Padawan Jinn put a bandaged foot out of bed, the floor a shock of smooth cold under newly regrown skin. It didn’t hurt to ease himself out from the sheets – what ache was left was inside, a stain on his heart that could not be reached by bacta.

He lay down on the ground, face pressed to the plating, metal slick against thigh, hip and shoulder, and he tried to absorb peace through his skin. If only he were not a boy. If only he were a fallen seed, lying on deep soil, quiet in the night, awaiting the sun. But there was no soil on Coruscant – only dirtier and more desperate levels of emptiness. And it was never dark. The tiny sliver of his window was full of dizzying brilliance, as comforting as burning magnesium.

Leather scuffed against carpet, and a shadow paused outside his door.

Please go away.

“Padawan?”

He deserved punishment – deserved more punishment in fact than the silk and cream of that voice seemed to promise. He saw no point in protest, or anything else.

The door opened, and brightness haloed the sword-like form of Master Dooku. Qui-Gon was no coward, so he turned his head slightly and met the black depths of his master’s gaze. It was cool, but concerned. “I feel your despair, Padawan. You and I must talk.”

The elegant gesture of a long arm invited Qui-Gon into the common room. He obeyed, dimly grateful to Dooku for not coming further in and invading the only space in the universe which was his own.

When he had sat on one of the delicate, carven chairs, Yan Dooku returned and put into his hands a porcelain cup of hot, sweet tea. Looking down at the tawny surface of the liquid, surrounded by his Master’s fine things, he felt rough, coarse, utterly out of place.

“Young man,” Dooku said, leaning over him, slender fingers on the back of his chair, “I am deeply angry with you.”

“I didn’t want to kill him.” Qui-Gon had to make a long journey in his mind before he felt himself capable of answering and even so it felt blasphemous, as if he was no longer worthy to speak. “I tried not to.”

“That, my dear child, is precisely the point.” The look was accusing and protective, falcon-fierce, “I am angry because you hesitated.” White fingers grazed the air above Qui-Gon’s partly healed cheek, “Your reluctance almost cost your life.”

Flash of memory, like the hail of blaster fire – the disorientation and near innocence in the slaver’s eyes as he was run through. Qui-Gon hunched against the nausea of that recollection. “But I don’t see why his life was worth less than mine.” The Living Force had streamed about them both – victor and victim – and Qui-Gon had felt the passing of something unique, irreplaceable. Infinitely valuable, and – because of him – broken beyond repair. There must have been another way and I failed to find it. The Force could not have wanted this….

Brushing back the sleek sable of his hair, Dooku straightened, his look of sympathy fading into sternness. “Qui-Gon, you will not find many Masters honest enough to say this, but if you cannot kill without remorse you will be useless to the Jedi Order.”

Qui-Gon breathed in. The ultimatum was as refreshing as snow on his swollen face. He admired the straight talking honesty of his Master – an integrity that others sometimes took for cruelty. “You must decide, Qui-Gon. A Jedi knight must kill. Do you still wish to be a Knight?”

And it wasn’t, after all, as if he had any choice – he was created to be a Jedi, he could no more chose not to than an oak tree could chose to be a rowan. “I do, Master.”

Dooku sighed, took Qui-Gon’s hand and helped him to his feet. “Then go back to bed, Padawan, and in the morning I will arrange for you to take a lesson in death.”

Padawan Jinn put a bandaged foot out of bed, the floor a shock of smooth cold under newly regrown skin. It didn’t hurt to ease himself out from the sheets – what ache was left was inside, a stain on his heart that could not be reached by bacta.

He lay down on the ground, face pressed to the plating, metal slick against thigh, hip and shoulder, and he tried to absorb peace through his skin. If only he were not a boy. If only he were a fallen seed, lying on deep soil, quiet in the night, awaiting the sun. But there was no soil on Coruscant – only dirtier and more desperate levels of emptiness. And it was never dark. The tiny sliver of his window was full of dizzying brilliance, as comforting as burning magnesium.

Leather scuffed against carpet, and a shadow paused outside his door.

Please go away.

“Padawan?”

He deserved punishment – deserved more punishment in fact than the silk and cream of that voice seemed to promise. He saw no point in protest, or anything else.

The door opened, and brightness haloed the sword-like form of Master Dooku. Qui-Gon was no coward, so he turned his head slightly and met the black depths of his master’s gaze. It was cool, but concerned. “I feel your despair, Padawan. You and I must talk.”

