I came back for you.
I love this as much as the next Janto fan…buuuuuut…what do we make of Jack telling Gwen the same bloody thing in the basement ten minutes later after he finds out she’s engaged?
Or do we just fast forward through that part of the episode? 😉 Because it did happen and I think he meant it.
It’s very, very hard sometimes not to see his asking Ianto on a date later as a second choice. Gwen was taken, and so he takes Ianto. It kills me to say it, though, so convince me otherwise!
I actually always felt like Jack’s reaction to Gwen was more or less shock at how vastly things had changed.
When Jack decided to go home, he thought that team Torchwood wouldn’t have had time to miss him, but with the paradox, he was gone for months. (One outline said he’d left in May and come home in January, that’s ages.)He left behind a team that *needed* him, relied on him. They may have died during the Year That Never Was, reinforcing his “Papa Bear” complex.When he came back, they had “grown up.” Cardiff was still standing, they were working well together. They were a team WITHOUT him.Being the newest, the most emotionally raw, Gwen was the one who’d needed him most. The ring wasn’t an indication that she was “off limits,” it was a symbol that she was relying on *someone else.*Then, too, let’s consider just how emotionally damaged he was during that year, at the Master’s mercy. How he must have romanticized going back home, to his team, his little self-made family.When the Doctor and Martha dropped him off he said “Had plenty of time to think that past year, the year that never was. And I kept thinking of that team of mine.”I think that during his times of hunger, pain and death, not to mention loneliness and isolation on the Valiant, that he dreamed himself back with them, protecting them, just being around them.And yes, I do think that his starting relationship with Ianto played a part in these daydreams. But I don’t think it was about sex, either with Ianto or with Gwen. It does Jack, the character, a disservice to assume everything he does is motivated by sex. With Ianto, for instance, he asked him on a date. If it was about getting back into Ianto’s trousers, well, he has endless experience in smooth talking his way into a bed, but he didn’t go that route. He took the method that *meant something* and offered more real! human connection.TL;DR It wasn’t about which of them Jack wanted. It was about Jack surviving a traumatic ordeal by fantasizing about how amazing it will be when he’s back home at the Hub and then discovering the reality doesn’t match it.