Tony Fyler
recalls a fine romance.
Have
you ever met someone – maybe someone you work with, or see pretty regularly,
and it’s not thunderbolts, not bam, that’s it, you’re in love, but slowly, over
time, day in, day out they make you smile, or make you proud to know them, and
then one day you find your heart aches if you’re not going to see them? You
find you’ve learned the rhythms of your daily interactions with them and those
rhythms have gone in so deep that you miss them. And then one day you find
yourselves together, and…
Fade
in on Jack and Ianto. Slow to germinate, but dependable as the sunrise, they
grew from boss and peon to trusted colleagues, to a couple that ripped the
heart out of a world of geeks when they were finally parted. Fade out.
There
was kerfuffling from sections of the press when Jack and Ianto first got
together, lots of deliciously troglodytic nonsense about the ‘gay agenda’ of
the show. The irony perhaps being that while Captain Jack actor John Barrowman is
not so much gay as GAY! [Rich - Any
chance of a bizarre bit of stuff here that colours the word in rainbow, just to
overaccentuate the point?], neither Ianto nor Jack are strictly gay
characters – Jack has been shown to be utterly omnisexual, has had at least one
child with a woman, and flirted with Martha and Chantho apparently for pleasure
rather than with any ulterior motive. Ianto on the other hand would be classed
by those who like to box people up as heteroflexible (identifying mostly with
heterosexuality, but refusing to pigeonhole himself as exclusively, all the
time, never-in-a-million-years-anything-else, straight).
Such
kerfuffling also shows a Daily Mailian misunderstanding of the nature of human
relationships, focusing purely on the sexual dynamics of the Jack and Ianto
relationship, rather than the personal dynamics involved.
Meet
Ianto Jones.
Valleys
boy made good, Ianto moved to London to work for top secret
skullduggery-merchants Torchwood at Canary Wharf, where he had a girlfriend
called Lisa Hallett. When his whole life was torn to pieces at the battle of
Canary Wharf, Ianto moved back to Cardiff, bringing Lisa with him. Lisa’s
situation seemed grim, but Ianto had a plan to help her, perhaps reverse the
process using the Torchwood Hub’s power and expertise. That’s Ianto – however
cool and calm he appears on the outside, he loves passionately and completely.
Despite the unlikelihood of success of his plans, he still kept Lisa secret,
waiting for the right moment to help her back to her human life.
Only
after the idea of Lisa’s resurrection is proved hopeless, and a period of
grieving for her, does Ianto seem to come a little back to life – and it’s Jack
who helps him find that spark again.
Meet
Captain Jack Harkness. Or who you think is Captain Jack Harkness. The
central defining quality of Jack is that there’s more to him than ever meets
the eye. Con man, omnisexual, wit, cosmic cowboy with a stride full of sass and
a really good coat – yes, all of these things, but so much more. A man changed
by love of the Doctor, who holds true to his own understanding of the Time
Lord’s creed. A man determined to rebuild Torchwood as a force for good, and
yet a man who could walk twelve children to an uncertain alien future. A man
who could stay away from his child, could let the fairies take an innocent
young girl away from her life and parents. A man crippled by guilt over his
brother, with a sledgehammer gap in his memory, and a man who can never, it
seems, be permanently killed.
If
we’ve learned one thing from 51 years of Doctor Who, it’s that with great age
in a changing universe, what becomes most precious to someone is a way to
connect, a way to be rooted in the world or the cosmos they inhabit and to understand
it, and perhaps most critically, a way to feel it.
Jack
has lost more than anyone will know, and by the time he finds himself in the 21st
century on Earth, he’s also still stranded by an ocean of time from all that
was originally familiar to him so very long ago at the beginning of his life.
He’s trying to re-shape the failed human experiment that is the original
Torchwood in the ethos of a benevolent alien and he himself is no longer sure
what he is, how old he will become or what will happen to his line in the sand
of alien and temporal incursion. He’s acting more on impulse, waiting for the
Doctor to show up, and doing as good a job as he remembers how in the meantime.
Ianto
has been around a while by the time Jack really notices him. Always impeccably
dressed, always on time, always prepared, he may be the least specialized of
the Torchwood team, but there’s still something about him that means Jack
lets him in. Perhaps it’s exactly that – he’s always there, always reliable,
always ready. When the truth about Lisa emerges, it fills the space where the
missing piece of Ianto’s jigsaw has been, and after the events of Cyberwoman,
Jack feels more able to relax around Ianto than any of his other team members,
with perhaps the exception of Gwen.
Indeed
for a while, it’s clear that Jack is searching for someone to ground him in
this world, to force him to remember what being human is all about, and while
it looks as though it might be Gwen who does that for him, oddly, the more she
learns about Torchwood and its work, the more au fait she becomes with it, and
somehow, the less technically human. And so it’s Ianto – quiet, dry,
always-there Ianto, who gives Jack what he needs at this testing time in his
life – a place to be, and a pathway to his humanity. It’s Ianto who’s the
companion to Jack’s Doctor.
It’s
an odd relationship, certainly – for Ianto, the attraction to Jack is his
otherworldliness, his unfathomable mind and nature, while for Jack it’s Ianto’s
very humanity, his diligence, his loyalty, that makes him indispensable, that
make Jack come to rely on him and need him more than anyone else in this time.
By
the time Series Three of Torchwood, Children of Earth rolls around, their
relationship has passed many modern milestones – out in public, displaying
affection, being classed by their friends and colleagues as ‘a couple’. Even
Ianto’s family, once they’ve got over the initial gossip-factor, are welcoming.
They’re also working very much more as a couple – retrieving the
‘hitch-hiker’ together, and even in that context, playing the friendly gay
couple next door. And when it comes time for Jack to right a wrong he did many
years before, it’s Ianto who without hesitation goes to stand with him, because
Ianto understands – while they started as a casual connection, when he points
out to Jack that people keep calling them a couple, Jack’s response is telling.
‘Well, we are,’ he snaps. And for Ianto, when you’re a couple, you stand
together.
That
scene has such potential to be magical – lovers standing side by side to save
the earth and wipe the record as clean as it can be. But the 456 hasn’t read
the script of their life, and callously kills them both, and we, like Jack and
Ianto, know only one of them will wake again. The death, the loss of Ianto is
the beginning of the end for Jack’s peace of mind and his humanity. It’s
interesting to wonder whether, had Ianto still been alive, Jack would have been
able to look his grandson in the eye and sacrifice him to get rid of the 456.
Or indeed whether he would so badly have needed to.
After
the events of Children of Earth, Jack can’t look humans in the eye – parents, children,
lovers, friends. He has brought his own humanity crashing down upon himself,
and it’s the death of Ianto that makes that happen. When Jack says ‘this
planet’s too small’ he seems to mean that it’s too small to lose his guilt, his
sorrow, his rage at all the cosmos at the death of this one quiet man. It’s
only, ultimately, the Doctor who can give him absolution, permission to move on
with his unfeasibly long life, by introducing him to Midshipman Alonso Frame.
He’ll never be a replacement Ianto – any more than Vicki is a replacement Susan
or Martha a replacement Rose - but it’s only someone who’s lived as long as he
has, and lost as much as he has, who can free Jack from his despair and guilt
over Ianto. Frame is a first step back towards the light, towards a new life in
which Ianto is the beautiful memory he should be, rather than an albatross of
love and guilt and pain.
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