(no subject)

I figured out yesterday's bunny!

Okay, so we had a tragic predestination paradox, a time travel device that is thoroughly useless because it kills the traveller. And whoever gets thrown forwards knows they go back to die in the crash because it already happened. So I was trying to figure out if I should do that to Owen or Ianto. But then it gets boring because they run around trying not to die and then they die.

Except, not *or*. Have Owen *&* Ianto time jump forwards - and know one of them has to go back and die, because it already happened.

Now we have tension. Conflict. A screwed up mess.

Win!



Of course then the thing is either we make Owen noble and then kill him, we keep Owen selfish and then kill him, we keep Ianto noble and then kill him, or we make Ianto selfish and then kill him. Or we make Owen selfish and kill Ianto, or Ianto noble and then kill Owen.

... is that all the combinations?

ANYways, what I mean is: I like Ianto. I want Ianto to live. I thoroughly dislike Owen and would quite like to blow him up a bit. So if I send Ianto and Owen into a situation where one of them inevitably dies, it comes out as a bit of Owen bashing *even if* I let him live. Or *especially* if. Because we likes Ianto, and if Owen is even indirectly benefitting from Ianto's noble and inevitable demise, we hates him muchly.

And whichever ending is set up it's author fingerprints everywhere. I mean, it's always an author's choice what happens, but sometimes it gets really *obvious*.


So I'm back to 'made of lose' for this plot.

Even if I get the whole team involved then it's still a big clunky ending.

If Jack is one of the candidates then he's the only one with a chance of surviving, so naturally he'd go. Except this time travel stuff is the only thing likely to end him, because he could be time looped or annihilated rather than simply killed, so he's at equal risk to everyone else. Having him walk in all "Hi, did you miss me?" would be... Hmmm, actually, having him walk in *oblivious* and all "Hi!" would be interesting, because then he *Time travelled back* so he could take the kaboom! And then he dies and doesn't die! And he'd know that the kaboom is his tragic and inevitable demise *but* he, being Jack, might have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years first.

And at the end of all that he gets to come back and spend his last day on Earth with Ianto.

So at some point in the tragic and inevitable future (because Ianto is mortal, so time's winged chariot is just as much a crash crash as a dying train) after Ianto dies, Jack will have saved up that one last day, and he can visit it any time he wants.
With that probable certain death afterwards.
And knowing it really is the *last* day either way.


oooooh... suddenly I like it! We get all the angst, the tension, the big choice, the arguments, and then we get all that at the end! And it isn't a magic out, it isn't saying 'oops, not inevitable after all!'
And it makes Jack mortal, but in a really specific way.
*And* it leaves a possibility of massively buggering up spacetime if he dies in any *other* way, so suddenly he'll have to be a bit careful about that.

Joy!


It only really works if it's a Jack comes back after season 1 story as well, yesno? Because otherwise he'd not be oblivious?

But he could have just wandered off to somewhere geographic and then wandered in while he knows he's away. That would mean the Doctor wouldn't be in any way involved, and wouldn't be turning up ready to magic things better. I really like to avoid the magic Doctor endings.



I think this plot has become worky.
'Cure' Jack of his immortality the hard way - make there be a limit because he knows he's already dead!
Nifty!

Character lairs, dragons, sex; Compare/contrast

Been reading that 'Studying Plays' some more. Have vague hopes of finishing it before next semester starts, which is only possible if I don't count today on account of it not having class in it.

Had a bit about character lairs - areas of the set that are associated with only one character, where that character goes but nobody else is allowed. In that sense, Jack and Ianto both have lairs within Torchwood, and both of them are sort of two or even three stage. ( Read more... )

almost completely seperately


Intertextuality
I was thinking about 1-02 in Torchwood and Angel, and how they've got the sex monster thing going on both places. ( Read more... )

I was wondering if anyone did a detailed compare/contrast on the episodes everyone was complaining was exactly like X. Because sometimes that means they're having a discuss with X.

... come to think, I'm wondering if *I* did a compare/contrast already... tags could be useful...



the more I meta though the more I wander around the whole building and every episode.



The Hub is an interesting place. 1-04 gives us a sense of claustrophobia, them running around a small space trapped in it. But 1-13 tells us the place is bloody huge, nine levels *plus* whatever Ianto opened up special. Bigsmall. Or Smallbig.
(There's an obvious xover comparison there. Sort of.)

(no subject)

The thing with watching Torchwood is you start looking at other stuff and wondering why they left out the kissing parts.
... yeah, the slash, it is not subtext. Anti-slash goggles would have to be there to not see it.

Do we see this?

Still 'Studying Plays'
There's a section on props and the flexibility and transformation of associated meanings.
Their example: Two bits of wood nailed together can be a sword, or a cross, and by convention the audience accepts that.
These transformations can bring different meanings into association.

So, applying that to television.

The dominant convention on TV is ... bugger, naturalism or realism? Or both. Or something.
(I hate it when I start out sounding smart and it goes away).

