Character Highlight: Rhys Williams (Torchwood)

Sometimes comic relief, sometimes source of romantic drama, sometimes convenient damsel, sometimes surprisingly helpful.  At his worst, Gwen’s bloke is a walking symbol of Dull Everyday Life Before Torchwood, contrasted with the fascinating, dashing Jack, but at his best, he’s a pretty good example of An Ordinary Man Holding His Own Against the Impossible (Rhys-related spoilers.)

The majority of shows that mix the real world with sci-fi/superheroes/the supernatural require the main character “in the know” to have a loved one with no idea what’s going on.  It’s a well-worn trope; as I pointed out, this loved one can be an endless well of secret-keeping hijinks, angst from the main character having to lie to them (often accompanied by strain on the relationship,) and crises involving the loved one unknowingly getting caught up in the danger.  While this loved one is often a romantic partner, it’s also usually a girlfriend or wife, which is a box Rhys obviously doesn’t fit.  However, the gender really doesn’t make the trope any more enjoyable.  This dynamic almost invariably frustrates me, because keeping such enormous secrets upsets the balance of the relationship, and even though the average person naturally isn’t going to suspect that their girlfriend catches aliens for a living, the viewers know what’s really going on, and so the continued obliviousness makes the loved one look dumb by comparison.

This is where Rhys sits for much of series 1.  It’s not a great look, and it’s compounded by the fact that Gwen is basically a mess as she struggles to adjust to life in Torchwood and treats him pretty badly as a result.  You get the sense that the aura the writers are going for is, “Look at the poor lug – he has no idea,” and while Kai Owen’s performance paints a decent picture of an affable Regular Joe who can’t figure out why his girlfriend has started acting so weird and shifty all the time, it’s not terribly exciting to see.

Things improve when, early in series 2, Rhys gets wise to all the alien business.  No longer being in the dark almost always helps characters like this, and Rhys starts coming off better almost right away.  I like that he doesn’t find out through a slip of the tongue or stumbling accidentally into irrefutable evidence, as often happens in these situations.  Rather, the alien plot of the week tangentially enters his circle, affecting one of his employees, and when Rhys discovers that Gwen is involved in whatever’s going on, he takes it upon himself to investigate.  By the time he confronts her about it, he’s already learned quite a lot, and he’s ready to help, doing a nice bit of undercover work and putting himself in danger during the mission.  From there, his contributions to Torchwood are occasional but generally good.  Even if he doesn’t run around guns blazing or have many special skills, he’s a dependable extra hand who’s an asset, not a liability.

I also like that, although the realization that Gwen is in Torchwood freaks Rhys out and makes him worry for her safety, he doesn’t try to make her quit.  There’s some “What were you thinking?” stuff, and I don’t like him grilling Jack about why he recruited Gwen, but he never says, “This is too dangerous; I’m not having it.”  In fact, when he helps with that first mission, it’s really more about him than Gwen.  He doesn’t demand to go along to keep an eye on Gwen or anything like that, instead insisting that he’d be valuable to the mission because he’s already established contact with certain persons of interest and can help the team get in.  I appreciate that – he’s worried, as anyone would be, but he also doesn’t interfere with Gwen’s choices.

More Notes on Race and Time Travel (Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures)

The Whoniverse’s spinoffs, with their lack of TARDISes, travel in time far less than the parent show does, but there’s still the odd time-travel episode here and there.  This offers a few more opportunities to explore race when 21^st-century characters of color visiting the past.

On Torchwood, “Captain Jack Harkness” finds Jack and Tosh transported to 1941.  Tosh, who’s of Japanese descent, is lucky to be in Wales in January rather than the U.S. in December, but it’s still a thoroughly-unnerving experience.  As soon as she realizes when they are, she gets anxious, and rightfully so.  “Jap” trips easily off of people’s tongues, and Tosh’s natural out-of-placeness from being displaced in time is interpreted by those around her as traitorous behavior.  She’s quickly suspected of being a spy, and without Jack asserting her loyalty to Britain, things might have turned very ugly for her.  For me, one of the hardest-hitting moments of the episode is when she worriedly asks Jack what will happen to her if they can’t get back, and Jack replies, “I’ll take care of you.”  Yes, it’s one friend looking out for another, but it’s also one friend acknowledging that the other will experience additional danger solely because of her race and that he, due to his privilege as a white person, will need to protect her.  Very sad, but very honest.

With The Sarah Jane Adventures, we have two PoC of different races with separate time-travel experiences, which are interesting to compare.  Rani visits the past twice and gets “exotic foreigner” reactions both times.  When she crashes a mid-century village in “The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith,” she causes quite a stir (to be fair, that’s partly because she’s wearing pants.  After she leaves, a villager exclaims, “Can that really be the fashion in the Punjab?”)  Rani has a bemused/weary acceptance of shocking the locals, replying, “Yes, hello.  Ethnic person in the ‘50s.”  Her other jaunt into the past is in “Lost Time,” where she, Clyde, and Sarah Jane are sent to different points in history.  Rani meeta Jane Grey, under the guise of being her new lady-in-waiting, and while one of Jane’s servants doubts the “foreigner” can be trusted, Rani uses the “mysteries of the East” thing to her advantage.  She plays off any out-of-time faux pas as Indian customs, and Jane, fascinated by but ignorant of Asia, easily buys her excuses.

