for savagestime, from the DVD commentary meme!

[thecopper]

I told you I'd do it next! &hearts

Honestly, I don’t really remember why I chose this prompt! I had just joined fandom_muses and this was for the application. I remember being torn between this one and one about making money, and even though I started the other one, it didn’t seem to fit. I decided to go with the prompt “Evidence” to examine the PC side of Gwen Cooper.

Bloody Torchwood, Gwen thinks. Certainly no police, certainly no police process. Sometimes she feels that she’d give up the adventure just to regain the small amount of dignity she fears she lost when she took off her uniform.

That thought lingers in her head for fleeting seconds before she banishes it completely.

I wasn’t sure where to start with in terms of evidence… but being a CSI dork, one of the things I always found interesting that Torchwood and CSI are often compared, but in terms of plot, are quite different. CSI relies on hard evidence, whereas Torchwood relies on assumptions, gut instinct, and luck. Seeing as Gwen comes from a police background, I wondered how she struggled with that difference; if it occurred to her, how would it affect her outlook on what kind of “justice.” Thus, it turned into PC Cooper versus Torchwood Agent Cooper. She is slightly disgruntled by the lack of a evidence process, but at the same time, she wants to defend it.

She can’t blame them, though. Chasing the creatures of nightmare and preventing world domination on the part of volatile alien races doesn’t leave much time for playing CSI. Tosh did what she could with the computers, and Owen seemed capable enough when he wasn’t nursing a hangover or God-know-what-else. Regardless of their apparent deficiency in understanding the judicial system, there wasn’t anyone out there who would argue with Torchwood’s burden of proof, or, rather, lack-thereof.

Hmm, not sure where the jab at poor Owen came from, but Gwen loved to make fun of his doctor skills. In essence, this is the foundation of her defense; Torchwood may be the strongest and smartest, but they are also in over their heads. Tosh and Owen can, at best, give educated guesses on what they are dealing with. Jack has experience, but only limited to what he’s encountered. Ianto and Gwen live on the outside; they do their best and learn as they go. But there’s no manual for alien crime-fighting, no courses to take at university. It’s a different judicial system, one that is declared and enforced by Jack Harkness.

That, and she’s not sure she wants to see Jack try to fingerprint a weevil.

I had to add this image, because it worked so well. It kind of puts into perspective the absurdity of taking human rules and applying them to aliens.

Still, she can’t help but wonder how much they’ve got wrong, because they don’t do it the way everyone else does. They function on instinct and assumption, and even if the law doesn’t particularly condone that sort of thing, Torchwood isn’t exactly punished for it, either. She dwells on the Brecon Beacons disappearances, and how they were so convinced it was nothing but alien meddling. It took her getting shot and the whole team nearly getting their faces eaten off to understand the true and utter depth of human evil.

In retrospect, I hate the wording of this paragraph. But “Countrycide” was one of those pinnacle episodes for Gwen because it attached the horror of the human condition to the horror of the alien encounters they’ve had, in a way that made it hard for her to differentiate. It was the bridge between Torchwood and the Real World, and a shocking realization that evil isn’t always isolated to the strange and alien.

Then she had watched the police milling about the place, collecting their evidence and preparing their case, so humans could look upon humans and decide their punishment for atrocities that she couldn’t even name. Meanwhile, Torchwood disposes of alien pests and makes their human victims disappear, with no need to prove their cases or defend their actions. It’s everything she was trained to disapprove of, everything that was in her nature to despise. You can’t have a case without proof, you can’t have proof without evidence. That was a process she had fully believed.

But she also once believed there was no such thing as aliens, or alien tech, or rifts in time and space that ran through the center of Cardiff. And Torchwood had shown her otherwise.

I felt like I needed to add evidence in somewhere, so here it is. I wanted a very literal image drawn between how humans handle their own problems and how Torchwood handles the alien problem. And the dichotomy that Gwen is experiencing between how those two are balanced. But, in a way, they can’t be balanced, because everything Gwen was taught to believe applies to the simplicity of human understanding. Once that barrier was broken, she had to confront herself on the fact that the same rules could not necessarily be followed now, because all the rules she knew no longer applied.

So she does the next best thing. She shoulders her dignity without her uniform, and hopes they never lose sight of doing what is right. She believes she can rest knowing she has done everything in her power to defend the human race. Because when the dawn breaks again over a thriving city, and children can walk the streets with that much less fear of what may lie in the shadows, that is all the evidence she really needs.

I knew I had to justify, in Gwen’s mind, that the human judicial process could be overthrown for the sake of Torchwood. She knows what they do is right, and she knows the price that will be paid if they stopped doing it. She trusts Jack to do the right thing, and so far that trust has not wavered, even if she questions his methods. But the fact is, Gwen needs to trust they are doing the right thing, because, at this point, there is no other way. There’s no Shadow Proclamation to turn to or Doctor to keep them on track… they just have to learn as they go and hope they do the right thing. For Gwen, knowing that the end justifies the means is enough to get past any doubts she has about their procedure.

(ETA: Totally accidental that my moodpic has PC Cooper in it... but I was amused by the coincidence! Also, doing this commentary has kind of inspired me to want to do something more with PC Cooper! I'll have to think about that...)