps he's starting to feel his immortality, that everyone on Earth could die but he'd still be there watching them go – but it doesn't seem like the normal Jack who takes the weight of the world on his shoulders and tries to protect everyone.
Jack/Ianto
Having now rewatched it all, I can totally see how I got very nearly to the end of S1 without realising that Jack and Ianto were (apparently) shagging – in fact, without even knowing Ianto's name! As far as I can see, there was the stopwatch scene in TKKS, which came completely out of the blue as far as I was concerned, and then nothing until this episode, when suddenly Ianto's concern for Jack when Owen's shot him and then the coat-sniffing business when Jack's really dead finally looks like something more than just doing his best for the job and more like a crush on his boss, and then, even more weirdly, when Jack revives at the end Ianto goes to shake his hand but Jack hugs and kisses him! And this is even more out of the blue considering Jack's assertion to the real Jack that "there's no-one."
The only way I can make this work for myself, from what I see on screen, is that Ianto perhaps started crushing on Jack after Cyberwoman, in a weird almost Stockholm way, and that perhaps Jack had given him a few shags to try and ensure his loyalty. The relationship definitely comes out as extremely one-sided right up until that kiss at the end of in End of Days. That kiss, then, is perhaps Jack realising, in the aftermath of everything, that he's not alone, that he has people who care about him (he's very huggy with all of them in that moment) and that maybe he ought to actually give some of Ianto's devotion back to him.
Which of course he then immediately goes back on by chasing off after the Doctor, but that's the only way I can read that scene, I think!
Gwen
Coming back to S1 after having watched Children of Earth was weird for me, because I'd started to like Gwen in S2 and in S3 I loved her. Yet rewatching S1, I can see why I despised her at first. She's come such a long way from the woman who cheated on Rhys with Owen and then retconned Rhys so she could tell him about it. In S1, Gwen was slipping under. She'd been plunged into this horrific, dark world where suddenly everyone's nightmares were actually true and she couldn't deal with it. She spent the whole of S1 floundering, and clinging to Jack, because Jack was the one who'd got her into it, and Jack was strong and heroic and couldn't die, and – as she says in End of Days - she believes in him. She needs him to come back, even more than she needed Rhys to come back, because to her, if Jack's there then everything's going to be all right.
And because he's come back, she seems strangely calm when he disappears so soon afterwards and she tells the others, "Jack's gone." I think the sheer act of Jack coming back from the dead there, and confirming her faith in the certainty of things, has made Gwen stronger. And by the next time we see her, in KKBB, she's this calm, confident woman who's taken charge of Torchwood in Jack's absence and who isn't floundering any more. Well, okay, there's still some floundering in S2, but she's grown up a lot.
I saw a lot of people complaining about Gwen and Rhys getting a 'happy ending' at the end of Children of Earth, but in a way, I think if anyone has earned a happy ending it's Gwen.
Well, obviously Jack's earned one too, but his ending is still one hell of a long way off. *g*
And finally…
Now that I know the layout of the Hub and the geography of the Plas above, it finally makes a kind of sense that you'd be able to hear the TARDIS taking off, since obviously it would reverberate down the water tower. *g* And the wind that disturbed all the papers etc. would waft down the tower or something…
I do think they needed to make it a bit clearer, though, that a few minutes had passed between Jack grinning crookedly at the hand in a jar and Gwen coming out of his office going, "Jack?" Because he had to go and find a rucksack (and not in his office, because Gwen was in there – perhaps it was Ianto's?) and bung the hand in a jar in it and get it on his back and dash off through the cogwheel and up the stairs, presumably while Tosh, Owen and Ianto were coming down in the lift with their coffee, and all the way round and into the Plas before the TARDIS took off. Still, I can just about make that work in my head. :-)