Russian class was boring. I'm aware people have busier lives than mine, with their Dienstreisen and bank jobs and computer specialist jobs and lawyer jobs and did I ever feel like a total loser when we were talking about our professions a few lessons ago, lives that aren't spent between mind-numbingly boring work and writing endless Torchwood meta, but I still wish they'd study a bit more, especially those who'd already missed one lesson before Easter break, so that we wouldn't have had to repeat everything all over again today, but could have (gasp, horror) actually moved on . ::grumbles::


And speaking of Torchwood meta... I've been browsing through reactions and reviews for Fragments on torchwood_three and couldn't quite help noticing that apparently no one else saw the implications for Jack's arc that I saw... Which kind of begs the question, am I a bit delusional? Over interpreting? Over-identifying? Have I gone the way of the crazier kind of Harmonians? Should I find something else (and probably more useful... perhaps I'd already be fluently speaking Russian?) to occupy my (apparently) brain-in-overdrive with?

I'd say I've been imagining things, except that I pretty much don't even have an imagination, much less an over-active one. Yet for me this was the episode where for Jack everything clicked into place like that, Adrift, his whole psychology, and if I had any kind of imagination or writerly talent I'd be writing fic by now instead of more metaish stuff. The Jack/Ianto part of yesterday's post I had to think about more, the part about Jack was just there.



I think we're meant to see that Jack's time at Torchwood wasn't a particularly happy one. There's a reason there's not a single positive moment or memory shown between Jack's recruitment to Torchwood and him standing there with Alex's blood on his face, just a sequence of updated files. There's plenty of bleakness and desperation in Jack even in S1, and by then he at least had some control over his life, TW Cardiff on his own terms and his own (mostly) hand-picked team -- which he still left without a backward look or a good-bye note at the first sound of the TARDIS.

IMO Jack didn't have a plan, not when he joined Torchwood, and not for the next hundred years or so. When they recruited him, he'd only found out about his immortality six months ago (left/lost his wife, too?), travelled to Cardiff from the US (in Utopia he says he was shot on Ellis Island) in the tenuous hope that the Doctor might turn up there eventually and fix him, and meanwhile got drunk, got into fights, and got killed about twice a month. Jack is not at his finest and most heroic there, and I think we're supposed to see that. The one time he actually does stand up to the two TW ladies is almost immediately invalidated when he comes back before they even have to make good on their threats. The man who says 'What will I do in the meantime', as if more than a hundred years only counted as an impediment between now and then, with such a blank, desperate look is not someone with a plan to subvert Torchwood. If anything, he was planning to use them for his own purpose (And how's that for a Ianto parallel?), to find the Doctor, but in that case the implication that the price was going to be having to do or at the very least witness a lot of unsavory things is a given, I think, after the scene with the blowfish alien. But Jack probably didn't give a shit about much of anything right then, or for a while afterwards.

It's hard to say if that was his lowest point, because we still know too little about his life before he met the Doctor, but it's a long fall from his heroism on Satellite 5. He'll have picked himself up eventually, because I think there's a natural tendency in Jack that makes him bounce back at least to a certain extent from whatever happens, but there is no evidence whatsoever that he changed anything in Torchwood at all, before it, along with the dead bodies of the latest team [*], was bequeathed to him by someone who'd seen into the future, or thought he had, and couldn't bear it. And if Alex hadn't done what he did it'd probably still have been 'field agent Captain Jack Harkness' by the time the Doctor finally turned up in Cardiff. No grand Macciavellian plan for a take-over there. What he did indeed do was use its resources to find the Doctor ('was once again to be found operating...'), but as far as we know that's about it. Maybe by the end enough of a silent or even outspoken opposition made Alex believe Jack would turn Torchwood into something different, but even that heavily implies that until then there hadn't been any changes at all.


And when he does take over Torchwood Cardiff he erases his past completely. None of the new recruits knew about Jack's immortality or past at Torchwood, and while they subsequently find out about the former, he takes great care to keep the latter well hidden. A complete new start, tabula rasa. Which is only too logical when the past came with all kinds of unpleasant memories and a lingering sense of guilt and shame. He'd worked for a longer time than he'd lived before he joined them for an organisations whose goals and methods he disapproved of, and (perhaps just as importantly, if not more so) he knew the Doctor would disapprove of; I think guilt is pretty much a given. Jack the time agent maybe wouldn't have felt it as strongly, but the Jack who'd met the Doctor and Rose could hardly have escaped it.


[*] And this adds a rather gruesome note to the closing scene of TKKS and Jack's remark about running out of space; not only must he have know almost everyone in there, he probably put the bodies of those whose deaths only made him the leader of Torchwood Cardiff there himself.