Torchwood, spoilers, Jack and memory
Oct. 25th, 2006 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethGreat Expectations quoteage I wanted to type up this afternoon but my computer needed restarting:
"That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."
- Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Someone I was reading via Torchwood community said
Jack drugging Gwen to make her forget what he's told her- complete double standards, considering what he's been through.
And I realised I completely forgot to follow through on All About Jack and the memory issues.
It isn't just that it is a double standard - it's a tool he can use, it's the one tool that made him bitter enough to break with the Time Agency and start pissing them off for fun and profit, and yet here he is using it. It is Jack's personal slippery slope.
Plus
Gwen broke it.
This is a great big Clue and I forgot to notice entirely.
One single image, right?
Which was the image for her? The knife bugged the hell out of her, but she only fully remembered after there was a dead body in the rain with Jack standing over it (yes? need to rewatch... er, or not, since that would be once a day all week...)
So, what will be Jack's single image?
And how far has he been to look for it?
And what chains did he wear, from the time he can't remember?
Guilt like the convict's leg iron?
Gold? Flowers? Thorns?
He doesn't know any more than we do, but they still weighed him down.
How much more now, with that new one day, that gave him all the days?
Flip side, Gwen had that day struck out, but it didn't make any difference. She still ended up confronting the killer.
Only it had made a difference in *her*. Instead of being armoured, with backup the other end of a radio or right beside her, doing her job all official and police, she was alone in the dark in the rain and didn't know she was in danger until she was too far in to get out of it.
If that isn't prefiguring something for Jack they wasted a hell of an opportunity.
He doesn't know friend from foe. Not only does he not recognise the Doctor, he doesn't recognise whoever he pissed off enough to get his memory wiped, just as one scenario.
But with the Gwen story, we've got a kind of inevitability on one side and her own lack of preparedness on the other. And Torchwood's continual efforts to cover up the alien threat do that to *the whole of humanity*. Because the threat is still out there, and will still come, but no one outside the chosen can remember that!
This is fun.
Great Expectations might not be the first place you'd look for Torchwood connections, but I think everything humans make can connect somehow, especially with a human looking and reading and making their own meanings from the combination.
The thing about GE and the other set texts is that they're about the search for identity within the constraints of society.
A lot of books are if you look at them at that angle.
Apply that to Torchwood and I'm sure there's layers and layers of interesting.
"That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."
- Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Someone I was reading via Torchwood community said
Jack drugging Gwen to make her forget what he's told her- complete double standards, considering what he's been through.
And I realised I completely forgot to follow through on All About Jack and the memory issues.
It isn't just that it is a double standard - it's a tool he can use, it's the one tool that made him bitter enough to break with the Time Agency and start pissing them off for fun and profit, and yet here he is using it. It is Jack's personal slippery slope.
Plus
Gwen broke it.
This is a great big Clue and I forgot to notice entirely.
One single image, right?
Which was the image for her? The knife bugged the hell out of her, but she only fully remembered after there was a dead body in the rain with Jack standing over it (yes? need to rewatch... er, or not, since that would be once a day all week...)
So, what will be Jack's single image?
And how far has he been to look for it?
And what chains did he wear, from the time he can't remember?
Guilt like the convict's leg iron?
Gold? Flowers? Thorns?
He doesn't know any more than we do, but they still weighed him down.
How much more now, with that new one day, that gave him all the days?
Flip side, Gwen had that day struck out, but it didn't make any difference. She still ended up confronting the killer.
Only it had made a difference in *her*. Instead of being armoured, with backup the other end of a radio or right beside her, doing her job all official and police, she was alone in the dark in the rain and didn't know she was in danger until she was too far in to get out of it.
If that isn't prefiguring something for Jack they wasted a hell of an opportunity.
He doesn't know friend from foe. Not only does he not recognise the Doctor, he doesn't recognise whoever he pissed off enough to get his memory wiped, just as one scenario.
But with the Gwen story, we've got a kind of inevitability on one side and her own lack of preparedness on the other. And Torchwood's continual efforts to cover up the alien threat do that to *the whole of humanity*. Because the threat is still out there, and will still come, but no one outside the chosen can remember that!
This is fun.
Great Expectations might not be the first place you'd look for Torchwood connections, but I think everything humans make can connect somehow, especially with a human looking and reading and making their own meanings from the combination.
The thing about GE and the other set texts is that they're about the search for identity within the constraints of society.
A lot of books are if you look at them at that angle.
Apply that to Torchwood and I'm sure there's layers and layers of interesting.