How To Write Out Jack the Ripper

[grav_ity]

or, "WTF, Into the Black?"

Reaction post/character meta/ship meta/getting things off my chest before I go on a four day road trip. This kind of expands on my thoughts from this quick post from earlier this afternoon.

Let me open by saying it's probably too late to make me hate John. If "Into the Black" proved anything, it's that attempts to demonize John will only appear half-assed and badly written. At best. And I'm pretty sure "ItB" was not Sanctuary at its best. We've had three whole seasons to reach an understanding with John, three seasons to get used to that overwhelming pity, three seasons to maybe come to love him, just a little bit, and love him in spite of Jack the Ripper. And, frankly, after "FK&C" (not to mention "Vigilante"), it's just not going to work. The tragedy of his character, and that connection to Helen, made again and again in blood, is too well established.

Fortunately, that tragedy might also be your "in", if you're seeking to clear John out of the picture, for whatever reason, and you'd be able to do it without it cost Chris Heyerdahl his job. It would be pretty damn easy for the Elemental to drive him over the edge, and then he could kill himself or goad Helen into killing him (again, for real this time). It would be all tragic and heroic, a fitting end for a man who was good and was horribly twisted, and we'd be sad...but then we'd all move on with our lives, like we did when they killed Ashley. And Clara. And James. They'd just have to make sure to stick to their own canon when they did it. Because "appeasement" is not the same thing as "stronger".

But frankly, I don't know why this is necessary at all. "Into the Black" pulled an incredible bait and switch on the viewers, first by presenting characterization that was completely ridiculous (more from John than from Helen, but Helen got her digs in "Out of the Blue", so I'm counting it), and then having them react to that ridiculousness COMPLETELY IN CHARACTER, Helen by rejecting him outright (again), and John by sacrificing his better nature on her behalf (again). And, you know, the acting was good. So I was focusing on that. The end of the episode, was also really intriguing, so it took me a while before I could really put my finger on the problem.

It's not John. It's not Helen. It's not the time travel. It's not the rumoured love interest.

The problem is this: If you take away John, turning him into the villain for an ill-conceived plot twist, changing everything we've learned about his character since we met him, twisting his relationship with Helen to match a plot instead of the story, all of that just to clear the way for a love interest? Heck, even if there is no love interest (or it hadn't been thought of yet), that's still a idea. Because in doing these things, YOU ARE ERASING HELEN MAGNUS.

And you know what? It's not any more romantic coming from the writers than it is coming from John. It's not even a little bit romantic. It's a cheap trick, one utilized by the worst fanfic writers to shoe-horn their OTPs down other people's throats. My feelings for Helen/Will are well known, it's true, but I loved missparker's "About Memory", and the tag ceilidh wrote for Carentan made me cry. I believed them. I do not believe "Into the Black".

Jack the Ripper, or even the John we met in the webisodes, would make a great nemesis. But John Druitt, the one we've watched develop, cannot be so easily villainized. It is simply not in his character. It's totally in character for John to be dumb enough to fall for Adam's ploy (well, it's frustrating because he was, at the time, COVERED IN THE BLOOD OF THE PEOPLE ADAM SENT TO KILL HIM, but I'm willing to handwave it because John Druitt never met a grand gesture he didn't want to try), but if you wanted me to believe John would ever think of changing Helen Magnus, the woman he fell in love with because she was a doctor and a thinker and ahead of her time, than you needed to do more than give me one line in "Vigilante" that might suggest, if you squint at it funny in the right shade of moonlight, that John's driving force for season three has been "Please, can you just die so that I can die too?"

Helen Magnus hasn't spent a century pining for John. She's moved on. Hell, she moved on with his best friend/ex. She's got that guy in Germany. And, I hope, a bunch of others. And they love her. And she loves them. AND SHE LOVES JOHN. That's what makes her so freaking awesome. Her long life is what makes her Helen Magnus, and John is a big part of that life. There is absolutely no reason why you need to negate Helen's previous love-life in order to make her accessible. Frankly, if you can't handle Helen's previous love-life, you probably can't handle Helen Magnus.

Sanctuary has been dogged by sloppy writing and, for the most part, I don't care. I do care, though, if it comes at the expense of Helen Magnus, and that's exactly what this development does. So sure, bring on the Ripper. Kill John. Shove him so far back into the refridgerator that it takes Helen two seasons to find him. But don't screw with your own canon to do it, and don't, just DON'T mess with Helen Magnus.

