Favorite Characters: Owen Harper (Torchwood)

Okay – so the first (few) times I watched Torchwood, Owen did nothing for me.  Granted, I acknowledged from the first that he’s a lot better after series 1, but I was cynical about the course correction, regarding it as a too-little-too-late attempt to make fans like him.  Somewhere along the line, though, he started to grow on me, and on my most recent Torchwood rewatch, I actually found myself appreciating Owen quite a bit.  Much of that is down to Burn Gorman’s excellent acting, but overall, I’ve learned to enjoy Owen for what he brings to the show.

Like many Whovians, I was completely turned off by Owen’s ugly ethics in Torchwood’s pilot.  It’s what initially put Owen in my doghouse and kept him there for a long time.  “That scene” still bothers me, and I will never, ever be okay with what Owen does in it.  However, inexcusable as it is, I’ve come to believe that RTD and co. really didn’t consider its implications.  I think they were going for roguish and id-feeding, along with what they probably assumed would be a cheap laugh, and no one realized that they ended up with heinous and gross.  So, while the incident itself remains awful, I’ve grown more inclined to blame the writers for it rather than the character, especially since it’s the only time we see Owen do anything like that.

This reassignment allows me to look more generally at Owen without that distasteful, deal-breaking scene clouding the lens, and more generally, he’s fairly interesting.  I get a better sense of the character I think the show set out to create, a man who uses his antisocial behavior, sarcasm, and lightly-taken sexual encounters to keep people at arm’s length.  In many ways, he’s a somewhat more extreme version of the leading man in the “hate” portion of a love/hate romance – plenty of moments in which viewers (and Gwen) can say, “What an unfeeling jerk!” and yet, there are just enough flashes of genuine humanity that we’re kept on the line while he slowly becomes a better person.

As is typical with characters of that sort, the show rolls out his tragic origin story in due time, but it mostly avoids the woobified bad boy trope.  We learn what caused Owen to put up his walls, and it’s truly terrible, but Owen, Jack, and the audience are the only ones who are ever made privy to this traumatic experience.  It’s shown only in flashback with no present-day discussion, rehashing, or dramatic in-show reveal, and as such, there’s no character to exclaim, “This is why Owen is the way he is!”  The knowledge doesn’t sweep any of his callousness or insensitivity under the rug, doesn’t romanticize the recklessness that masks his issues.  Rather, it only contextualizes him and makes him a fuller character.

What’s more, I’ve started to recognize the groundwork laid for the rehabilitated Owen of series 2.  Where before I grumbled at all the centric plots for a character I didn’t really like, I now see that Owen takes gradual steps toward change almost from the start.  He’s a character who really learns from his experiences and takes things to heart, even if the visible change is slow to peek through.  As early as episode 3 of series 1, events occur to make him examine his behavior, and all throughout Owen’s time on the show, he reacts to everything that happens to him and grows accordingly.  He’s often resistant to it and backpedals frequently – some of it is Owen-will-be-Owen stuff, whereas I think that, other times, he’s wary of letting his guard down after so long – but his overall trajectory is always moving forward, and now I can see the trail that connects the different versions of Owen that the show gives us.