The Early Years and The Time Agency
Javic was born before the year 5094 in the 51st Century and came from a ‘tiny little place’ called the Boeshane Peninsula. He lived there with his Mum, his Dad Franklin, and his younger brother Gray. He lived near the beach, and would often spend evenings with his father and brother playing cricket and sitting around the camp fire, laughing and singing.
The Peninsula lived under the threat of invasion. Normally the enemy would pass overhead, but on the day of Gray’s abduction, they didn’t. ‘They came without warning…their howls travelled before them.’ When the creatures came, many inhabitants of the Peninsula ran for shelter. Franklin, instructed Javic to run for shelter with his brother Gray, while he would run back for his wife. Unfortunately, Franklin never made it, and the family lost their father that day. Javic had further news for his mother when he returned to the homestead. In the dash for safety, Gray had tripped and Javic had let go his hand. Thinking that Gray would still be behind him, he ran for the shelter of the trees, but was panic stricken to learn that his brother was nowhere in sight. Many more inhabitants lost their lives that day.
Jack confessed to ‘Adam’, an entity that had forced its way into the Torchwood Hub, convincing the entire team that he was and always had been, a member of Torchwood, that he searched years for his brother but never found a body.
In the years that followed, Javic
joined the Time Agency around the age of 15 - 20 years old. He was the first
citizen of Boeshane to sign up and was the poster boy for the Peninsula.
‘The
Face of Boe, they called me.’
Thane encouraged a friend to join up with him and fight an enemy he described later to the real Captain Jack Harkness, as ‘the worst possible creatures you can imagine.’ They were captured and because his friend was weaker, tortured him and made Thane watch, later releasing Thane, to bear the guilt of his friend’s fate. I wonder if these were the same creatures that captured and tortured young Gray?
Around the age of 20 - 35 years, and still working with the Time Agency, he was partnered up with Captain John Hart, a rebel in his own right. They once spent five years trapped in a two-week time loop, and became the equivalent of a married couple. Hart confessed after an ongoing row that he was a good wife, proving that the pair had more than just a professional partnership.
Unlike life in the 21st Century, the 51st Century was so much more diverse and the attitudes towards sexuality was a lot more acceptable.
During further missions with Hart, the two agents faced off against a horde of Weeping Angels.
On one of his Time Agency missions, Thane fought the Navigators, and visited a black market on Fluren’s World where he bid on a Monstrom Time Destroyer. He lost out to a pair of Wrightosaur mercenaries, whom he later had a sexual encounter with.
Thane had two years of his memory removed while working for the Time Agency, a fact that Hart knew about but refused to discuss with him. I wonder if the truth of this will ever be revealed? Shortly after this, he left the agency to become a time travelling con artist, running scams using his knowledge of future events. He preferred schemes which involved payment for items that he knew would later be destroyed.
He was sentenced to death for unknown crimes, and ordered four hyper vodkas as his last request. Thane woke up in bed with his two executioners. ‘Lovely couple. They stayed in touch. Can’t say that about most executioners…’
At some point in Thane’s life, he travelled to the 17th century and lived as a priest under the alias ‘Father Julian Horst.’
At the estimated age of 35 Earth years, while operating as a Con Man Thane stole a Chula war ship from a beautiful woman and used it to head to Earth where he hoped to trade with two Time Agents that he’d located in wartime London at the height of the Blitz. Unbeknownst to him, they were the Ninth Doctor and travelling companion, Rose Tyler. He’d picked up a battle ambulance, dropping it down in Lime Street Station, unaware of its cargo, and expected to be paid handsomely for it, and seeing it destroyed much later by a German bomb, that was destined to land on that very spot. It fell on a child, Jamie, who plagued the area surrounding it, making anyone who touched him, become like him, a gas mask zombie. Nanogenes had fixed him, but assuming that the mask on his face was an actual part of his genetics, had made everyone else who touched him, become the same.
He rescued Rose Tyler as she desperately clung to a barrage balloon, wearing a Union Jack t-shirt while German and British planes had dog fights around her. Drawn into the tractor beam of his Chula ship, Jack brought her to safety and fixed her burns with saved nanogenes trapped in his ship.