What I mean is

On television it's accepted that the way to do things is to make things look like they're real. Like that's a real room you could really walk into and pick things up and the buttons would all work and stuff. You don't tend to get two bits of wood nailed together except on children's TV, and I haven't watched that in so long it may have ceased to be true there as well. Which would be a loss. You can get different effects out of some of the cool stuff I remember from kids shows, like watercolor backgrounds and animations you can wander into.

So when TV does something like have a shiny bit of angular plastic and call it alien, we reckon we see an actual alien object, as put together by the props department. And then if it looks a bit shonky we reckon it was either meant to be a shonky cheap alien or the props department ran out of budget. We're reading it as if they're trying to be realistic, somehow, even when they're completely totally making things up.

I mean, on many levels, it wouldn't hurt the story if they had a post it note that says "This is alien tech. Got it? Good."

Whilst acting they sometimes *do*, or at least the Myfanwy shaped equivalent.

What I was thinking though is how assumptions about budget and reading conventions can interact.

Wardrobe, for instance. Is a bit of a bugger. In Buffy I can read it and get actual meaning out, to the point I can make predictions based on what people are wearing and they stand up. Not 100%, obviously, but to a fun degree. I can associate colors with themes, emotions, characters, teams, and places. It's a useful meaning carrier.

Highlander? If I try to look at it that closely? Makes my *head* hurt.
There's this one pair of earrings looks like a vase that every blonde woman in the first two seasons wears. Seriously. If you try and get realistic/plausible in 'verse explanations for it they get really *bizarre*. You basically just have to accept that the wardrobe department had only that one pair of dressy earrings and pretend we don't see them.

But other times it's borderline, or there's a story that stands out and actually does things on purpose with the parts we usually aren't seeing. Like, sometimes shared clothes means they have a clothing budget somewhat smaller than my personal one, and other times they mean that a character wants to be the other character when they grow up. Other times they may or may not mean the characters in question were shagging, depending on what goggles you're wearing. I think there's one jumper that would, by that rule, indicate that the entire male recurring cast were, on occasion, ending up in situations where they needed to borrow a fresh set of clothes. It's either headache inducing or slash bait, depending.

Torchwood?

Has it's own 'do we see this' moments. Aplenty.

Like, there's one shirt that either all the men have worn or all the men have their own version of. Do we see that? Did they just need something clean and light blue? Or are they dressing them similarly to make some kind of thematic statement? Or does it indicate they're actually borrowing clothes from each other? Or, and this is where it gets headachey much, is it some complicated mixture of all of them, and we need to switch codes between scenes?

Then there's props. Alien props cost money. So, if a prop gets re-used, is the *object* reused, do we see it in both places? Or do we assume they have a budget to stretch and call them entirely seperate things?

Tosh and the door opener.

There's an item that is associated with Tosh in two early episodes, looks identical, but has dialogue cues that it's unfamiliar to her the second time and does different things. Which to rely on? Well you can handwave and say she didn't see how reading a book would be useful in their current situation and then she knows the item but not the use, which makes it the same. Easy. But... did they mean that? And if not, why reuse it?

So I was thinking, transforming meanings means associating them.
Book scanner and computer interface / really fancy skeleton key
stolen knowledge / secured doors
knowledge / opens doors

... useful.
... and all associated with Tosh.

Plus then when Tosh goes missing pastwards, Owen uses the same thing to look for the way to come get her, only he uses it as a key and it opens an empty safe, so it turns out a bit useless in that way.

One vaguely wonders about it's data backup capacities and what it had been reading lately.

But then everything important on my laptop computer is also on two or three different memory sticks too.

(Because my notes fit into convenient memory sticks now. All my notes. And all my fiction. That I've ever written. The expanding capacity of computers is *amazing*.)
(Course my artwork is a whole other story, and if I worked in vid that would be something else again, but.)


I think the problem is that sometimes you need a set of reading tools and sometimes you get static from them instead, and not everyone finds it fun applying different tools to see what they get.



Also, once you start noticing earrings, it gets really really irritating.
Well, to me.
Sometimes.


YMMV.



... I still have 40 pages to read and I keep stopping every two or three to do this to Torchwood. I'm not even doing the suggested exercises to Torchwood, which one suspects would be quite useful. But half of them require use of drama text and we only get the performance text from TV so it don't quite work.

(no subject)

Methos in The Source
I stand ready to repress all knowledge of this movie, as I have several other Highlander films and quite a few episodes
but PW is very, very pretty.

Getting more so as he ages
though that whole 'Immortal' thing is harder to sell in that context.

Men with swords = yaays.

PW with a sword to his neck = kinky yaays.



He really needs to be on Torchwood.
And by 'Torchwood' I mean 'Captain Jack'
and by 'Jack' I mean 'naked'




Having said 'pretty' you might want to ignore the glasses, the helmet, and the fringes on the coat. Leather good, but random stringy bits not so much.

His sword is pretty too. There's close ups.