Comments

[jemster.livejournal.com]

Frankly, if you can't handle Helen's previous love-life, you probably can't handle Helen Magnus.

Word. That's it...we need to make our own series and put it on the web dammit. ;-)

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

I think I might need that stitch on a pillow, actually. I want to write it on a postcard and SEND IT TO AMANDA TAPPING. ;)

(Because, seriously, Dear Helen, I will still love you if you love John and move on with your life to have meaningful relationships with other people. You have done it before. You can do it again. And in all likelihood, IT WILL MAKE ME LOVE YOU MORE. Love, K)

[jemster.livejournal.com]

Honestly, her previous love life is no one's business but her own. Not her future lovers, not us fans, no one.

[openended.livejournal.com]

Bless this post. Really.

John would ever think of changing Helen Magnus, the woman he fell in love with because she was a doctor and a thinker and ahead of her time

I have 10,004 problems with John's plan. Most of them are procedural and obviously a moot point since it got thwarted. Other problems are that, to me, it delves into non-con territory and I don't believe John's capable of that with Helen. More importantly to your post, though, the rest of my issues are exactly what you've landed on here. John has never given any major indication to the audience or to Helen that he wants her to change. I have no doubt that he will do anything to be with her because he loves her so dearly, but I do believe that he's intelligent enough to realize that returning to those pre-Source Blood times is not what Helen wants, nor is it particularly practical.

In the first half of the season, once he recovered from the massive quantities of drugs he took, he was under the influence of the energy being and simultaneously a good guy who was kind and cared about Helen. It doesn't fit, in my mind, to suddenly have this well-rounded character who can love and overcome his flaws turn into someone so flat with only a single goal in mind. Yes, there is a huge amount of history between the two that you can't ignore, and there's also the underlying "he's possessed by a crazy energy being and could go off the deep end any moment" tension, but I think that if both of them were willing to make the effort, they could make it work.

They could've reached the same "I love you, I will do anything to be with you" / "Get out of my life" exchange without devolving him as a character. I don't quite know how at this point, but I'm sure it could've been done with a little bit of thinking.

Because now they can't use him as a guy Helen can rely on or trust in any capacity. And he's played a huge role in the series as that guy. So I don't know what on earth is in store for that.

But if they do any sort of timey-wimey crap where Helen futzes with the timeline or does something so original!Helen isn't the one to survive, it's her duplicate from the timeline Adam created, and therefore has no knowledge of John's plan and HEY LOOK IT'S ALL FORGOTTEN, I'm going to be angry.

re: death of original!Helen

[gsyh.livejournal.com]

Still working my way through the series, but yeaaaaah, I'll be so pissed off if they do that. Dude, copy/clone of any sort does NOT negate character death!

Did you know that that the original Ensign Harry Kim from Star Trek Voyager is actually dead? The one we saw boarding the ship is dead, the one that first befriended Tom Paris is dead - but what happened is they got the one from an alternate ship and then Nobody evar mention it again. What the hell? So okay, it was 2372 (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Harry_Kim) one year into the show...so the Harry Kim we saw for the most part and grow to love/hate is actually the duplicate aaaaah mindhurt!

...and then I heard something about Superboy being replaced by a Superboy clone?

If Helen dies, I would cry, and no, the duplicate, I might grow to like her as different character, but Replacement Goldfish is not cool!




...and all aboard with what John planning to do to Helen being all shades of non-con wrong and from what I've seen of him so far (okay, I haven't seen all yet), I don't believe he would. I don't believe any of the men in her life would, Helen drives, and they are okay with that or they would NOT be in her life.

As for the Jack the Ripper thing, if I don't separate it into an energy being, I can still sympathize with Jack...have you ever seen Psycho II? Sometimes when you are crazy, you are crazy. Doesn't mean I would date him, but I can sympathize with someone who for real, cannot control it. All along, it's actually Helen I have more of a problem with, if she had been in self-denial. Okay, so Helen is a woman, that sucks in Victorian times, but she's a high class woman! So high class she gets to go to university, in some capacity. Meanwhile, the women that John murders get all the suck, I don't think being a prostitute is all that fun, they probably had very little choice. Something about the combination of it all just rubs me the wrong way. Ah, here's the word: Madonna/Whore complex.

