And whatever you do, don’t think about how much Torchwood London actually meant to Ianto and how deeply the Battle of Canary Wharf affected him.
I think Ianto had been lonely for a long, long time. Much longer than the show suggests. The after math of losing Lisa wasn’t the first time Ianto was lonely I think. We know that he had a very estranged relationship with his family, and we know that he was a drifter when he came to London. He tells Rachel Allan in Torchwood One: Before the Fall that he didn’t think his father liked him very much, that his mother and sister were “very Welsh” which I think he meant they complained about him a lot or something (which we see Rhiannon do in CoE).
Yvonne Hartman, in her plea to get Ianto to help her, reminds Ianto that he’d been lost and alone when he came to London and she had given him a place at Canary Wharf. It was because of her that he had a job at all and she reminds him of that and the fact that she helped him with his crush on Lisa.
And then Rachel says something about how friendly everyone at Torchwood One is, that they all “actually” like her and she feels like she has a place and is included and liked for the first time. I mean, Rachel isn’t exactly a reliable narrator, but considering how friendly everyone was and how they treated Ianto, who was a lonely outcast in his own right, this was probably true enough. Torchwood found brilliant, but lonely people who had nothing else and gave them purpose. Torchwood Three did the same thing (minus Gwen who was hired for her compassion police connections instead). When you have someone who has nothing else in their life, it’s easy to get them to commit to your organization.
And for someone like Ianto, who left home as soon as he could and always felt lonely and like he didn’t belong, and who had very little self-worth, to find a place like that where people weren’t just kind, but genuinely loved and cared for him when they didn’t have to, that must have meant everything to him. Ianto had friends, he was respected and loved, he had a girlfriend eventually.
Then the Battle of Canary Wharf happened. Ianto didn’t just lose a job, he didn’t just lose a girlfriend. Ianto lost everything. He lost his boss whom he was fond of and who respected him, he lost all of his friends, he lost his very purpose. In just a few hours, Ianto was alone again. That must have killed him inside.
but then he found Lisa, half converted but still very much alive and Ianto desperately clung to her and the possibility of saving her. His purpose became to save her rather than live as a survivor of a horrible event. When he told Jack in Cyberwoman that he had nothing left to lose, he meant it. He had no friends in Cardiff. Torchwood Three operated very differently from London. It wasn’t like the others disliked Ianto when he started working there, but Torchwood Three was very closed off and Ianto was closed off from Torchwood Three because he was still traumatized from Canary Wharf and everything that was happening with Lisa. Ianto went from working in one of the tallest buildings in the country, Yvonne Hartman’s right hand, with plenty of windows and an open atmosphere to working in an underground base with a man whose real name no one knows, serving coffee and cleaning up the trash.
Ianto didn’t just lose Lisa at the end of Cyberwoman. He lost his last connection to a life that he’d made for himself, a life where he’d been happy and felt like he belonged. Also, considering his belief that he is expendable and his lack of self-worth, that he would willingly die to save the world and the people he loved, he must have really believed that he had nothing else to lose because he’s never really thought that his life mattered. He’d already lost everything at Canary Wharf and all he’d had left was Lisa.
It took forever for Ianto to recover from that but Jack helped him see that he wasn’t expendable, that he could recover and have everything he had before the fall of Torchwood One again. Ianto had a lot of growth between Cyberwoman and Captain Jack Harkness; he wasn’t just being loyal when he told Owen that Jack needed him. He meant it. Ianto felt needed, like he had a purpose, even if it was just being emotional and general support for Jack. When he said that coming to Torchwood Three gave him meaning again, and that meaning was Jack, he meant that. He’d lost everything but Jack and Torchwood Three helped Ianto find his way again and gave him the only thing he’d ever wanted: a place where he belonged.
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