“Suzie Costello, She's Second-in-Command.”

[sariagray]

Written for and linked to Suzie's entry at womenlovefest

Ever since signing up, I’ve been trying to think of what to write. A week’s worth of posts, about Suzie Costello; a character in canon who is more mystery, more plot device, than woman. I’ve come up with bits and pieces of things I may or may not want to say about her. I’ve tried to consider what others would say, too. All to no avail.

And so I’m going to make this kickoff post about why I chose Suzie in the first place. Why did I choose Suzie? She’s hardly the most-hated woman of Torchwood fandom – she’s barely in the show to begin with. More often than not, she’s used as a delightful villain who manipulates the people around her. Which, well, is all we really know about her.

Suzie is used, even in canon, as a plot device. She is there to illustrate just how terrifying/dangerous/depressing working for Torchwood can be. She’s Gwen’s foil, really, the jaded employee driven mad by the wonders of the universe to Gwen’s innocent naivety. The aging stepmother queen to Gwen’s Snow White, if you will.

(Interestingly, John Hart is a very similar character, only he’s male. He’s Jack’s foil – the image in the Looking Glass of “What I might have been.” He’s manipulative, almost completely lacking in compassion, only appeared in two episodes – and yet, fandom loves him. I won’t get into my suspicions of the psychology behind the perceived difference, but I do find it very interesting. It says a lot about societal views of women, I think.)

We know almost nothing about Suzie Costello, really. We know that she worked for Jack, as his second. We know that he recruited her. We know that she had a father that was, in her mind, worth killing. We know that she slept with Owen. Everything else, even her interest in Emily Dickenson, is inference. (She only had one book, as far as I know, and used only the one poem and ISBN.)

In Everything Changes, I always found Suzie to be a sympathetic character, in that I got her level of madness. She used a piece of tech and was driven to distraction by both the device itself and a fervent, passionate desire to save the world. To me, the Suzie we saw then didn’t jive at all with the Suzie we saw in They Keep Killing Suzie (which, interestingly, is a totally weird title, as they only ever killed her once; prior to that, she killed herself. Unless the “they” involved is the writers).

In TKKS, there seems to be far too much premeditation involved. Over two years’ worth, according to her admission to Jack regarding her methods of retconning Max. That was before the glove, I’m presuming, because I can’t see Jack letting her focus so much energy on a piece of tech for such a long period of time. In just a few lines, Suzie jumps from a person altered by external forces that shouldn’t be messed with to a criminal mastermind. And we really don’t get to see anything in between.

It also sends in interesting message – maybe Torchwood doesn’t make people crazy. Maybe it just attracts people who are already on the brink. (We discover this to be relatively true throughout the series, all the way up through Fragments.) Or maybe it was just Suzie who was absolutely mad.

It’s difficult for a fan to pick and choose canon when the only bits we have to go on come from a mere two episodes, but my Suzie was always Everything Changes Suzie. Not because I’m against the idea of manipulating criminal masterminds, but because she’s who I met first. I fell in love with the lost, terrified woman who just wanted to do good so much that she became almost purely Machiavellian.

But this is just me, rambling. What I want to get to why I chose Suzie. The answer? Where Tosh is loved and Gwen is hated (generally speaking, of course), Suzie is ignored. And to be completely honest, she was the reason I finally relented and allowed myself to be sucked into Torchwood. I’d seen Indira Varma in Bones and then again in Rome. And I totally adored her. When I saw that she was in Torchwood (yeah, I know, I should’ve kept reading the IMDB page, right?), I got really excited! And then she killed herself! Boo! But then, I saw her name on the list of episodes on Netflix, and I hung in there! And then she died again! By that time, I was so completely entrenched in Torchwood, I couldn’t stop myself. The rest, I suppose is history.

As for Suzie herself, I absolutely love the sheer determination, the focus, and the cunning. I love women like her; brilliant and calculating, and a little bit broken inside. She's hurt, she's a real person with fears and hopes and dreams, and she's utterly manipulative. I can't tell if she's a sociopath (<- not a legitimate source of diagnosis) or not, but she certainly straddles the line and I love it. 

But mark my words, I’m doing Lisa next round.

In any case, as this is my first post of the week, I’d like to open this up and find out the opinions you all have on Suzie. Do you love her? Do you hate her? Do you even care beyond, “Hey, wasn’t she that dead body over which Ianto propositioned Jack with a stopwatch?” Why do you feel this way?

I’m curious. Like Suzie with the glove.

Comments

[coldwater1010.livejournal.com]

I'm mostly neutral on Suzie. I don't love her or hate her. (I know scandal).She's probably one of those characters whose more interesting for me in fanfic than she was on the show which is pity because she clearly had a lot of potential and there are moments in TKKS when you get to see that.I do remember thinking when I first watched the pilot that if she hadn't been played by Indira Varma her death would have been even more meh than it ultimately was for me because we didn't exactly get to know her. (I always compare it to Helen's death on Spooks because I'm guessing that was the model). But as you said she was mostly a plot device to show the horrors of Torchwood and to give Gwen an in. Her speech though was why s1 despite it's many failings will always be the season where this show was its most interesting to me; that whole idea of the job as both potentially brilliant and psychologically and emotionally, as well as physically destructive was intriguing, we get hints of that throughout s1, but I'm not sure it ever went anywhere all that interesting in the end. But the idea of her feeling a need to join that group just so she'd have someone to talk to and then retconning them really stayed with me because it's just so sad and disturbing. It actually made me feel for her.

[sariagray.livejournal.com]

There is no scandal to neutrality. Honestly, sometimes I wish this fandom had more of it, really!

that whole idea of the job as both potentially brilliant and psychologically and emotionally, as well as physically destructive

Sounds like show business! I wonder if the whole series is a metaphor. ;) But I agree re: Pilgrim. If that was really the case, and she wasn't lying, of course!