Britpick?

[sholio]

... I don't suppose anyone might be available to Britpick a Torchwood fic for me? It's about 12K, heavy hurt/comfort with some blood and gore, mainly focused on Ianto and Owen in late season two, though the rest of the team is around. If you're not familiar with canon but might be interested in doing it anyway, I can give you a quick rundown of what you need to know (it's a pretty straightforward "team deals with weird sci-fi stuff" kind of show, with a couple of quirky aspects).

You know, something I've been thinking about rewatching the show ... over the past decade or so, I've started thinking of the MCU's interlaced storytelling as something really unique, but this show and the RTD-era DW-verse in general is exactly the same thing; Torchwood weaves in and out of the DW universe in exactly that way, with missing pieces of the story happening in other shows and DW characters like Martha showing up to cameo, years before the MCU showed up on the scene.

Comments

[frith_in_thorns]

Very happy to do so, I'm heading to bed now but could get to it tomorrow!

[sholio]

That would be awesome, thank you! ♥ I'm doing some edits, so I don't think I'll have it ready to send before this evening, anyway.

Are you familiar with Torchwood at all? There are just a couple of canon details that are important to let you know when I send it, if not.

[sovay]

Torchwood weaves in and out of the DW universe in exactly that way, with missing pieces of the story happening in other shows and DW characters like Martha showing up to cameo, years before the MCU showed up on the scene.

I heard about this at the time! My father turns out to have watched the first couple seasons of Torchwood at a time when he wasn't particularly tracking Doctor Who. I think he may have bounced on the same rocks-fall-everyone-dies season finale as you.

[sholio]

I know quite a lot of people who bounced off that finale. And rewatching the show made me really aware of how much of a departure that was. It's not like the show was never dark or people never died. But it made a sudden left turn from a goofy-but-fun sci-fi team show to trying to be Prestige TV, and it was really startling.

[sheron]

I think the uniqueness comes from movies & tv shows, vs only tv shows, that's what MCU introduced.

Glad to hear you finished the fic!! :)

[kore]

Yeah, I think a number of British shows were doing the overarching storyline thing, maybe partly because European TV often tended to be shorter limited series that were way less episodic. In the US that didn't get going so much until genre shows like Babylon 5 and Buffy and Farscape and X-Files, which I think are some of the earliest examples. (For some reason it's more a thing with genre TV....?) And Lost and Heroes really kicked it up a notch. (I know there were some non-genre US TV shows that had narrative arcs but right now I can't remember any.) Now "eight hour movies" are the latest big thing on streaming prestige TV channels. I remember British series being shown on US TV mostly on PBS anthology series, like Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery, but they didn't seem to influence pop US culture.

I think where the MCU-verse was different was "age of the geek, baby" -- Feige basically brought the overlapping semi-continuous (sometimes semi-coherent, LOL) comics verse to movies, and while comics movies had had big hits like the Batman trilogy or Superman films, they didn't have that ongoing serial structure. (What with all the recasting in the Bats and Supes movies, it's pretty amazing MCU has gone on for 10+ years with so little recasting.) And not only did he do that with movies, they were huge hit movies. I still remember when critics were predicting nobody would want to go see Avengers. (And then, that Avengers was certainly a one-off and nobody would want to see Avengers 2. One decade and billions of dollars later....)

[willibald]

Can also Britpick if you need. Not so good on colloquial Welsh though.

[sholio]

I'm good, but thank you for the offer!

[selenak]

Torchwood weaves in and out of the DW universe in exactly that way, with missing pieces of the story happening in other shows and DW characters like Martha showing up to cameo, years before the MCU showed up on the scene.

True, but RTD and Friends were self-admittedly also influenced by Buffy and Angel, and who had a lot of adulterous affairs (err, not just on his part adulterous, I mean affairs with married women), seems to have regarded having a sexual affair with Mina as going against the Bro Code. See his letter to Ferdinand early on which Ziebura quotes, and also his statement to Lehndorff a month before his death where he says that "if not for the love to my brother Heinrich", he'd have gone for it.

these shows did it, too. (I.e. a story starts in Buffy 4.03. that gets continued in Angel 1.03, various cameos, and most famously, the Fool For Love on BTVS and Darla on Angel combination, which was filmed together, and while the episodes work independently, the flashbacks really tell a different story if you see them together. (For example: in Spike's pov during the Fool for Love China flashback, Angel just seems to be in a bad mood because Spike just managed to kill a Slayer; this reads differently if you watch the Darla China flashback giving the context that Angel at this point already has his soul back, which Spike and Dru have no idea about but Darla knows, and is starting to realise he can't continue faking being his soulless self.)

Back to Torchwood and Doctor Who: for me one of the best "reads differently when having the context" examples is when the Doctor in Utopia (season 3 of New Who) asks Jack during their big conversation scene in and out of the radiation room whether Jack wants to die. If you've only watched DW, the answer is self evident, because Jack on DW is usually in optimistic gregarious mode. But if you've watched the first season of Torchwood, after which this DW episode takes place, you've seen the episode where Jack is with a depressed guest star when the later committs suicide by gas, dies holding his hand, and when resurrecting does not look particularly happy about it. This is really a question for Torchwood Jack.

[rabid_bookwyrm]

... I think the bit about affairs was an accidental copypasta? If not, I'm desperately curious who Mina is and how she fits in to RTD's film theory.

[selenak]

Argh, yes, it seems two different replies of mine to two completely different entries got mixed up! Sorry!

[sholio]

Yeah, after writing the above I got to thinking about Buffy and Angel, and it makes a lot of sense that the influence is there, because they were essentially doing the same thing. I wonder if there even were any other examples before that? Spinoffs, of course, go back a long way, and shows with ongoing plots were hardly rare by the point when Torchwood came out ... but the weaving in and out, the way storylines discontinue and pick up from one to the other, where you have to watch both shows to get the full impact, really was very different from most of what else was out there. It's that aspect, specifically, that reminded me so much of the MCU, but of course you're right that Whedon did it first.