The elegant gesture of a long arm invited Qui-Gon into the common room. He obeyed, dimly grateful to Dooku for not coming further in and invading the only space in the universe which was his own.

When he had sat on one of the delicate, carven chairs, Yan Dooku returned and put into his hands a porcelain cup of hot, sweet tea. Looking down at the tawny surface of the liquid, surrounded by his Master’s fine things, he felt rough, coarse, utterly out of place.

“Young man,” Dooku said, leaning over him, slender fingers on the back of his chair, “I am deeply angry with you.”

“I didn’t want to kill him.” Qui-Gon had to make a long journey in his mind before he felt himself capable of answering and even so it felt blasphemous, as if he was no longer worthy to speak. “I tried not to.”

“That, my dear child, is precisely the point.” The look was accusing and protective, falcon-fierce, “I am angry because you hesitated.” White fingers grazed the air above Qui-Gon’s partly healed cheek, “Your reluctance almost cost your life.”

Flash of memory, like the hail of blaster fire – the disorientation and near innocence in the slaver’s eyes as he was run through. Qui-Gon hunched against the nausea of that recollection. “But I don’t see why his life was worth less than mine.” The Living Force had streamed about them both – victor and victim – and Qui-Gon had felt the passing of something unique, irreplaceable. Infinitely valuable, and – because of him – broken beyond repair. There must have been another way and I failed to find it. The Force could not have wanted this….

Brushing back the sleek sable of his hair, Dooku straightened, his look of sympathy fading into sternness. “Qui-Gon, you will not find many Masters honest enough to say this, but if you cannot kill without remorse you will be useless to the Jedi Order.”

Qui-Gon breathed in. The ultimatum was as refreshing as snow on his swollen face. He admired the straight talking honesty of his Master – an integrity that others sometimes took for cruelty. “You must decide, Qui-Gon. A Jedi knight must kill. Do you still wish to be a Knight?”

And it wasn’t, after all, as if he had any choice – he was created to be a Jedi, he could no more chose not to than an oak tree could chose to be a rowan. “I do, Master.”

Dooku sighed, took Qui-Gon’s hand and helped him to his feet. “Then go back to bed, Padawan, and in the morning I will arrange for you to take a lesson in death.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

this looks fabulous! Maybe a little too influenced by Peter Jackson’s films, but lots of fantastic Middle-earth scenery, and a feeling of real authenticity. I’ll be there for the launch

Click here to view the embedded video.

GnlEI: oh hai
Strvn: hai
We can has golden ballz.  Mad king is mad.  Strvn *is Nigmtik*
GnlEI: u suxxors

My overall reaction to this episode is massive squee. That was good! It messed with my expectations in the best of ways. I honestly did buy the idea that John was the bad guy until he explained otherwise. I honestly thought, when Ianto said he was going to try and shut down the nuclear reactor from the inside, that that was the end of him in a ‘going out as a hero’ season finale way. So when Owen went instead I was like ‘oh yes, of course, cos he’s already dead! Even Owen’s mysterious control over the weevils was used in a way that made loads of sense.

I think this episode had the strongest plot I’ve seen in an episode of Torchwood yet. Things worked – the aforesaid Weevils; Jack coming up through Torchwood’s floor not in one of RTD’s usual deus ex machina coincidences but in a carefully set up subplot that made time-travelling sense! I squeed, I honestly did

Of course it made no psychological sense whatsoever. Is there anyone out there who seriously believes Jack would still be sane after being buried alive for a thousand years? He’s falling into the trap of New Who – the trap of making the hero such a ghastly Mary Sue that you hate him. And why has Jack come back speaking like the Bible? Redemption? Atonement? ‘I offered you absolution’? Yes, yes, you were drawn alive out of the grave and now you live forever. Seriously, Jack, you do not make a good Christ figure, and you do not want to make a good Christ figure because someone else has already done that, better. You were more amusing as a messed up con-man trying to become a decent human being than the cut price deity you’re in danger of becoming.

Ahem, but on to other things…

While I’m ranting, can I say that the ‘hero’s evil brother’ thing has been done to death. It had been done to death when Robin of Sherwood revealed that Guy of Gisburne was Robin’s younger half-brother – and that was 20 years ago. If Jack is going to be saddled with mythic archetypes (which frankly don’t suit him) they could at least try to do it differently, or well!

Grey turning out to be evil has got to be the only ‘plot twist’ that can’t have surprised anyone at all. I was honestly hoping that Torchwood would not go there. But it did.

