damn you, chibnaaaaaaaallllllllll
If only because I must curse how unbelievably AU my epic crackfic has just become. Granted, I knew it was going to be AU from the very start, but hot damn is it so off now. And I won't be able to write the Tosh and Owen scenes anymore without wibbling a bit inside.
Dude, I BAWLED at "Exit Wounds." I'd put it on the level with some of the hardest moments of Farscape -- Die Me, Dichotomy or Self-Inficted Wounds, losing Aeryn and Zhaan respectively. The only crying jag caused by a TV show that topped those was the season four finale of Farscape itself, where not only the unexpected deaths of John and Aeryn but also the overwhelming realization that the show was gone forever just hit me all at once and I had to go outside and have a meltdown on the deck for half an hour.
I realize that I'm affected much, much more deeply by traumas in shows where I've invested a lot of time and energy in participating in a community of fans. Because other than Trigun, Farscape was the last fandom I completely immersed myself in before TW. Harry Potter doesn't really count because it's too huge to fit in quite the same category as anything else. It's too much of a phenomenon. Too many people know about it. Farscape and Torchwood have a lot of things in common: small enough communities that you can see most of their fanbases in one pass through the internet, huge, glaring flaws, and a broad streak of self-awareness which makes each of them particularly endearing. It's as if by being a fan of them you're also sort of being a parent to them. Watching them grow into themselves, stumble over bad scripts, figure out their own strengths and weaknesses... And in both cases it's awfully obvious that these are shows that are doing something completely new and skew-angled to traditional sci-fi plots while still retaining a distinctly SF-flavored core, and that this newness makes them feel awkward to watch, while at the same time the shameless enthusiasm of the cast and crew make the awkwardness feel shared and understood and ultimately okay.
It's not a matter of whether the show withstands critical analysis. Both TW and FS can be analyzed in some pretty phenomenal ways, and there are graduate-thesis-quality metas out there to prove it. But what makes them so emotionally involving (for me, at least) is not how good they can be, but how bad they can be without even making a dent in their own willingness to persevere. Shows like Babylon 5 and, to a large degree, Buffy, Firefly and (early)X-Files are so well-made that there's simply no room to get close to them. Doctor Who (though New Who has many flaws) falls into the same category by dint of simply being older than dirt. Watching them can be a nigh-on transcendental experience, but that's because they're the masters -- you can only learn from them, not really care for them. TW and FS are children. I started watching them both in their very earliest stages, and experienced their learning curves and leaps of improvement in real-time.
It feels pretty good to have a fandom like this again. I'm capable of some pretty hardcore media consumption A.D.D. when I don't have a particular fandom that I'm following. And Farscape was the last one -- so it's been, what, six years since my last emotionally involving fandom? They cancelled FS in 2002.
Anyway. A lot of people are complaining about the deaths of Tosh and Owen being cruel and unusual and unfair and are saying lots of unspeakable things about RTD and Chibnall, but honestly, having survived the emotional rollercoaster of Farscape and being a writer at heart, I can't fault the show for its dramas. If you put your characters in a life-and-death situation, you have to let some of them die or risk undermining every bit of power you've gathered. Writing IS mind control. It isn't fair, sure. You can call the writer evil all you want, but you went into an understood contract with that writer when you started watching/reading their product, and you expected to be emotionally manipulated -- so when your emotions are (shock!) manipulated harder than you expected, you can exclaim about how much it hurt but you can't really say it was unfair of the writer to do it to you. A writer lives for pushing that boundary, for doing the same seven plots over and over again in such a way as to fool the audience into being shocked like it's new every time. I say if Chibnall has made a lot of people hate him, it's because he's doing something right. I mean, I remember the hate fans had for David Kemper (bastard) on FS. Even me. But damn he wrote some memorable television.
Besides, it's science fiction. These things just happen. Those characters might be back in the next season premiere or they might shock you by being gone for good, like Zhaan, and the void left by them will never be filled again. But it's like real-life grief: losses happen without warning, and learning to grieve without anger is part of life. I mean, I understand that it's just a TV show, but you have to be honest: when a TV show is emotionally involving enough to make you feel for its characters, then those feelings are real enough not to disregard. I learned a pretty huge life lesson about grieving when Farscape was cancelled, and it was a hell of a lot gentler way to learn that lesson than if I had lost a living friend or relative, so I don't see any problem with being emotional over something fictional.
Wow, what was supposed to be a brief "WAHHH TOSH AND OWEN" turned into a real rant. Oy. But I guess it needed to be said.
I've given up on conspiracy-theorizing, on trying to come up with "my ideal" for what happens next. I go in for spoiler-hunting, and I don't mind being spoiled on things like deaths and plot retcons, etc. If I'm a big enough fan of the show, the emotional impact won't be lost even if I know what's going to happen. The greatness is often in the execution, not necessarily the idea. (Except for things like "Blink," where the idea was Made Of The Win and the execution just bolstered what was already brilliance incarnate.) But the point of that is, I don't really mind whatever the writers do on the show, as long as they do it well. It's the core dilemma of all writing: everything, literally everything, has been done before. There are no new ideas, or so few as to be negligible. I do believe in the theory that there are only seven core plots, anyway. So a writer must learn not to be discouraged, but to simply understand that it doesn't matter what you write, as long as you write it well. TV scripts are no exception. Don't be afraid to do the same thing that's already been done on every Star Trek show in succession -- just bowl on into that cliche with all the power of originality that your characters and setting will allow, and whatever comes out is what you've got, for better or for worse.
And that's my bit of rant on the TW finale and why I didn't have a problem with it, though I am still very sad about it and expect to cry a lot again when I rewatch it with friends tonight.
Blargh! Anyway. Now I just have to write the chapter with Tosh and the ninjas in my epic crackfic. No, srsly. There are ninjas. You know you want to read it.
still needing to study for political science,
-rave
ETA: Universal Law of Synchronicity FTW. Literally the same day that newtypeblue made me start watching The Venture Bros. and I picked up the new Dresden book at BAM, I started reading the first of the Supernatural tie-in novels ("Nevermore"), which contains both a pop culture reference to the Venture Bros. AND an almost-canon standing crossover between Supernatural and Dresden Files. ("I'm part of a network of cops... keep an eye on things, help out hunters who come through town... there's all of four of us -- me, a woman in Chicago named Murphy..." DUUUUUUDE. WIN, KEITH R.A. DECANDIDO. WIN.)