There are no stars in Hell... just as well.
(I wrote this on Saturday morning, when I'd seen everything but the last day of Children of Earth, which I've since seen.)
The thing about Torchwood is that it's fundamentally a show about character death. I mean, it would be pointless to ::do:: a Captain Jack show that wasn't all about character death. Having a character who comes back every time he dies is enough of a comment on the standard action mcguffins that you have to contrast him with characters who actually die. Because if Jack dies on a nearly-weekly basis and no one else ever dies, it starts to look ridiculous. Is Jack just not as cautious as the others? Is he as bad at defending himself as stormtroopers are at shooting.
Thus advertising Suzie as a regular cast member and killing her off in the first episode. Thus "They Just Keep Killing Suzie." Thus Owen's stint as a walking corpse, and Tosh and Owen's deaths at the end of season 2. And thus Ianto's death now.
I haven't seen an episodic canon that was this casual and brutal about killing regular characters since Harry Potter, and it makes sense. Harry Potter too has the fundamental theme of the inevitability of death, and the way that accepting or not accepting that choice changes the shape of one's life.
So while Ianto's death hurts a lot, I really, ::really:: liked just about everything about COE, and I came away as invigorated as I was heartbroken.
In point of fact, I spent a lot of the weekend thinking about the possibility of making a "lots of death sequences" Torchwood vid. A big part of my brain wants to do it to "Every Day a Little Death" from A Little Night Music, except for the whole bit about love in the middle.
Side note: I have been indulging my masochistic tendencies by imagining what was going on to Sarah Jane over the course of COE. Fun, right? I may also have bothered Ariel with a lot of unnecessary speculation about how things would have turned out if Luke had been in Stephen's place. Fundamentally, I am kind of a bad person.
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