"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Sunday, April 21, 2019

Relationship Spotlight: Captain Jack Harkness & Ianto Jones (Torchwood)


I’ve talked before about my frustrations with Torchwood.  While I pretty much always come down on the side of enjoying it, it’s a show I sometimes seem to enjoy despite itself, and I only rarely feel it lives up to the potential of all it could be.  I feel much the same way about Jack and Ianto – I like them, and John Barrowman and Gareth David-Lloyd consistently bring it, but I usually can’t shake the feeling that they could be a lot more (some Jack/Ianto-related spoilers.)

On the face of it, Jack and Ianto make for a solid quasi-odd-couple pairing.  Jack is a cheeky, swashbuckling former Time Agent with a mysterious past, while Ianto is a frequently-underestimated man of few words with hidden depths.  Looking at them, they’re both very different people, and we particularly see that playing out in season 2 on, once they’re romantic relationship is out in the open.  While Jack is never one to leave any innuendo unturned, Ianto is much more private, and he can grow noticeably shy when Jack is less-than-demure about their sex life.  Similarly, in the field, Ianto is more likely to strategize while Jack is more likely to throw himself into things – not that Ianto is never reckless and Jack is never thoughtful (and the fact that helps that Jack doesn’t stay dead when he dies gives him much more leeway to take chances,) but those are the general ways they tend.

They’re also a couple in which there are a few different power imbalances at play.  The biggest is Jack’s functional immortality, a condition Ianto doesn’t share.  Not only does Jack have more than a century’s worth of life experience on Ianto (including enough former boyfriends and girlfriends to probably make Ianto’s head spin,) Ianto additionally has to deal with knowing that, no matter how long he lives, Jack will far outlive him and pretty undoubtedly grow to forget him entirely in the end.  It’s something Jack seems to like to ignore in their relationship, but it definitely weighs on Ianto’s mind from time to time.  Then there’s Jack being Ianto’s boss (I’m sure Jack has always been an HR nightmare,) although once they get together, they both seem able to handle the overlap between their professional and personal relationships without any big issues.  There’s also the small matter of the fact that Ianto cajoled his way into Torchwood Cardiff in the first place so he could use their resources to keep his half-converted Cyber-girlfriend alive in the basement – oh, and when her programming took over and she laid siege to the Hub, Jack was the one who killed her.  Surprisingly, though, this development doesn’t seem to present any stumbling block to their starting a sexual relationship, at least not that we see.

This is my biggest struggle with Jack and Ianto, everything we don’t see with the two of them.  We only rarely see Ianto working up the courage to talk to Jack about his immortality concerns, their work/romantic relationship appears seamless, and we don’t even know how they got from Ianto raging at Jack over killing Lisa to arranging kinky rendezvous after hours.  Even apart from the extreme ends of that range, consider this:  Jack is the show’s male lead and Ianto is his main love interest, and we don’t even know how they got together.

While I pretty much always like what we get – Jack’s confident flirtations, Ianto’s subtle overtures, their private moments of emotional honesty – so much of this onscreen romance exists in tidbits, throwaway lines or reaction shots with few actual stories about their relationship.  This makes their rare scenes of more intense drama – tearful declarations and whatnot – feel kind of unearned, because so much of the building blocks for how they got there have been left unshown.  It’s an odd technique that I feel pretty much has to be rooted in homophobia/censorship (despite Torchwood being touted as a sexy sci-fi spin-off for the famously-omnisexual Captain Jack,) because otherwise why would you depict what ought to be your central romance in this way?

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