Thane assumed the identity of American volunteer of the 133rd Squadron of the Royal Air Force – Captain Jack Harkness, who he was later to meet in Cardiff, when he stepped through the doors of The Ritz Dance hall, with Toshiko Sato, during a temporal shift sending them back to 1941. He knew all about the real Captain Jack Harkness, and explained it all to Toshiko that he was undercover and needed a name. He explained that the name was convenient, as the real Harkness died in battle. ‘They go out on a sortie and are surprised by two formations of Messerschmitt's. He destroys three of the enemy. His men listen to his whoops of joy over the radio. Then it all goes quiet. He can't bail out because his whole plane is on fire, but his men all make it back to safety.’
Rose was quite taken with the time traveler, the Doctor less so. Jack was introduced to the Doctor some time later, who was disgusted to learn that it was Jack’s fault that people were succumbing to the gas mask invasion, due to the broken medical transporter. Jack learned that the medical transporter wasn’t empty at all. It contained billions upon billions of nanogenes, all set to fix the world, and the first thing they fixed was the dead child wearing a gas mask.
Eventually, the Ninth Doctor managed to convince the nanogenes that Nancy, the boy’s mother is who the boy should resemble and not the gasmask that is a permanent fixture to his face, in much the same way as all other zombie patients in the hospital, and those protecting the bomb site. The Doctor is joyous when the nanogenes return the patients to their normal state, including giving a woman back her missing limb.
Jack, using the Chula war ship, captures the German bomb destined to destroy the medical transporter for good, and transports it in his Chula warship, away from Earth and into space. Unfortunately for Jack, his ship has no escape pod. He is literally stuck with the ship and can only face the countdown to oblivion, unaware however, that the TARDIS is parked at the other end of his ship. He closes the doors to avoid the blast and travels with the Doctor and Rose, for many adventures until…one adventure changes his life forever.
Travels
with the Doctor & Rose Tyler
The Doctor takes Rose and Jack to the location of the planet Excroth, only to discover it’s not there. The TARDIS is taken aboard a Lect spaceship which Jack and the Doctor escape from after it is attacked by Unon. Rose unfortunately is blasted into the Time Vortex but is protected from the time winds by the tachyon inhibitor she finds. After a battle between the Lect and the Unon which triggered the emergency protocol, Fluren’s World was no longer protected by the time bubble. Jack, who managed to locate Rose at a Temporal Bazaar on Fluren, subsequently is separated from her and is taken in the TARDIS to the Unon’s Perpetual City where he is once again reunited with the Doctor who he believed dead. The Doctor is tricked by the mother superior of the Unon, Arnora and Rose tricks the Doctor into giving the co-ordinates of the Perpetual City to the opposition – the Lect. Jack is taken into the sub-dimensional void and is shown what the future would look like without the Doctor around. Not a pretty sight. The Doctor is saved when Jack is released from the void, and after discovering that the Doctor cannot prevent the entropy engine from overloading, saves as many Unons as possible, and takes them to another world so that they can start again.
The Doctor discovers a giant ziggurat and the Hanging Gardens of Slarvia. He uses his sonic screwdriver to locate a ship in orbit that had transmatted them aboard, and comes face to face with the Taggani, a famous geohacker. Jack, Rose and the Doctor had stopped the geohacker from using the Doctor’s memories to recreate the Last Great Time War. They discovered that the geohacker was none other than an art historian from the Braxiatel Collection, who is subsequently handed over to the Judoon. ‘Justice is swift’
While on the planet Clix, Jack and the Doctor disguise themselves as Slitheens in a bid to find Rose, who has been kidnapped by Slist Fayflut Marteveerthon Slitheen.
A darker Jack journeyed with the Doctor and Rose
to the Novrosk Peninsula and encountered Russian Special Forces, nuclear submarines
and something that predates the stone circle on the cliff top, that is waking,
hunting and killing. Jack finds a girl of 19, whose life has been sucked clean
from her, and that only her memories survive, but she cannot talk about it, and
can barely walk.
‘I used to think I was scared by death. Or by facing death – by combat and action and the uncertainty of the battlefield. Not any more. No, now what scares me is the possibility I might live to grow old. I might wake up one day tired and wasted and unable to even open a beer. I might need crutches and a hearing aid and help getting dressed. When and if I get to that point, it’ll be my memories that’ll keep me going. The fact I’ve lived through so much, survived so much to get there.’
During another journey with the Doctor, Jack spends a month in Bromley in the year 2006, babysitting a Neanderthal who can no longer return to his own time and helps him integrate into life in the 21st century.
