Part 1
Posted on 2020-07-12 by grinchwrapsupreme
Losing it over the fact that Ianto places himself in the role of detached caregiver and removed assistant even though his entire character is built around the fact that he cannot let go because he cares too much.
He literally forces his way into Torchwood 3 because he cannot stop caring about Lisa despite what she’s become. He cannot let go of what happened at Torchwood 1 and it eats him up inside like rats. He cannot let go of the pain it causes him to the point he considers suicide just to get away from it. He cannot let go of Jack, saying he feels like screaming and never stopping because he misses him so much when they’ve barely been involved up to that point. He cannot stop caring about his coworkers, his friends, his relationships, the people they’re trying to help, he just can’t and it’s killing him and ruining him so he’s screaming or crying or falling apart every other episode, every other audio drama, every other book, but he also can’t quit because he just. Can’t. Let. Go. And you can tell he wishes so badly that he really was this detached guy he makes himself out to be, but so far the only thing he’s been able to remove himself from is his family, and even then they keep pulling him back in because he’s incapable of not caring.
In Broken the thing that finishes him off is finding out his mother might have cancer and the reason that’s the thing that gets him is that for the first time, in his overwhelming (yet budding) experience of losing people, there’s nothing he can do. There’s no big bad monster to avenge her against. There’s no remains to be pulled out of the building and obsessively try to fix. This is just such a normal and senseless way to lose someone that he doesn’t know how to deal with and he cannot control. And it’s the thing that makes him realize no matter how hard he tries, how many cannibals he headbutts, how many people he shoots, how many collapsing buildings he rushes into, he can’t save everyone. And that’s exhausting for him to realize. That’s why he reaches out to Jack because he’s discovering that being detached doesn’t save him from losing people so he might as well get attached because he knows he’s just going to get hurt anyways. Learning Jack is immortal just makes him running off all the more painful because suddenly here’s a person he’s guaranteed to never lose. Someone who can never die. Someone who will outlive Ianto no matter what. Someone it’s safe to care about and get attached to. So Jack leaving is that much more a slap in the face. Ianto can’t help caring about everything in the world, but Jack was the one thing he chose to care about. And Jack was the one who decided to leave.
Part 2
Posted on 2020-11-18 by grinchwrapsupreme
Okay I finally watched Cyberwoman again and I get why Ianto couldn’t be the one to shoot Lisa, I get it, he couldn’t do it because this wasn’t about him moving on and getting over things, removing that last desperate tie to his old life, this was about how he’s been doing this on his own and desperate for someone to be there with him. He needs someone, in this case the team, to pull him out. I’ve talked before about how Ianto is incapable of letting go of things, he will literally die for a cause, be it Lisa or Jack or the children of Earth, he doesn’t have that boundary, he doesn’t have the ability to define a line for himself that he cannot cross so it just keeps going round and round. So no matter how independent he is in his job and in his life, if he doesn’t have someone there to tell him when to stop then he just won’t. Remember when Jack had to physically pull him out of the Hub in CoE before the bomb went off? It’s the exact same thing. When he says he’s got nothing left to lose that’s not a lie or an over exaggeration, because in his mind if something is worth dedicating yourself to then it’s worth dying for. He would rather die than shoot Lisa, and even at the end when he’s decided that, yes, he will do it, and he points the gun at her and says he’s sorry, he still can’t pull the trigger. He gets so caught up in caring about things he just can’t let go, so he has to be pulled away or he’ll be like that forever. He never could have gotten over Canary Warf by himself because he needed someone to pull him through it, just like in Broken how he relied so heavily on Mandy, because he couldn’t get over the cannibals by himself. He gets so lost in grief and determination every damn time that the only way out is for someone else to pull the trigger, so, going back to the symbolism, someone else had to cut that tie because he absolutely never would because he can’t