Still, where it didn’t go, though I thought it would, was killing Ianto. So I’m a happy camper. The fact that they killed off Tosh, who is my second favourite character is made up for by the fact that she had one hell of a death scene. Tosh saves the city! And then she saves Owen’s sanity and she does it all while dying from an abdominal wound in extremely well acted agony. Yes, it made me cry, but it made me elated too, because the writers had been consistently letting Tosh down in terms of storylines this series and she at least went out in such a way as to demonstrate to everyone that she was a big damn hero.

Owen – I fully admit that when he got locked in the reactor my thoughts were ‘oh, thank god, they’re finally going to get rid of him properly!’ But he claimed my affection with his wild, honest panic – something so human that you don’t often see from TV heroes. They finally made me believe, too, that he and Tosh might have worked after all, if they’d been given time. So that was bitter sweet and really well done.

Can I say on a shallow level that Ianto storming in and shooting everything in sight gave me a fangirlish squee? Gwen was also awesome with her take-chargeness, though I still find her behaviour with Jack inappropriate considering Rhys. LOL! But it’s amusing that the only people left standing are Jack and his harem. Probably a very good decision, ratings wise, too – since most viewers want to see Jack end up with either Gwen or Ianto, though from what I can tell there’s also a faction who are fine with him having both – and they’re pretty happy too.

To sum up; everything except for Grey and Jack’s overly epic battle = squee. But Jack? You’re not the Doctor, and you’re not any kind of deity, OK? It’s just no fun. (And frankly the Doctor used to be more interesting when he was just a well intentioned time traveling alien and not the messiah too – but that’s a different rant.)

1. Jack

Not particularly pleased to see either John or Grey back. The whole ‘lost brother’ storyline for Jack seems one crisis too many. I mean, being an intergalactic time travelling con-man, who saw his best friend killed at age 16, was totally amoral until redeemed by true love in the form of the Doctor, was subsequently made immortal and then abandoned by the Doctor, spent a couple of hundred years of serial suicide only in order to be rejected by the Doctor again… was this not *enough*? Isn’t an absent (possibly evil) brother and psychotic ex a little tiny bit of overkill? Seriously, do we need to know any more about Jack’s tragic past, when there are aliens to hunt and the world to save on a regular basis?

This is my resistance to heroes coming through, probably. The piling on of ways in which Jack is special only risk making me dislike him for an attention grabbing tosser.

Of course, being an attention grabbing tosser is part of Jack’s charm, but I would hope that the writers themselves were aware of where they were in danger of going over the top. However, I seem to be the only one I know who doesn’t find Jack’s tragic past fascinating, so perhaps it’s just me.

2.Owen

On the subject of tragic pasts; it really says something about how obnoxious Owen used to be that it’s taken being dumped by a potential true love, being killed, being brought back as a zombie and then being given a tragic past in which he was a much nicer person to make him even remotely likable. It’s almost become touching, the fact that even after all of that, he’s still a git

3. Toshiko

I’m afraid I was too busy being horrified at UNIT to notice whether this told us anything new about Tosh. We already knew she was a technical genius and a simultaneously strong but fragile person. I suppose it puts a new slant on her relationship with Jack, though sadly (yet again) casting him as the big damn hero. That ‘silhouetted in the light of the door’ shot was so unsubtle it made me want to throw things. Yes, I get the message, thanks!

But really, UNIT as some kind of Guantanamo bay? Tosh with marks on her face that indicate she’s been beaten up?! ‘Your rights as a citizen have been revoked’? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything so chilling. Have I missed something, because this is not the Britain I live in – or if it is, I want to know so that I can make it stop! It adds an ugly note to the fact that Martha is working for these people, and it makes Jack’s ‘I am your saviour’ entrance deeply distasteful, because it’s quite clear that he works with these people too.

4. Ianto
But now onto the squee. What can I say about Ianto’s backstory that hasn’t already been said by the hoards of other people who were totally delighted by it? It’s certainly tipped me over from watching Torchwood with mild liking and interest to being completely invested in the Jack/Ianto relationship, because Ianto is so cool!

I’m not one of those people who thinks that Ianto was born in a suit – I look on his appearance in Countrycide as being his normal mode of dressing, so seeing him in jeans didn’t immediately make me go ‘oh, Ianto’s trying to seduce Jack’. If anything, I thought this was normal, pre-Torchwood, casual Ianto, who had thought that getting himself into a position in which he could rescue Jack from life threatening peril would be enough to earn him a job. Then when it wasn’t, he tried appealing to Jack’s sympathy – ‘I’m emotionally damaged and I’ll work for nothing.’ When those two approaches didn’t work, however, he finally resorted to appealing to Jack’s baser nature by making himself pretty – putting on a nice suit – and moving the low key attraction that had been there from the start right out in the open. (Seriously, who puts on a suit to go pterodactyl hunting if they don’t have an ulterior motive?)

