Positing a question:

if you lived to 300, and subsequently all of your former lovers died, your children, your grandchildren (great-, great-great-, etc.), how would you experience loss? There's got to be a point when the individual deaths wouldn't have the same impact as the first few did.

I was sad for Ianto for Ianto's sake and his family. I was a little mystified at how hard Jack took it.

This is all to say, I didn't see his death telegraphed. I actually thought Jack's daughter was going to bite it.

Well, it's hard to judge foreshadowing since I knew about it going in, but what jumped out at me was that within the first ten minutes Jack jokes, "You get killed, not me! You die like a dog."

LeN, I think that Ianto is supposed to be extra special to Jack, moreso, than say, his daughter's mother. This I'm gathering from the radio play reaction as well as CoE.

Torchwood:

Did you guys feel the foreshadowing?

I read the whitefont so

I also have a hard time judging, but the die like a dog line was jarring. I don't think it would have been AS jarring if I didn't know what was coming. Then when Jack's daughter was talking about Jack standing at her mother's funeral, never getting older but making the rest of them feel old, I felt like screaming, "yes, we get it. Jack outlives everyone he loves. Ianto has to die." If it had been a death by natural causes it wouldn't have been any less traumatic for Jack because he still had to keep on living as if he was thirty years old. The loss would always be too soon. But for us as the audience, the only way we would feel the loss of that relationship was for Ianto to be gone "too soon" for us.

Overall, I'm left rather depressed and not sure I would put myself through all that again. OTH, I think it was a legitimate story that was well executed. Even if Jack wasn't heroic, by golly, the British people were heroic, and the series as a whole was more about Gwen/them anyway. I cried when Andy took off his police gear to fight for the children. The series was then full circle with Gwen walking away from Torchwood, the chapter of her story with Jack had been told.

I liked the series and the mini-series. It was dark, gritty, and ugly the whole way, making bold unpopular choices from the first episode to this last. But I always felt I was seeing who these people were and exactly what they would do.

have not seen COE yet. But I can comment on what I have seen. Isn't it totally in character for Jack to make wrong choices and keep making wrong choices? We first met him as a stylish con man on DW who took a stupid risk and almost wiped out earth. He has a broad selfish streak, and really bad judgment even though he really does want to be a good guy. Also being made in Britain when the series was made isn't "American cowboy type who trusts his gut over good advice" pretty good shorthand for someone who can be counted on the screw things up? Especially, as stuff is shown in the series his gut actually doesn't make decisions that well. Even something as fundamental as choosing his team - even though his people did have skills he really chose an extremely flawed team, and from the flashbacks at the end of season two, chose them in an extremely half arsed way.

What was half-arsed about the way he chose them? I really don't think the text is supposed to make us sincerely doubt him. I think we're supposed to trust him for the most part. And to think that in the end, in CoE as well, that he made the right call.

At least one of his team members turned evil, another used alien tech for rape, another used memory erasure to manipulate and preserve a relationship. (Well the one who turned evil did that too.) And it looks like at least half his was chosen on gut instinct.

So you don't see him as a canonically bad manager, and a bad leader for this type of team? Making bad situations worse almost as often as he makes them better? Again, have not seen COE, so maybe everyone just shines or at least comes through in the end in that one.

well, when you put it THAT way...

I think having chosen them badly and having chosen them half-arsedly are two different things--and I agree with the former, although I'm not remembering the memory erasure plotline, ironically enough.

I don't think, though, that we're *supposed* to think he's bad at his job. When he makes the calls to save the day, they're day-saving calls, no? His team looks to him to save their asses and the world, no?

My impression was kinda that Jack has the job because he knows more about alien life than anyone else currently in residence on earth and is unlikely to be killed by any of the things he comes into contact with, rather than because he's actually good at it.