Outside the Government: Fragments
The week of my coauthor Alex Reed and I guest-editing 33 1/3’s blog in promotion of our book on They Might Be Giants’s Flood continues with Alex counting down the ten best TMBG non-album tracks. You can buy the book here.
It’s March 21st, 2008.
In Miracle Day there is a startlingly large continuity gaffe when Jack knows the “fixed point in time” explanation that he’s given in Utopia several decades too early. And yet this seems, in light of Fragments, to be just one of many gaffes in attempting to reconstruct Jack’s experience of the twentieth century. While employed by Torchwood, after all, he is seen to, for no apparent reason, enlist in the military to go to Pakistan, work for a travelling circus, and go romp around the US for a while. There is no coherent timeline to be had of Jack’s twentieth century.
This is strange given that the norm for Torchwood is rapidly shifting to being about various secrets from Jack’s long life that he’s been hiding. And yet these secrets exist in a fundamentally incoherent timeline. Jack’s twentieth century is so oversignified that it can contain anything. There are consciously no limitations to the secrets contained within it. He’s gone from having two years of his life that he knows nothing about to a hundred that the audience knows nothing about.
Which makes his life in Fragments odd, given that it is defined in essence by his being captured by Torchwood and steadily coming to accept their ways. The narrative is one of corruption – Jack goes from being appalled by Torchwood’s tendency to randomly murder aliens because it can’t think of anything to do with them to running the joint. Yes, he runs it in a more humane and less murderous way, but this is still the sense of progress that suggests that putting less evil people in charge of corrupt structures will fix them. Which is to say, New Labour.
In many ways this perfectly sets Jack up for the future of the show, in that it properly makes him a site of anxiety within the narrative. Jack is not a heo, but someone who has been corrupted by the system he sets out to work – a concrete demonstration of all that is wrong with the logic of changing the system from within. And yet on the other hand Jack is forever without – external to the world and to its systems. His status as a fixed point in time becomes all too symbolic; he becomes locked as a bridge between the world and its eccentric spaces. This liminal space is a source of danger. Jack becomes the eternal transgressor – always in between two spaces, but, unlike the character he derives from (who remains unspeakable within Torchwood) never moving as such. He is stuck on Earth, and festering there.
When, on New Year’s Day, he is finally given control of Torchwood Three, it is visibly a poisoned chalice. The site of too many crimes and murders.…