The Cyberman vs. Lisa

[eldabe]

Most of the time, my personal canon is that Jack is fully convinced that Lisa died at Canary Wharf, and the shell of her body had been controlled by a Cyberman brain before Ianto ever got to her. The Cyberman convinced Ianto (not, perhaps, without a little wishful hope in Ianto's part) into thinking it was still Lisa and guided Ianto sometimes to do what would benefit the Cybermen the most.

Ianto, meanwhile, quietly knows it was Lisa until the Tanizaki started tinkering and while he can accept that maybe it was impossible to save her, he still believes it was her until moment when the Cyberman was finally switched on.

Post-Canary-Wharf-Lisa is one of the things they do not talk about.

___

Thoughts? Ideas? I know many fics have theorized that Jack was only able to forgive and/or let Ianto back onto the team once Ianto came to the realization that Lisa had been a Cyberwoman all along. Any thoughts on that?

(This is posted on our sisters site on livejournal tw_meta.)

Comments

[star54kar]

Apologies in advance if this turns into a bit of a book. This is an issue that fascinates me because there are large number of possibilities that exist! I have a lot of opinions on this topic and have spent a great deal of time thinking about this very issue because there are a lot of various ways (many valid and some kinda stretching the realm of believability) that I have seen in various fics. I'm going to focus on Jack's perspective for this comment because I really don't have enough time right now to cover the whole issue, but I plan to post another comment at a later time that delves more into Ianto's mindset on this topic.

Personally, I subscribe to the idea that during the events of Cyberwoman, Jack fully believes that Lisa died at Canary Warf. This being said, he still allowed Ianto to try to reach her despite his own beliefs because he wanted to wrong on this issue. After Lisa "deletes" Ianto and makes her move on the rest of the team, Jack is assured that his original assumption about the cyberman in his base to be true. This is evidenced by what he says to the team in the episode during a makeshift emergency boardroom meeting (as a side note I always found it utterly hilarious that in the middle of their base being attacked by a cyberman that they ran to the boardroom and still had enough time to conduct an actual meeting! LOL!), "Forget what Ianto said, that thing is not human."

This being said however, I do believe the fact that Jack actually gives Ianto a chance to approach "Lisa" is also evidence that Jack believes, even in the intensity of the moment, that Ianto believes that Lisa is still Lisa and therefore is able to be saved. This belief is key to Jack's ultimate forgiveness extended to Ianto because Jack knows that Ianto's motives and intentions behind his deception and betrayal were pure. This distinction is what makes Ianto's betrayal different from Susie's betrayal. The loss of life that occurred as a result of Ianto's betrayal was unintentional. He was seeking to help the woman he loved despite the danger represented by what had transformed her. Susie on the other hand repeatedly and deliberately took the lives of others for her own gain without remorse. This distinction is important to Jack and ultimately the reason he does not carry out his threat to "execute" Ianto if he does not "execute" Lisa, but does not forgive or hesitate to kill Susie when she selfishly and deliberately steals Gwen's life to prolong her own.

I do not think that after the events of Cyberwoman that Jack would necessarily remain steadfast that Lisa died at Canary Warf but (assuming that some dialogue eventually took place when the wound wasn't quite so raw) might come around to Ianto's point of view that the cyber portion spread slowly throughout Lisa, like an incurable disease until she was beyond the point of redemption. I do not think that Ianto's opinion one way or another has anything to do with his being forgiven by Jack, but rather that Ianto did not intend to hurt others with his actions.

[eldabe]

No worries about writing too much in this community. I like discussion. :D (You can also feel free to join up and post thing!

Yay, you're the first person to really dig into Jack!

I don't think Jack necessarily wanted to be wrong or right on Lisa. I don't think he cared enough about Lisa either way. The whole time it was a desperate sort of belief in Ianto that drove a lot of his stupid reactions.

I think, honestly, that much of Jack's forgiveness is because he knows Ianto won't do it again. The only purpose of punishing him is, well, to punish as retribution. It won't educate because Ianto learned his lesson and it won't stop him from doing it again because there's really no danger from that anyway. In fact, by forgiving him Jack is pulling Ianto a little deeper into the hole of TW3 (and holding Ianto's loyalty), which Ianto only joined to save Lisa in the first place.

I don't know if motives mattered. I think Jack might have forgiven Suzie as well, if she had confessed to him and not killed herself. Jack's not always terribly rational about his emotional decisions and there's a lot of evidence that he doesn't value the lives of people outside of his personal circle as much as he should. We see a lot of deaths on that show but Jack is only sad when they are close to him. Suzie killed only individual strangers, Jack...might have forgiven her. (Jack doesn't always do the right thing either.) I do think Jack was thinking of Suzie when he forgave Ianto. In terms of Suzie's second appearance, it's totally different. At that point, Gwen was a valued member of the team and Suzie was the dead crazy one. Jack's choice there was pretty clear.

