I am going to have proper thinky thoughts about the whole thing tomorrow, but briefly they really have turned Jack into the Doctor, haven't they? Right down to privileging his emo manpain over every fucking other thing else. It really did seem to me that we were intended to read it that Jack sacrificing Steven is his redemption for being involved in 1965, rather than a fucking horrible thing to do to his own family and even in pragmatic one vs millions terms a horrendous thing to have to do. And in Doylist terms that last scene with Gwen and Rhys makes sense to explain where he's going, but Watsonianly, WTF? This was clearly him coming back after having fucked off (probably without a word) for six months -- coming back just to say "actually, yeah, I'm really fucking off" is just cruel and "I want you to witness my manpain"-y. Ick.
Basically, it felt to me like the whole last episode fell apart into RTD's OTT-melodrama standards, which is a real fucking shame because the build up had been so good. The most annoying thing for me apart from the Jack = Ten stuff was the fact that they didn't just do the bottom 20% of schools and assume half the kids would stay home rather than send the army chasing after individual children because that makes for ZOMG TRAUMATIC VIEWING (it's not fridge logic if you're shouting at the evil characters to at least be clever evil characters as they're doing it). I also think it is too cynical to think that nobody at all spoke out at COBRA, and that the army all went along with it and stuff.
OK, that was a bit longer than I intended it to be when I started typing. There was good stuff, loads of it, but it looks like yet another case where RTD's ending undermines what's come before it.