When the TARDIS needed to refuel, they stopped off in Cardiff and settled the ship over the Rift, a scar that ran through the city of Cardiff. Jack was introduced to Mickey Smith, Rose Tyler’s boyfriend and earned the title of Captain Cheesecake. The Doctor discovered that one of the Slitheen still existed on the planet after the attack on 10 Downing Street and had now become the Lord Mayor. He set his sights to capture her before she caused any further trouble. The Doctor and Jack discover that beneath the plans for the new Blaidd Drwg nuclear power plant is an Extrapolator, which once the power plant goes into meltdown and destroys Earth, Margaret Blaine will ride aboard the extrapolator and escape.
In a bid to hasten the speed of the refueling,
Jack attaches the extrapolator to the TARDIS console. Instead, the device
causes a massive earthquake in Cardiff, which instead of feeding the TARDIS
from the Rift, does the exact opposite. It is a clever trick by the Slitheen,
known as Margaret Blaine as she enters the TARDIS and takes Rose hostage.
When the Heart of the TARDIS is revealed to Blaine, she is hypnotized by it and when Jack and the Doctor finally close the Rift, and disable the extrapolator, all they find of Margaret Blaine is a Slitheen egg. They take Margaret’s egg back to Raxacoricofallapatorius, where she is given a second chance at life.
Jack journeys with the Doctor and Rose, to the Colony World of 4378976 Delta-Four in the year 2775, where Jack finds himself committed to a lunatic asylum called the Big White House, for telling fictional stories. Inside the asylum, he faces the possibility of being experimented upon by a nutty surgeon called Cal Tyko.
Jack, the Doctor and Rose also visited New Vegas in the 23rd Century, where they helped detective James McNeil investigate The Whisper, a strange vigilante that was terrorizing the city’s underworld. Jack worked undercover as a reporter for the Daily Galaxy, where he befriended Daisy Hewett, but some gals are not to be trusted, and Jack found that out to his peril, when Cyrus Wolfsbane kidnapped him, in order for the Doctor to lead Cyrus to the Whisper.
In 1336, Jack, the Doctor and Rose visit Japan but find themselves transmatted to different areas of the Games Station, where each member of the TARDIS crew awaken to find themselves in certain doses of terror, although at first, none of them see it that way.
When Rose is zapped by the Anne Droid in the Weakest Link Game show, the Doctor and Jack are distraught but after Jack finds the TARDIS stowed away in the back of a unit, soon discovers how the trick reveals that Rose is not dead at all. What he and the Doctor uncover however is a secondary signal, into an empty location of space, where the losers wind up. Disabling the signal, the Doctor discovers that his worst adversaries, the Daleks have been playing an extremely long game, and promises to destroy them once and for all, when he flies his TARDIS into their Mothership and rescues Rose from their clutches.
Thus, ensues the battle on the Game Station that subsequently kills Captain Jack Harkness, in a battle he knew he could never win. Facing down three Daleks, he empties his weapons on them, but already knows he’s a dead man, when they open fire. When Rose returns in the TARDIS, she has the power of the Time Vortex inside of her and destroys the Dalek’s, wiping them from existence. She was also able to bring Jack back to life, making him a fixed point in time, and immortal. The Doctor knew that the power would eventually consume her, and absorbed the Time Vortex himself. This would mark the end of the Ninth Doctor.
When Jack gasped back to life and returned to the TARDIS, it was already dematerializing. He was stranded on the Game Station, orbiting a Dalek devastated Earth in the year 200,100. Rose suggested that the Doctor should go back to find Jack, as he might be able to help them, but the Doctor, having regenerated, couldn’t tell her the truth, that if Jack entered the TARDIS he would cause a temporal paradox and threaten the TARDIS’ proper operation, and insisted he was too busy rebuilding the Earth.
Having been left behind by the Doctor, Jack was
distraught and sought solace in a small cabin near the ruins of the Black
Country Dome. He wanted to be left alone but was approached by an aspiring
journalist called Silo Crook who was as intrigued as Jack, to know more about
the Hope Foundation, a charity founded by Vortia Trear, which took surviving
humans off Earth and gave them new and better lives. Jack and Silo discovered
that Trear was a rich elite and was intending to exploit the humans below them,
which naturally lead to a revolt. With the satellite station now left to fall
to Earth, Jack scrambled to interact the live cables to ensure it landed
safely. As Jack came around after being electrocuted, he saw an abundance of
resources that could be salvaged from the fallen satellite that would enable
humanity to rebuild itself.