The reason I think Jack might have stayed steadfast in his opinion is that it makes it easy for him to dismiss Lisa from his mind. Jack sympathizes with Ianto, but just like he doesn't share a lot of details of his old lovers, he lets Ianto keep Lisa private. And for him, there's not much of a reason to think about her all that much. So he picked a stance and sort of stopped thinking about Lisa for the most part.

I do not think that Ianto's opinion one way or another has anything to do with his being forgiven by Jack, but rather that Ianto did not intend to hurt others with his actions.

Oh, I totally agree Ianto didn't intend to hurt anyone. Watch his face that whole episode. He has no idea how to handle people being killed because of him. But I think that's true regardless of what he believes was going on in Lisa's head.

[amphigorym_2011]

I agree that Ianto honestly believed, up till she started killing people, that Lisa was still Lisa. I also think he believed it because he was in love with her, and love frequently makes us do stupid things. The fact that she possessed enough knowledge of what was happening to her to explain to him how to keep her alive would support this. I think she was already gone by the time he found her, but the Cyber part of her was able to convince him that his Lisa, the Lisa he'd loved, was still in control.

It wasn't till after she killed Dr. Tanzinaki that he realized she was lying, and by then, she was too strong for him to take her down on his own. He definitely knew after she killed the pizza girl to take on a more human appearance and tried to convince him they could still be together.

I do wonder, sometimes though if there wasn't still a very small part of the original Lisa buried in the Cybernetic body.

And of course Jack was furious that Ianto would bring such danger into the Torchwood home Base. Yet not so furious that he didn't revive ianto after Lisa killed him (which he would have been perfectly within his rights to do). I think that whatever relationship they'd built between then before Jack discovered what Ianto had done meant something to both of them, even if it likely started out as a ruse on Ianto's part to keep Jack distracted. I think that Jack, with his checkered past, had probably done worse things for far less. So how could he blame Ianto for doing what he did out of love and grief?

[star54kar]

I do wonder, sometimes though if there wasn't still a very small part of the original Lisa buried in the Cybernetic body.

I believe that there were vague traces of Lisa that remained, but those traces were warped and confused by the partial conversion. The cyber portion couldn't tell the difference between itself and the traces of Lisa, and the traces of Lisa couldn't tell the difference between the woman she used to be, and the cyberwoman she was forced to become.

[eldabe]

See, I think Ianto remained convinced that it was Lisa until Tanizaki started tinkering. Obviously there's a lot of debate over that and a lot of opinions, but I think Ianto holds onto that one time for himself even while he's willing to that by the time the Cyber killed it was no longer Lisa.

There's a lot of argument going on in the Livejournal post if Lisa was still in there, if she even could have still been there, etc. I have extremely mixed feelings on that one.

[star54kar]

Yay, you're the first person to really dig into Jack!

LOL! I could dig into Jack all day:D I actually was in a bit of a hurry when I posted yesterday and didn't actually have enough time to write as much as I could have.

I don't think Jack necessarily wanted to be wrong or right on Lisa. I don't think he cared enough about Lisa either way. The whole time it was a desperate sort of belief in Ianto that drove a lot of his stupid reactions.

I think that in my hurry yesterday, I might not have chosen the best words to convey what I was trying to say. When I said that Jack wanted to be wrong about Lisa having died at Canary Wharf, I didn't mean that he consciously wanted to be wrong. Things were happening far too rapidly for him to really waste time wondering about it. I do however think that despite Ianto's obvious betrayal of Jack both professionally and personally, and despite Jack's emotional knee-jerk reactions, Jack recognized that Ianto was driven solely by the need to save someone he loved. I think that subconsciously, Jack's feelings for Ianto, (even at this early stage in their flirtation/relationship) were driving Jack's behavior when he allowed Ianto to try to get through to Lisa. Jack wanted to be wrong about Lisa for Ianto's sake, not for any other reason.

I think Jack might have forgiven Suzie as well, if she had confessed to him and not killed herself. Jack's not always terribly rational about his emotional decisions and there's a lot of evidence that he doesn't value the lives of people outside of his personal circle as much as he should. We see a lot of deaths on that show but Jack is only sad when they are close to him. Suzie killed only individual strangers, Jack...might have forgiven her. (Jack doesn't always do the right thing either.)

