Agreed, alas. There was a hell of a lot of great stuff in there - the Jack backstory, the family who owned the cinema, the use of Owen's predicament, the old lady, the thoroughly-tempered happy ending (like you, I loved that they had a mass kill-off of victims - it doesn't always end with everybody being saved, sometimes they just have to take what they can get) and yet somehow it never quite gelled. A part of me wonders if it should have been told in a longer format, but I'm not convinced that there was really enough to it to warrant that.
I must admit (*grabs hardhat*) that I found Ianto quite thoroughly uninspiring as a sidekick, which may have been a part of the problem - Gwen made a great Scully in Small Worlds but Ianto was just sort of... there, vaguely bland and anonymous. It was as if he was just there to give Jack someone to talk to and I think I'd have preferred Tosh in that role if anyone, given what they were doing. I don't have a great feel for Ianto as a character at the best of times and was hoping for something more solid here, but if anything I have even less sense of him as a character than I did this time yesterday! That he and Jack were on strictly-professional terms didn't trouble me - I've never had the sense that they're more than happy fuckbuddies (at least from Jack's perspective) - but I would have liked to get a bit more about Ianto as a person.
Still, there was a nice bit of Jack backstory (to be fleshed out, no doubt, on the website next week and in fanfic forever after!) and a few good characters to throw into the General Background pot. And I guess we can't really complain if that was the weakest of the series so far! And next week's looks absolutely cracking.... :D
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Date: 2008-03-13 03:45 pm (UTC)I must admit (*grabs hardhat*) that I found Ianto quite thoroughly uninspiring as a sidekick, which may have been a part of the problem - Gwen made a great Scully in Small Worlds but Ianto was just sort of... there, vaguely bland and anonymous. It was as if he was just there to give Jack someone to talk to and I think I'd have preferred Tosh in that role if anyone, given what they were doing. I don't have a great feel for Ianto as a character at the best of times and was hoping for something more solid here, but if anything I have even less sense of him as a character than I did this time yesterday! That he and Jack were on strictly-professional terms didn't trouble me - I've never had the sense that they're more than happy fuckbuddies (at least from Jack's perspective) - but I would have liked to get a bit more about Ianto as a person.
Still, there was a nice bit of Jack backstory (to be fleshed out, no doubt, on the website next week and in fanfic forever after!) and a few good characters to throw into the General Background pot. And I guess we can't really complain if that was the weakest of the series so far! And next week's looks absolutely cracking.... :D