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Title: Jack's Heritage
Challenge: challenge: heritage
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Not mine, no claims, all property of the BBC.
Notes: Cross-posted to my LJ and tw100.
Jack's Heritage
Jack's first life was light-years away and millennia in the future. His second was that of the Time Agency: a created universe, twisted, magnificent, ultimately worthless.
Then Earth, World War II, and the TARDIS, followed by abandonment, loss, Victorian England. He picked up customs and manners quickly, from people, books. Then there were the motion pictures; the talkies; technicolor; Gary Cooper, Richard Burton, Harrison Ford. Jack drank it up eagerly, studying every nuance. The film industry made his past out of bits of light and sound.
Celluloid heritage: it served him well, for a life he could call his own.
~ ~ ~
no subject
Date: 2007-07-19 08:40 pm (UTC)I mean honestly, con artists are basically actors anyway.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-20 03:10 am (UTC)This is one of the things that make him so fascinating. I think I understand Jack very well: part of that understanding is to realize how his whole life (and his version of Torchwood) is all a con. It's built on an imaginary foundation and made into something real - all created by a con man's skills. The central fact of his existence is that "Captain Jack Harkness" doesn't exist, he's a borrowed name with a made-up identity, who has managed to get exactly the power and position he needs to do what he wants to do (save humans from alien threats and the dangers of the Rift) without compromising his unreality. It's an amazing achievement!
I love it. No wonder Jack is my hero. "The lie that becomes the truth" is one of my favourite fictional themes, and it's illustrated over and over again in Jack's life. Lying as a process of creation.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-21 03:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-21 02:45 pm (UTC)It's a fabrication. I don't think it's a "con" in that his purposes are not self-serving - and are, in fact, exactly what he says they are. I think it's true that "the 21st century is where it all changes" and Jack is trying to prepare the world, or perhaps to stave off disaster as long as the world is still unprepared.
His purposes are heroic. And to a large extent he's not lying about who he is any more - he uses a name not his own, granted, but he hasn't made up an elaborate cover story, he just lets himself be the mystery leader of Torchwood. Which he is. He talks - at least to his team - fairly casually about meeting aliens,
having sex with aliens, knowing what will happen, knowing things no one else on earth knows... having been pregnant. What they make of it is unclear. Presumably they all think Jack is full of it, but he amuses them.no subject
Date: 2007-07-21 04:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-22 01:26 pm (UTC)