I think that these are very valid points and I agree that if things played out differently with Suzie they were certainly possible. I still feel that my original argument stands though, based on the actual events as they played out regarding Suzie. I strongly believe that the fundamental difference between Ianto and Suzie's betrayals as they played out in canon have a lot to do with intent. While both Ianto and Suzie managed to successfully execute a "long con" on Jack, who at one time, was a conman in his own right, that is where the similarities end. It is the differences, rather than the similarities of their respective situations which results in Jack's lack of forgiveness for Suzie and his forgiveness for Ianto.

Suzie was Jack's second in command. She was trusted by Jack with a position of power, and given that Jack knew that he should be running into "the right kind of Doctor" fairly soon, he likely had every intention to permanently leave Torchwood in what he believed were her capable hands. Instead of using that trust to help Jack re-build Torchwood into something to be proud of, Suzie became obsessed with obtaining immortality and abused her position to achieve that goal. It is frightening to contemplate, considering that at this point Jack's team did not know about his little problem with staying dead, one can only imagine what Suzie could possibly have done to Jack if she had known because her plans were meticulous and malicious enough as they were.

She retconed and placed subconscious triggers into the mind of poor Max, rigged the Hub to go into lockdown once "Because I could not stop for death" was quoted enough times, went on a killing spree to play with the power the glove gave her over life and death, attempted to murder Gwen when she suspected that she had figured her out, actually murdered Jack when he tried to stop her, took her own life when her murder of Jack failed unexpectedly, and then to top it all off, when Max went off as planned and Gwen used the glove to bring her back to life, Suzie deliberately stole Gwen's life force so that she would never have to die. Suzie's actions were selfish. They had everything to do with herself, and she didn't give a damn who she hurt in the process.

In comparison, Ianto's betrayal had nothing to do with himself and everything to do with Lisa. In order to save her, he did everything in his power to get Jack to hire him. If that meant using his sex appeal to get Jack's attention, then he was willing to do it. However, Ianto wasn't expecting that the spark of attraction would go both ways. In a sense the con began to backfire on Ianto right from the very beginning because of the fact that the mutual attraction existed. Regardless of how Ianto suppressed it, or justified it in his own mind, he flirted with Jack, played hard to get, and he enjoyed it-- even when he was still using it as a tactic to distract Jack. I imagine that the guilt Ianto must have felt regarding the games he was playing with Jack was quite strong, but he continued the game because he felt that was the only way he could help Lisa.

Ianto deceived Jack, but he also deceived himself. He thought he was doing the right thing. He thought he was going to save the woman he loved. He probably even thought that once he managed to fix Lisa that Jack wouldn't really be hurt because Jack flirts with everyone. He didn't intend for anyone to be harmed as a result of his actions, and as you mentioned, was clearly horrified when people died and when things began to spin rapidly out of his control. Unfortunately, the road to hell is paved on good intentions and Ianto was wrong on all of the above counts. I believe that once Jack finally got his own emotional responses under control that all of these things were obvious to him. Ianto had good intentions throughout the course of his deception, and because Ianto didn't really mean anyone any harm, that's why Jack was able to forgive him.

[eldabe]

Don't ever worry. I want this place to be casual and welcoming, so I'm not planning on worrying about massive edits on my own responses either. I would rather have messy, interesting discussion than no discussion. :)

I think that subconsciously, Jack's feelings for Ianto, (even at this early stage in their flirtation/relationship) were driving Jack's behavior when he allowed Ianto to try to get through to Lisa. Jack wanted to be wrong about Lisa for Ianto's sake, not for any other reason.

Honestly, the first moment when Jack lets Ianto approach Lisa always read to me as this sort of morbid fascination. Like, Jack is just watching the way you would watch a car crash. "Is this real? Is this actually possible?" He might be hoping a little bit for Lisa on Ianto's sake, but it's just so shocking as well.

Later, when Jack sends Ianto down with the gun, I read that as a test. Can Jack trust Ianto ever again? Whose side is Ianto really on? Of course, he's not on Jack's side at that point, but he still can't bring himself to be on Lisa's anymore, so.

I think Jack's stance on Suzie probably changed the more they found out. Suzie as a killer (Everything Changes) might have been demoted but forgiven. Crazy & manipulative evil!Suzie of They Keep Killing Suzie didn't deserve forgiveness, and she didn't get it. (I love the massive paragraphs on nitpick on Suzie's motivations. I was going to quote sections, but it was so fabulous I couldn't pick. I would like to encourage you to post it if you'd like. :)

The comparison to Suzie as selfish versus Ianto as selfless is great. It's true that motivation counts and I certainly think that was part of Jack's forgiveness process.

He probably even thought that once he managed to fix Lisa that Jack wouldn't really be hurt because Jack flirts with everyone.

