![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThe other day, kindkit asked about bleak Christmas episodes in tv shows, and by sheer coincidence, since the international BBC iPlayer put on the first season of Torchwood (which I don't have on dvd - I have s2 and my beloved Children of Earth), I had the chance to rewatch an episode I hadn't seen for years, which was as good as I remembered. Now s1 is a very mixed affair in quality - hence my not owning it - but there are two episodes which I thought then and still think are sublime, both written by Catherine Treganna (and I still regret she never wrote for the parent show, because her s2 Torchwood scripts are also excellent): Captain Jack Harkness and Out of Time. It is the later which is indeed a Christmas episode - i.e. set just before Christmas, the character mention Christmas a lot, and though I may remember wrongly, it was even broadcast in December. I'm not sure I would call it "bleak" overall, because that's not the emotion you're left with (well, not me), but some very dark stuff happens, and not in a typical Torchwood way. As is lampshaded by a remark from Jack to Ianto, there are no aliens involved here, no monsters, either, no catastrophe to be prevented. "Just three people lost in time." (Which makes it very personal for Jack indeed.)
Out of Time takes a seemingly simple mcguffin - an air plane from 1953 falls through the Rift and ends up in present day Cardiff (just before Christmas) - and makes it into a poignant tale by letting the three interact intensely with three of our regulars. The most optimistic of the three plot threads is the one concerning the youngest inadvertent time traveller, Emma, who bonds with Gwen and is the only one of the three to adapt to and decide for the present day. (Cue lots of neat period details - Emma's delight at bananas and lots of chocolate makes sense coming from somone who lived in food rationing times through the last decade - and slapstick gags, aka naked Rhys, who doesn't know Gwen brought a guest.) Even Emma's plot thread isn't all bliss, though; she's painfully aware she won't ever see her mother again, and the fact Gwen lies about her identity to Rhys serves to highlight Gwen's constant s1 problem of lying to her boyfriend about an increasing number of things (especially since this lie gets found out; indeed, Gwen hitting her own rock bottom, aka the no.1 incident brought up by Gwen haters, ignoring everything she does afterwards, confessing and retconning Rhys is just an episode away). Still, Emma gets to fulfill her dream of a job in London in this new world, and mostly sees its good sides.
The plot thread which looks bittersweet though you could also take the angle of considering it dark, given results and likely results, concerns the air plane's pilot, Diane Holmes, who learned to fly during the war and had no intention of giving it up afterwards. Owen, up to this point usually the most cynical of the regulars (including in his affair with Gwen, which effectively ends in this episode), falls deeply in love with her, and the episode has a neat time reversing conventional gender roles there, as Diane is the adventurer coming and going who while also falling for Owen has no intention of prioritizing this over her desire to fly as she used to (which she can't do in the present and has no patience to wait for). Diane is such a charismatic, devil-may-care character that watching, I never doubt that she makes it through the Rift and is still flying and having adventures somewhere, but you can also be pessimistic; as Owen points out, it's more likely than not that she'll die by flying back into the Rift. The relationship with Diane will affect Owen for the remainder of the first season and trigger his attempt to committ suicide-by-Weevil in the next episode, so for all that their actual scenes in the episode are banter and romance, the dark undercurrent is definitely there.
It's out full front with the third guest character, John, a middle aged businessman, and with Jack Harkness who, having been stranded in time himself, is the one who bonds with him. John is by no means a cuddly like-at-sight character (and has the least sympathetic scene of the three guests when he chews out Emma for partying), but in the end his story is the one I found most affecting. As opposed to everyone else, he still has a surviving family member in the present... his son, who was a child when the time accident happened, and who now is an old man (much older than John himself) with Alzheimer's. The scene where John talks to his son and desperately tries to reach him, reach any fragment of him that still remembers, is gut wrenching and demonstrates the loss by temporal disruption most brutally. After this experience, John decides to committ suicide. Jack finds out in time to stop him, but John points out he'll do it again as Jack can't supervise him all the time, and asks to be allowed to go the way he wants and with dignity. Whereupon something happens that really couldn't have happened on the parent show, and is adult in a way, say, the alien-who-kills-by-shagging shenanigans of ep 1.02 were not: Jack agrees and they sit in the car together while breathing in the lethal fumes, holding hands. Jack, of course, can't permanently die anymore, but the impression you get when watching his resurrection afterwards is that at this point, he wants to. It's the most depressed we see Jack pre- ending of Children of Earth, and the scene I can't help but flashing back to when watching the Doctor Who episode Utopia, when during their long overdue conversation in the radiation chamber the Doctor asks Jack whether Jack wants to die (permanently). If you know Jack Harkness solely from DW, this is not a serious question; if you've watched the first season of Torchwood, which was broadcast before s3 of Doctor Who, it very much is, and so is Jack's reply (that he thought he wanted to, but not anymore). What strikes me about the suicide scene is both how tender it is - Jack is holding John's hand while John dies - and how completely bleak (earlier, when still trying to persuade John to live, Jack said there was nothing after dying, just darkness, which he knew from his first death; Jack when reviving is silently crying, and while John Barrowman is hardly a subtle actor most of the time, he really sells it here). It's not gratious nihilsm: after watching John desperately looking for his son and finding him in his irrevocably unapproachable Alzeheimer state, seeing what age and illness did to his child, you can believe John making this choice, and you can believe Jack choosing not to let him do it alone.
