Tony’s away with the
fairies.
Small Worlds brings PJ
‘Sapphire And What-The-Hell-Did-I-Just-Watch-Steel’ Hammond to the world of
Torchwood for the first time. When you bring PJ Hammond in, you know a few
things – you’re going to end up with a story with high stakes, distinctly and personally
realised, there’s going to be some serious creepiness involved, possibly involving
photos and time and the gateways between states, and there are always, always,
always going to be several levels on which you can watch it or read it.
Go into Small Worlds
expecting all that, and you won’t be disappointed. What’s unusual about this
story is that for a PJ Hammond script, it’s very ‘daytime,’ very sunny and
modern. But let’s not kid ourselves – Small Worlds has plenty of
trans-temporal, extra-dimensional creepiness to go around, and a handful of
pretty darned effective kills to ramp up the stakes, so that when its final
bargain is struck, we believe there really is no other way to save the world.
People are frequently
misled into remembering Small Worlds as a sunny, bright, slightly silly story
though, because it’s ‘the one with the fairies.’ But that’s to make the central
mistake of the story – to see something that looks small and cute and pretty,
and think it’s innocent, and well-intentioned, and above all, not dangerous.
But even within their own mythology, fairies are misunderstood by the majority
of the world’s population. As was probably best pointed out by Terry Pratchett
in his novel Lords and Ladies, in older civilisations, fairies were inherently
seen as things to be respected and feared, rather than necessarily liked, and
under absolutely no circumstances were they seen as the fluttery winged friends
of children our generations have made them.
Hammond taps into the
older, more primal version of fairykind, while showing the folly of our
sanitised, oversweetened version. But in his storyline of fairies from the dawn
of time coming to collect their next ‘chosen one,’ the next human child they
will steal away from her family and friends, he also highlights two other,
deeper concepts.
Jasmine Pierce is a loner
child, who likes to play at the bottom of her garden (some things after all are
too traditional to ignore). Throughout the course of Small Worlds, we see
snapshots of the kind of trauma through which 21st century children
go every day – bullying at school; vicious words and slappings at home; the
ever-present threat of paedophiles. While Jasmine is a condensation of
experiences more widely spread throughout society, she serves to make a very
valid point – she may well be the fairies’ ‘chosen one,’ but every victim of
these kinds of trauma is the chosen one to somebody, the special child for whom
someone would do anything. It behoves us to keep them safe from all the threats
that lay in wait for them – to interpose our version of justice between the
innocent and those that would persecute them.
But perhaps more
strikingly, Hammond shows us the dangerous alternative. He shows us
child-justice – merciless, immediate, entirely disproportionate justice, driven
by the unrestrained id, repaying hurt with sudden violence, repaying threat
with death in terms of the paedophile who tries to steal Jasmine away. While
the fairies themselves show this overreaction throughout the story – killing
jack’s former lover Estelle simply, it seems, for sticking her nose into their
business, killing Goodson the paedophile for his attempt to take Jasmine away
and harm her, and killing Roy, her would-be stepfather, both for harsh words
and slaps, and just as much for trying to keep their chosen one away from her
fairy friends. But what’s telling is the actions of Jasmine herself – simply
standing there, laughing as her would-be schoolyard tormentors are scared out
of their wits, and as her fairy friends kill Roy right in front of her. If we
fail to protect our children, Hammond suggests, they will protect themselves,
and they have none of the balance, none of the fairness to which we as adults
like to lay claim.
This utter lack of
compromise makes itself felt in the final bargain too. With people dead and
dying, both the fairies and Jasmine determined that she should go away with her
friends, leaving her mother, her family, everything behind for a life in the
eternal, timeless forest, and the Torchwood team prepared to fight them, it’s
Jack to whom Jasmine issues her world-destroying ultimatum. These fairies, like
those in folklore, can control the elements – and the elements are all they
need to destroy the world should they want to. Storms that blow cities down,
seas that swallow continents, ice that freezes the survivors, all are within
their power – and all they want is one child. The lengths to which they’ll go
to get what they want is familiar to every parent who’s ever had a child not
want to go to bed, but it’s put into a grand context here - the world versus
one child – that will come back to haunt Captain Jack Harkness in The Children
of Earth, and which haunt him already with the import of the fairies’ power.
Small Worlds gives us a look into two parts of Jack’s past – his wartime
romance with Estelle, and his first encounter with the fairies, in which the
accidental killing of one of the chosen ones results in fifteen characteristic
murders, the throats of all the men in his troop filled with the bright red
petals that are the fairies’ calling cards. It’s his experience of their
unremitting, uncompromising approach to revenge that gives Jack his
uncomfortable perspective. They’ll stop at nothing to get their newest
playmate, even the destruction of the world. They will always have the past to
retreat to, the ancient forests to play in, and we don’t have that option. So
Jack hands Jasmine to her friends, and, with barely a backward glance to say
thank you, she goes away with the fairies. Jasmine’s mother loses both the man
she’s been with for five years, and her only child, in the space of minutes –
her world destroyed by her daughter’s choices, and ultimately by Jack’s
decision that one child’s life is worth the world.
Small Worlds is a story
that mimics the fairies themselves – when you first look at it, it looks
pretty, and sunny, and bright. But by the end of the episode, we’ve gone to the
past, witnessed Jack’s capacity for love and heartbreak, seen the dangers that
lay in wait for every child, every day, had a horrifying lesson in the instant
nuclear retribution instincts of the young, and wept for mistakes made, lives
lost and those left behind by the singular self-interest of a child who wants
to go and play.
Never – but never –
underestimate Small Worlds. It, and they, have the capacity to tear the heart
right out of you, and serve a salutary lesson in looking after our youngsters,
protecting them from evil, because if we don’t, the fairies, while not a real
threat in our world, will represent the reactions of our kids, the furies and
scars left on their psyche by the wounds we too easily inflict.
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