3 CoE vid recs + more Jack meta.

[elisi]

All The Pretty Little Horses by hollywoodgrrl
Summary: Jack Harkness. Torchwood's Pied Piper.
This is most definitely Torchwood’s ‘Handlebars’. And also the most hauntingly and harrowingly beautiful illustration of Jack’s “Began to like it. And look what I became.”
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Requiem – The Show Must Go On. (Moulin Rouge) by thrace_adams.
Summary: Jack Must Go On.
Jack-centric CoE vid with a definite J/I slant (but don’t let that put anyone off). The vid absolutely does the song justice!
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A Blip in Time by di_br.
Summary: Ianto has a few things he needs to say before the end.
A CoE Jack/Ianto vid using Ianto’s speech from ‘The Dead Line’. Absolutely gorgeous. Bring tissues.



‘All The Pretty Little Horses’ really made me think, so here is a slightly expanded version of my feedback (with all the flailing taken out):

I very deliberately said that this vid is Torchwood’s ‘Handlebars’, rather than Jack’s, even though Jack is very much the focal point, and (to a great extent) Jack = Torchwood.

Because thinking about it, then Jack can also be seen as Torchwood's ultimate victim. They recruited him, made him into their agent, and then after a hundred years put him in charge... Looking at Suzie, we see what just a few years could do. Multiply it, and you get Jack, Torchwood's very own monster:

Ianto: You like to think you're a hero. But you're the biggest monster of all.

What all this made me think of was the very last scene in ‘Damage’ (AtS 5.11):

Spike: She's...one of us now. She's a monster.
Angel: She's an innocent victim.
Spike: So were we... once upon a time.
Angel: Once upon a time.

The thing is, that Jack’s capacity for monstrousness was hinted at right at the very beginning:

Jack: Two years of my life. No idea what I did. Your friend over there doesn't trust me. And for all I know... he's right not to.

Most of all, when it comes to CoE and Jack and the creation of monsters, these are the lines that come back to me - again from AtS:

Angel: It was art. The destruction of a human being."

We watched the destruction of Jack. And it was art.

Comments

[elisi]

Yes!! I thought I was the only one who saw it like that!
*grins* I remember it specifically because I was at the time busy plotting my Jack-is-The-Immortal fic ('The Immortal' from TGiQ - Angel's 'archnemisis' and Buffy's new boyfriend!), and trying to fill in that missing century, and wondering how and when and *why* Jack became involved with Torchwood, and how I could fit my story in around that were all v. important. And then the show went and gave me all the answers I could want and more besides. Both S1 and S2 made so much more sense. :)

You're right, and I phrased it badly.
And I replied way too early in the morning!

What I meant was the step from thinking of himself on some level as the (mostly) good guy in (mostly) bad organisation he'd been (mostly) forced to join against his will, to realising that the century spent there left its traces.
*nods* Yes, very much so - and that last scene, where he takes responsibility for everything shows that very clearly.