kindkit asked about bleak Christmas episodes in tv shows, and by sheer coincidence, since the international BBC iPlayer put on the first season of Torchwood (which I don't have on dvd - I have s2 and my beloved Children of Earth), I had the chance to rewatch an episode I hadn't seen for years, which was as good as I remembered. Now s1 is a very mixed affair in quality - hence my not owning it - but there are two episodes which I thought then and still think are sublime, both written by Catherine Treganna (and I still regret she never wrote for the parent show, because her s2 Torchwood scripts are also excellent): Captain Jack Harkness and Out of Time. It is the later which is indeed a Christmas episode - i.e. set just before Christmas, the character mention Christmas a lot, and though I may remember wrongly, it was even broadcast in December. I'm not sure I would call it "bleak" overall, because that's not the emotion you're left with (well, not me), but some very dark stuff happens, and not in a typical Torchwood way. As is lampshaded by a remark from Jack to Ianto, there are no aliens involved here, no monsters, either, no catastrophe to be prevented. "Just three people lost in time." (Which makes it very personal for Jack indeed.)Out of Time takes a seemingly simple mcguffin - an air plane from 1953 falls through the Rift and ends up in present day Cardiff (just before Christmas) - and makes it into a poignant tale by letting the three interact intensely with three of our regulars. The most optimistic of the three plot threads is the one concerning the youngest inadvertent time traveller, Emma, who bonds with Gwen and is the only one of the three to adapt to and decide for the present day. (Cue lots of neat period details - Emma's delight at bananas and lots of chocolate makes sense coming from somone who lived in food rationing times through the last decade - and slapstick gags, aka naked Rhys, who doesn't know Gwen brought a guest.) Even Emma's plot thread isn't all bliss, though; she's painfully aware she won't ever see her mother again, and the fact Gwen lies about her identity to Rhys serves to highlight Gwen's constant s1 problem of lying to her boyfriend about an increasing number of things (especially since this lie gets found out; indeed, Gwen hitting her own rock bottom, aka the no.1 incident brought up by Gwen haters, ignoring everything she does afterwards, confessing and retconning Rhys is just an episode away). Still, Emma gets to fulfill her dream of a job in London in this new world, and mostly sees its good sides.
The plot thread which looks bittersweet though you could also take the angle of considering it dark, given results and likely results, concerns the air plane's pilot, Diane Holmes, who learned to fly during the war and had no intention of giving it up afterwards. Owen, up to this point usually the most cynical of the regulars (including in his affair with Gwen, which effectively ends in this episode), falls deeply in love with her, and the episode has a neat time reversing conventional gender roles there, as Diane is the adventurer coming and going who while also falling for Owen has no intention of prioritizing this over her desire to fly as she used to (which she can't do in the present and has no patience to wait for). Diane is such a charismatic, devil-may-care character that watching, I never doubt that she makes it through the Rift and is still flying and having adventures somewhere, but you can also be pessimistic; as Owen points out, it's more likely than not that she'll die by flying back into the Rift. The relationship with Diane will affect Owen for the remainder of the first season and trigger his attempt to committ suicide-by-Weevil in the next episode, so for all that their actual scenes in the episode are banter and romance, the dark undercurrent is definitely there.
It's out full front with the third guest character, John, a middle aged businessman, and with Jack Harkness who, having been stranded in time himself, is the one who bonds with him. John is by no means a cuddly like-at-sight character (and has the least sympathetic scene of the three guests when he chews out Emma for partying), but in the end his story is the one I found most affecting. As opposed to everyone else, he still has a surviving family member in the present... his son, who was a child when the time accident happened, and who now is an old man (much older than John himself) with Alzheimer's. The scene where John talks to his son and desperately tries to reach him, reach any fragment of him that still remembers, is gut wrenching and demonstrates the loss by temporal disruption most brutally. After this experience, John decides to committ suicide. Jack finds out in time to stop him, but John points out he'll do it again as Jack can't supervise him all the time, and asks to be allowed to go the way he wants and with dignity. Whereupon something happens that really couldn't have happened on the parent show, and is adult in a way, say, the alien-who-kills-by-shagging shenanigans of ep 1.02 were not: Jack agrees and they sit in the car together while breathing in the lethal fumes, holding hands. Jack, of course, can't permanently die anymore, but the impression you get when watching his resurrection afterwards is that at this point, he wants to. It's the most depressed we see Jack pre- ending of Children of Earth, and the scene I can't help but flashing back to when watching the Doctor Who episode Utopia, when during their long overdue conversation in the radiation chamber the Doctor asks Jack whether Jack wants to die (permanently). If you know Jack Harkness solely from DW, this is not a serious question; if you've watched the first season of Torchwood, which was broadcast before s3 of Doctor Who, it very much is, and so is Jack's reply (that he thought he wanted to, but not anymore). What strikes me about the suicide scene is both how tender it is - Jack is holding John's hand while John dies - and how completely bleak (earlier, when still trying to persuade John to live, Jack said there was nothing after dying, just darkness, which he knew from his first death; Jack when reviving is silently crying, and while John Barrowman is hardly a subtle actor most of the time, he really sells it here). It's not gratious nihilsm: after watching John desperately looking for his son and finding him in his irrevocably unapproachable Alzeheimer state, seeing what age and illness did to his child, you can believe John making this choice, and you can believe Jack choosing not to let him do it alone.