Ooooh, that is interesting. I've seen some fic postulation that really rings with me that Ianto would probably have left after Lisa was cured. Because he joined Torchwood to use them and use their resources and he probably didn't want to be there a lot of the time. Now, I would also think that by the time of Cyberwoman Ianto's initial post-Canary Wharf anger at Torchwood might have faded somewhat, but I could see that being his ultimate plan. Meaning that no matter how much he might have cared for Jack, his plan was to leave Jack behind and try to forget about him. When everything fell apart, he then had to actually acknowledge how he had dealt with Jack and what that meant for him.

[arnica]

Now, I would also think that by the time of Cyberwoman Ianto's initial post-Canary Wharf anger at Torchwood might have faded somewhat...

Hi, don't mind me as I hurl myself head first into your discussion. I was just going to read the awesome comments, but since we're doing a break down of cyberwoman, I have to ask if I'm the only person who thinks there aren't enough mental breakdowns for some of these people? I am always, endlessly annoyed that what you wrote above is so very true. Ianto was just kind of over it. Like it didn't matter that he was held hostage in an active war zone, forced to hide from the people who should have been helping him, and then forced to uproot the shreds of his life to move himself and his evil tin girlfriend into another equally dangerous situation for a relatively long time. Anyway, that's just my random slightly annoyed reaction to canon saying that after several months of long term stress following one large supremely traumatic event, Ianto Jones is just over it, thanks anyway. Okay, enough of that, back on topic.

I've never actually believed the plan was to run after Lisa was saved. I think Ianto might have thought that was his plan, but I also think Ianto never really thought too many steps in advance because the Lisa situation was really something that can't be planned for more than a step or two at a time. Honestly I think in a perfect world if the cyber implants could have been over ridden Ianto would have been forced to go to Jack. A civilian expert in cybernetics might be able to finish wiring a metal shell so Lisa could breathe on her own, but what really could be done about her limbs other than remove them? What about the head gear? I'm convinced he'd have been forced to turn to Jack because there's no way he would have smuggled that girl out of the United Kingdom without being spotted by someone. Where can you hide almost six feet and a baby elephants weight in metal and flesh? I think that if things had gone better Ianto would have realized that.

But Jack...oh my Jack! People look at me funny every time I say I feel just as bad for Jack in that episode as I do Ianto, but I really do. Talk about an awful night. He got electrocuted, house jacked, punched in the face, and beaten up by a girl. He's just recently lost his oldest agent only to be confronted with losing all the rest of them in a freak occurrence that they really could not have been prepared for, and whether or not you believe the sexual aspect of his and Ianto's relationship began before this (I do!) it's irrefutable that he got played like a chump by a kid. More than a century old, several of those years spent as a professional con artist and some kid with big blue eyes, a smirk, and a bad habit of teasing with an almost straight face walked in off the streets, read him like sheet music and then played him like guitar. I cannot imagine how humiliating that would have been, but if I were Jack, I couldn't have done what he did in letting Ianto's punishment be living with it. I think that with the things we've seen Jack do, his restraint was remarkable and enjoyably manipulative.

Sorry, I'm rambling, but pre and post-Cyberwoman is my favorite era. I must have 15 or so stories in various stages from done to notes set around then just because there's just so many ways to look at it all. It's almost infinite and pretty freakin sweet if I do say so myself.

[eldabe]

Oh, I don't think he's over it at all! I think his big emotional break comes at the end of S1, when he betrays Jack. I just think he's less furious at Torchwood as an organization the way I think he might have been immediately post-battle. He's got lots of PTSD, as do many of the people in Torchwood. They're a patched-together bunch, our Torchwood.

I read one fic where Ianto had bought them each two false passports and gathered money in different denominations in preparation. I'm not saying he did, obviously, but planning for a fantasy future might have been a badly-needed outlet in the crazy. (Also, I highly recommend this unfinished fic, which remains (weirdly) one of only two fics in which Ianto succeeds. I also recommend the other one!)

I feel terrible for Jack in this episode. For, well, all the reasons you listed. On top of that Jack's been trying and trying to turn Torchwood into a force for good, to bring the positive messages of the Doctor to bear, and one subordinate turned into a crazed alley-killer and the other one nearly destroyed the world. It's enough to make any depressed, lonely immortal snap. It's impressive that he didn't retcon Ianto back to childhood and kick him out, but it's so much more interesting that he didn't.

Cyberwoman as an era of Torchwood is full of delicious things to dig into and explore. It's such an emotional touchstone of the series and it makes so little sense when examined that I really enjoy theorizing and playing with it. :)