Re: death of original!Helen

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

The Harry dying thing worked because both Harry's were at the same point in Time. On Farscape, it worked so well that it scarred most of us for life! :) It won't work with Helen, because if Blonde Helen dies, she won't be able to go back once she becomes Brunette Helen. It's NOT a duplication. It's the same person twice, and there's a distinct difference.

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I never for a moment thought that Blonde Helen would die. What I was implying was that BOTH Helen's would live...they have to. But in the "present", ONE OF THEM HAS TO GO BACK TO THE PAST.

I'm going to need a diagram, like I did with Moebius... ;)

[naiad8.livejournal.com]

I do not love John Druitt. I love Christopher Heyerdahl and he does a magnificent job with a complex, difficult character. I understand that this is not the best written show, and I'm amazed at the ability of the amazing actors to make some of the material so compelling. So, I know that the show exists in a world where logic doesn't always hold, but I still cannot for a moment forget the actions of the true Jack the Ripper. These crimes are so incredibly misogynistic and hateful of the existence of women that I unfortunately can believe that in desperation, when the darkness is so close, when the man is covered in blood and the woman he loves may or may not be saved from a gruesome death and yet she did not turn to him for comfort as she lay dying, with all of that I can believe that John/Jack might want to try to rewrite everything, believing that he, as a man, knows better than Helen want she truly wants. I don't think he can ever accept that the Sanctuary is more important, and always has been more important, to Helen than any lover.
I do think that they could have done it in a much better way, and I hope they don't screw everything to hell and gone early in Season 4 and kick out a brilliant character because they aren't smart enough to know what to do with the gold they have, but I have to admit that I can believe that John would pull something stupid. At the last moment, he might give up, he might pull back, but the temptation would certainly be there.

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

I suppose the difference between you and me (and this may be because I watched the first two and a half seasons of the show in a week), is that I view John Druitt and Jack the Ripper as two different characters. Jack I have no sympathy for at all. John, however, pulls a little bit at my heart strings. While I do think that John selects who gets murdered, I also think that Jack forces him to pick, and that's his tragedy: he has to pick who dies, and the only person he can't pick is himself (because Jack won't let him).

So yes: Jack the Ripper is bad. And I'd be okay if he died, even if that cost us John, but I also need it to be a tragedy that John is dead.

(I think too that, in his heart, John knows that Helen is always work first. He did fall in love with her in the first place, after all, and was seemingly okay with living in her shadow even in the Victorian era. I don't think you get to be friends with Helen Magnus unless you understand that about her, and I think all of John, James, Nikola and Nigel did...and that's why she let them in.)

[nomorefrostbite.livejournal.com]

John Druitt never met a grand gesture he didn't want to try

Basically, all of this entire post... but THIS particularly is the truest thing about John i've perhaps ever read. HE IS KING OF (attempting) GRAND GESTURES.

Love him so hard. And absolutely everything you said regarding the possible writing out of him is completely spot on.

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

He's just...so bad at being good!

[jerusha]

I...kind of love John Druitt, and I think one of the things I love about him is that he loves Helen Magnus. He loved her when she was forward and a bluestocking and ahead of her time and a doctor. THAT IS WHO HE FELL IN LOVE WITH. So, this thing now... I just. I can't even. I CANNOT EVEN.

And what I keep coming back to is "Normandy" which was so rich with feeling. There was the tension between John and James, and James and Helen, and John and Helen. You got the feeling that they had all loved each other and been in love with each other and probably had sex in every conceivable position. And it's complex and interesting and multi-layered.

And now you give us John as this flat, one-dimensional, idiotic super villain wannabe. Who would like to erase Helen. I don't buy it.

[shadadukal]

I don't think John is being demonized in this. John can alternatingly be crazy, make stupid plans or act mostly sane, sometimes all three at once. In ItB, it looks to me like mode 1 and 2 combined.

In FK&C, John was drugged out of his mind, and when Helen cuddled with him, he was unconscious. This is hardly a normal situation even for them. And in "Vigilante", Helen was dying, again with the special circumstances that are going to alter dynamics. Otherwise, in Revelations/End of Nights, Helen reluctantly treated him as an ally. In "Haunted", she tried to lock him up and help him, what she wanted to do back in the 1880s. Helen wants to help him, but when he is proving too dangerous she tries to kill him (in 1880s after he's refused her help and "Sanctuary for All").