Ianto is very desperate to get into Torchwood for Lisa’s sake, and I think that he would not have refused to sleep with the boss if that’s what it took. But I don’t tend to read this as that sort of an offer. A woman who makes herself pretty in order to get a man to do something is not necessarily offering sex, not even if she flirts as well – she’s just improving the man’s mood; improving the odds. So I see it as Ianto making himself pretty merely in order to make Jack feel more receptive to him. The real message is ‘look how useful I am at catching pterodactyls (also I look good in a suit), not ‘give me a job and you can have me.’

Why do I think this? I think partly because the director says the segment was intended as a romantic comedy – and to me it comes across as too amusing and lighthearted for something that says ‘and Jack recruited Ianto as his personal whore.’

Also, I think it’s pretty obvious that Ianto is taken by surprise by the sexual spark between him and Jack. He’ll do flirting, he’ll do wearing nice clothes for the boss, but put in a perfect position to offer more he doesn’t do so. He walks away, clearly distressed. At his moment of triumph he’s clearly thinking ‘oh shit, what have I got myself into?’ as well as ‘God, I quite like him and now I have to betray him’, as well as ‘God, I want him and how can I stop myself from betraying Lisa?’

But Ianto’s distress also points out his strength – he’s in absolute mental anguish, but he’s still planning, still making sensible on the spot decisions, still calmly going through what has to be done, and persisting until he gets what he wants. This man is no poor, unfortunate woobie whose love Jack is using and abusing. If there was a character in this series who could put up with Jack and his issues, it would be Ianto.

And I think that’s why this segment made everyone squee so much; it showed the Jack/Ianto relationship was in place from day one. There is no way that these two are mere indifferent fuckbuddies. It makes the emotional meltdown of both characters in Cyberwoman suddenly make total sense; they each felt betrayed by the other and that hurt because they each cared about the other.

It even makes sense of why Ianto spends Countrycide in civvies. If he wore a suit to go dinosaur hunting, it wasn’t practicality that made him dress casually on the field trip. It was a mute dig against Jack.

So it turns out that this was a relationship that began on the first day they met, survived Ianto using T3 (and by extension, Jack) to try and save his girlfriend, survived the real Captain Jack, and Jack running off to the Doctor without saying goodbye, and is now stronger than it ever was. After bringing Owen back and unleashing Death on the world, Jack can hardly claim any moral superiority in the matter of ‘foolish things I did to save someone I loved’. And now it only remains to be seen whether the relationship can stand up to Jack’s psychotic ex-boyfriend.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Ianto isn’t doomed. It would be very like me to have fallen in love with an awesome character just in time for the show to kill him off. (I managed it with Qui-Gon Jinn, Marcus from Babylon 5, One-Eye in Elfquest, both Norrington and Gillette in PotC and numerous others whose names escape me for now. I have a long track record of this!)

It would also be very like the show to get rid of Jack’s boyfriend in a horribly tragic way in order to give Jack something new to angst over.

But I’ll cling to the thought that when has Torchwood ever done anything expected? And hope that Jack/Ianto carries on strong into the next season. It is at least 76% of why I’m watching the show at all

Jack is keeping his baby

Though possibly you may need to read this first, just to make everything clear: What baby, for crying out loud?!!
All I can say is LOL!  Also ‘best vid I’ve ever seen’

http://riskyregencies.blogspot.com/

With reviews of regency romance, as well as articles on Georgiana and Jane Austen, this blog seems to satisfy both sense and sensibility

So, I read the BBC article about how Season 2 of Torchwood had pulled together, got into its stride, left the shaky start of season 1 behind and was now utterly brilliant. Perhaps it was that which left me feeling rather blah at the end of Season 2 Episode 1.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Torchwood fan and I thoroughly enjoyed the episode. In Season 1 I had been alternately fascinated and slightly repelled by each of the team, and I was neutral about the series until the two part finale. At which point the whole thing clicked for me. I suddenly understood that these people might be slightly despicable, really astonishingly incompetent, self centred bickering socially maladjusted losers, but in some way they had all become dear to me despite that. I liked their big dysfunctional family, and I was rooting for them to come through, save the world, and get things right for once.