What they did with Ianto's sister and her family was utterly brilliant, because we meet this sweet little family, these likable and kinda goofy people, and get to know them -- and then we find out that they're the expendables, the bottom 10%'ers, and see the soldiers coming for them and watch them acting with courage and dignity and self-sacrifice. Meanwhile, Frobisher and his pampered, top 1%'er family fall apart -- where Ianto's sister's husband throws himself between his children (and other people's children) and an army, Frobisher's only way of dealing with it is to kill his family and himself. And in the end, Frobisher and his kids are dead, and Ianto's in-laws are together and safe and alive. It's a marvelous little subversive bit of storytelling.
... and hmm, you know, 'til you pointed it out, I hadn't really consciously made the comparison between Jack's sacrifice of his own grandchild and the government types' willingness to sacrifice other people's children but not their own. That's a really good point, and demonstrates, I guess, that these are the people worth rooting for; as dark as the show was, it still put some of the very best aspects of human nature on display, along with the worst.
Edited to add: And I thought of Watchmen too -- actually, I almost put a comparison into the above post. It's really a very similar dilemma, though in Watchmen (the book anyway; I haven't seen the movie) there's the added angle that Ozymandias is enough of a megalomaniac that he's not particularly affected by what he's done. In Torchwood the world is saved by a decent person who makes a terrible decision and breaks himself in the process; in Watchman, the savior of the world is a complete bastard, but of course no one knows that.
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... and hmm, you know, 'til you pointed it out, I hadn't really consciously made the comparison between Jack's sacrifice of his own grandchild and the government types' willingness to sacrifice other people's children but not their own. That's a really good point, and demonstrates, I guess, that these are the people worth rooting for; as dark as the show was, it still put some of the very best aspects of human nature on display, along with the worst.
Edited to add: And I thought of Watchmen too -- actually, I almost put a comparison into the above post. It's really a very similar dilemma, though in Watchmen (the book anyway; I haven't seen the movie) there's the added angle that Ozymandias is enough of a megalomaniac that he's not particularly affected by what he's done. In Torchwood the world is saved by a decent person who makes a terrible decision and breaks himself in the process; in Watchman, the savior of the world is a complete bastard, but of course no one knows that.