John and Helen have hardly seen each other since the 1880s. 1908 and 1944 we know for sure, but I have the impression from what James says in Revelations, interactions between them were rare. In the last few years, John has been around a lot and Helen finds it too much. I can buy that.

Also, I don't feel like John is being written out of the show. I take the elemental consuming him as John's personality being lost, giving us a darker John so to speak. As I've always been more interesting in the darker side of John, in SFA, Eulogy, beginning of Haunted, I'm actually looking forward to where they can go with this.

But I am very pissed that they changed their own canon over what electricity does to the elemental.

The problem is this: If you take away John, turning him into the villain for an ill-conceived plot twist, changing everything we've learned about his character since we met him, twisting his relationship with Helen to match a plot instead of the story, all of that just to clear the way for a love interest? Heck, even if there is no love interest (or it hadn't been thought of yet), that's still a idea. Because in doing these things, YOU ARE ERASING HELEN MAGNUS.

I don't follow the logic. Or I'm not sure I do. Even if John is now going to be more of a villain, how does that erase Helen?

one line in "Vigilante" that might suggest, [...] that John's driving force for season three has been "Please, can you just die so that I can die too?"

What line are you referring to?

I guess I don't read Helen saying "I don't want to see you again" as "I don't love you anymore". So I don't think they are erasing her history with him by that line.

Even if John changed the past, i.e if the Source Blood Experiment hadn't happened, I don't think John would have had anything against Helen being a doctor.

[fellowshipper.livejournal.com]

I pretty much agree with almost all of this. Not the last paragraph though. I like the character too much to have him killed off or forgotten for 2 seasons. ;)

I think the thing that bothers me the most about this ep is that it feels like we're abruptly ending this complex and intriguing relationship that has existed for 3 seasons. Even when John was batshit crazy and threatening their daughter and killing people in her own home or right in front of her, there was always this sense of hesitation in Helen, that she still felt something for him and would regret it, just a little bit, when he was gone. That's probably why she's never actually killed him (well, killed him for good anyway) when she's had several opportunities where she could have, and probably should have. I'm missing that moment here where she softens, just for a second, in the middle of her ranting and raving. Her "we're not meant to be together, I never want to see you again" seems too harsh, too quick, too decisive, considering she's had 120something years where she's never quite been able to let him go. If she really means that, if she's finally ending it for good this time, then she needs to give him one last look back, and she doesn't. I get that she's pissed, but some of her dialogue here feels like an almost denial of the previous cannon.

And John's storyline makes him look really really stupid. I don't have a problem with him wishing that they'd never injected the source blood and wanting to go back and change that (because John's life has probably been pretty shit since he became the Ripper. How many times can you have Tesla shock you or put yourself into a drug-induced stupor?), it's the fact that he put himself in a position to be betrayed for a second time, when he was still dripping blood from the first. I could have almost bought it if he said he was willing to save Adam's daughter because Adam promised to save his, and I think even Helen may have had to stop and consider that one, but him thinking that they could go all the way back to how things were at Oxford is stretching it a little much.

I guess we'll have to wait and see how it all plays out. I for one am hoping things are not over between the two of them, because it's so beautiful and tragic and twisted and enduring that I want to see more.

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying I want him to die...I'm just saying I'd rather he died than suffered bad characterization. ;)

As soon as John said "He offered to take me with him", I yelled "THAT'S THE WRONG YEAR, YOU GLORIOUS MORON!" at the screen. So yeah: TERRIBLE WRITING on top of a TERRIBLE PLAN and just...GAH, so much ANGER!

I want it to be beautiful and tragic.

[sasuran.livejournal.com]

I just came across your post from the sanctuary for all comm, but I had the same reaction at first. But afterwards, I thought there was some line that suggested Worth wasn't going to tell Helen John's plans (or that he hadn't) - and I wish I could remember what it was!

But I'm still thinking that going back to the 1800s might not have been John's plan at all (for many of the reasons Helen mentioned) - and that maybe his agreement with Worth was to rescue *his* daughter, too. (... And if so, he can save Watson while he's at it!!)

... That's what I'm hoping for, anyways!

[sasuran.livejournal.com]

Oh, and then, you know what? That could totally be the explanation for the weird power surge when Ashley died/disappeared. John and James go to rescue her, and then disappear with her to avoid creating a paradox.

... THIS IS MY NEW CANNON. XD