erastes

Oh how good, how good how good. What a BRILLIANT TITLE too.

Absolutely wonderful episode. I have seen almost no reaction to this series other than on twitter (yes, I'm the sad person who joins a Twitter stream and watches with other people...) This has been an adjustment for me because TW is normally one story per episode with a thin over-reaching arc. Monsters turn up, TW deals with them(or not!) and then the next week there's another problem. Here, the story is slowed down to the same speed as normal series and the story rolls out over ten(?) episodes. Up to now it's been quite slow, and while that has been a little frustrating (because I'm used to the frantic pace of TW, run! etc, it's started to gel together and the pace is speeding up which is great! There was even a RUN! moment this week.

I absolutely adored the romance between Angelo and Jack - and the angst involved. It was wonderful to see some propa gay historical romance on the TV, and it was dealt with beautifully (although I dare say they made a LOT of noise specially in that big brass bed, and they were in a family house, but that's just my inner GHF head coming into play. The talking sex scene was so gorgeous and extremely hot. They used this device in "Bent" but there it was heartbreakingly sad--here it was just hotness inducing.

It broke my heart that I realised (I THINK, unless I got it wrong) that the timeline for the romance was after Ianto’s death. I wasn’t sure how Jack got to the 1927 as I thought his wristband didn’t work any more – unless the Doctor gave him a lift? So Jack was hurting, and on the rebound. Also odd that he got the boat in the US, but hey. Perhaps he was just trying new stuff to do.

Perhaps it wasn’t after Ianto’s death—just looked at the Wiki entry and it says “he was sent” to kill the alien…So I must have that wrong.

Loved that it was the Trickster involved, although whether that’s the end of the matter, and that the Trickster is involved further I don’t know. Excellent cliffhanger. more more more! I’m sorry, people, if you stopped watching it when Ianto died, but I think that’s silly, to be honest. I adore TW for the fact that—like GRRM—it’s brave enough to kill off the charismatic characters and the good characters and the brave characters—because that’s life. Most of our fiction is based on Good Guys Win Bad Guys Die. I loves me some moral ambiguity and that uncertainty. Which is probably why I chafe under the Romance label and many of my books have a HEA but if you squint they SO don’t.

In other news there's a wonderful write up on AAD (Authors After Dark) HEREby James Buchanan. It's so wonderful that the gay fiction crowd is getting together now on both sides of the Atlantic. For too many years we haven't had acceptance into either the gay literati or the fiction world or the romance world and we've just got fed up and said "Yanno what? who cares! We'll do our own thing."