It disappointed me that Clyde was the only one not to visit the ‘50s in “The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith,” and I was glad he finally got to time travel in “Lost in Time.”  Clyde is sent to the WWII era, where he and an evacuated boy thwart a group of Nazis planning an attack – he’s tossed right into the deep end, isn’t he?  I’ve already mentioned the main race-related scene here, when the Nazi commander calls him a Negro, and Clyde in turn amazingly calls the Nazis “a gang of bullies picking on others for what they look like” who will lose the war due to their “blind, stupid prejudice.”  (I love it so much.)  But what really strikes me is what I think may be the reasonClyde only time travels once, and then only to WWII.  I wonder if the writers were aware that, as a Black boy, Clyde would experience harsher, blunter racism than Rani would as a South Asian and wanted to be sure that racism came from obvious bad guys (Nazis, people.)  When 1950s villagers gawk at Rani, their exoticizing is more about ignorance than malice, but if Clyde had walked into the same crowd, he would’ve likely had a far colder welcome.  It’s ugly enough for a Nazi call him a Negro.  If he’d had that contempt from one those pleasant villagers?  From one of Sarah Jane’s parents, maybe?  Way worse, and harder for Clyde to push back against.  If the show really had that kind of understanding and planned Clyde’s one time-travel adventure accordingly, it shows a pretty unflinching awareness of history and race relations.

Character Highlight: Gwen Cooper (Torchwood)

Gwen is a tricky character.  She’s probably one of the characters in the Whoniverse most ill-served by the writing (not far afterClara,) which makes it harder to connect with her and the often-contradictory things she does.  And generally, while she doesn’t quite pop the way the rest of the team does, she’s frequently at the forefront of the narrative, which leads to griping about her taking screentime away from characters we want more of.  All in all, a bit of a mess.

Gwen is framed as both the Everywoman and the Exceptional Woman.  The main show often does this with its companions – ordinary people discovering the extraordinary in themselves – but it’s kind of bungled with Gwen.  She’s our eyes into Torchwood, the lowly beat cop who stumbles upon the organization and its alien wonders.  She tenaciously follows her curiosity and pushes past attempts to throw her off the scent, and in the end, Jack is so intrigued by her and her “heart” that he brings her aboard.  It’s through her that we see the freaky alien goings-on and get to know the other team members.

For me, the biggest part of the problem is that Gwen is very much the newcomer who doesn’t know what she’s doing (in and of itself, that’s fine – to be expected, honestly,) but she tends to act like that isn’t true.  When her clumsy mistakes on her first day lead to major trouble, she insists that Owen should’ve been more careful.  When she thinks the team is acting too callously toward a civilian who’s gotten caught up in a sci-fi mess, she lectures them without knowing what’s really going on.  She charges in headfirst, she defies Jack when she doesn’t have all the facts, and she argues for a better way without having tangible ideas to offer.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with being confident and strong-willed, but when you don’t yet have the skills or knowledge needed to back that up, it’s important to play to your strengths, minimize your missteps, and acknowledge that you have more to learn.  With Gwen, I just don’t see that.

The show also doesn’t do her any favors by describing her, again, as the “heart” of the team as though it’s her actual job description.  It’s a vague term that doesn’t really speak to what her presence actually brings to Torchwood, and it can annoy fans because it seems to suggest that Gwen is the only one who cares while the others (Jack included) are just jaded bastards.  To be sure, Gwen is a caring person, sometimes to a fault.  She’s a very “heart in the right place” sort, someone who is desperate to help but doesn’t necessarily know how.  This makes it tough for her to operate in Torchwood, where tough decisions with no obviously “right” answer rule the day.  At times, it feels like the show is designed to beat this quality out of her, when really, it needs to be about recognizing that compassion and pragmatism have to go hand in hand, knowing that not everyone can be saved but that everyone is worth trying to save.  When things go badly, one has to mourn, but one also has to move on so they’re ready to try and save the next one.

That said, Gwen is concerned about the human cost of their work.  She’s often the one who thinks of the innocent bystanders, the one who reaches out to families of the victims or tries to reassure frightened people in the midst of the action.  She tends to be selflessly brave, frequently to her own detriment, in order to keep other people safe.  And while she can get caught up in the moment, skipping “practical solutions” and going straight to “noble self-sacrifice” (leaving the others scrambling to find those solutions,) she’d always rather take the risk on herself than let someone else get hurt.