Harkness eventually set his Vortex Manipulator for Earth and Cardiff in the 21st century, to the site of the active space-time rift, in a hope that he would reconnect with the TARDIS and the Doctor with Rose, when it refueled. Unfortunately, his wrist strap device burnt out somewhere in the 19th century leaving him stranded in 1869.
Jack remained in Cardiff, and after visiting the Little Girl with the Tarot Cards, and learning that it would be some time before he would reconnect with the right Doctor in his time line, decided to work for Torchwood Three.
Jack learnt that after his third death and
resurrection after being shot in 1892 during a fight on Ellis Island, that
although he was immortal, he still aged, albeit very slowly. He could recover
from any physical harm, almost immediately, although his legs were always the
last to knit back together.
Jack eventually became the Head of Torchwood Three, after succeeding his boss, who after shooting all of the Torchwood Three agents in the Hub, turned the gun on himself, just as Jack re-entered the building, and was unable to stop him. His boss had seen the future after opening the Pendant that was known as the Bad Penny!
On Earth and assuming the role of Head of Torchwood Three in 2006, Thane, now Harkness lamented about contraceptives in the rain. ‘You take the pill, flush it away, and it enters the water cycle. Feminizes the fish. Goes all the way up into the sky then falls all the way back down onto me. Contraceptives in the rain. Love this planet. Still, at least I won't get pregnant. Never doing that again.’ Which begs the question, which con did he and Hart work on that produced a pregnant Thane?
Jack enlisted a new team of agents. Suzie Costello, Toshiko Sato, Dr Owen Harper, Ianto Jones and eventually, when memories of her experience returned, Gwen Cooper. Each had a unique ability that was paramount to their role in the Hub, and after the death and re-death of Costello, the team became a closer-knit bunch of agents who had each other’s back, right up till the end.
When the alien known as the ‘456’ returned to Earth for another hit of ‘children’, Harkness knew he had to stop them, but secrets of the past encounters with them, to save the planet against Spanish Flu in the earlier decades, would drive a wedge through not only his team, but also his family. At the risk of saving millions of children, Jack sacrificed the life of his grandson, alienating the connection he had with his daughter, Alice Harkness.
He left the Earth once the threat of the 456 invasion was put to an end, his heart broken further by the death of Ianto Jones, a death that could have been avoided – but nearly all Torchwood agents die young.
Jack returned to Earth many years later to discover a new threat to Earth. Nobody was dying. Even the dead weren’t dying. Worse still, Jack was now mortal. To find out who was behind it, meant Jack had to dig deep to find what the connection was between him and The Family.
When the world was put right and many sad farewells were made, Jack remained on Earth and we had a new immortal being – that of Rex Mathison.
Much of the chaos in Earth history seems to bear some connection to Jack Harkness but surely, it can’t be all his fault, can it?
Beyond these findings, I can find little more to write about this incredible character, who has seen more death, and more destinations than an ABTA travel brochure.
Jack’s life is anything but straight forward. There is more than one version of Jack Harkness out there. Harkness has helped and worked with three of the Time Lords known as The Doctor, his latest was in the exploit of rescuing the Doctor from a prison planet, and stopping another invasion of Daleks, this time partly commissioned by idiots running the UK government – no surprises there.
Although Torchwood has no physical home in Cardiff, or indeed the world, as far as we can see, Captain Jack Harkness, as he goes by these days, will be out there somewhere, monitoring the skies above and when the call to arms is made, he and the remaining Torchwood team will come out of the shadows, and defend the Earth once more, with or without the help of the Time Lord known as the Doctor.
References:
Audio: Month 25
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Adam
The End of Time
Last of the Time Lords
Utopia
Captain Jack Harkness
(COMIC: Weapons of Past Destruction)
(COMIC: World Without End)
(COMIC: Slaver's Song)
(COMIC: Secret Agent Man)
The Empty Child
(TV: Children in Need Special)
The Parting of the Ways)
(AUDIO: The Year After I Died)
Boom Town
The Stealers of Dreams
Bad Wolf
(AUDIO: Night of the Whisper)
Audio: Uncanny Valley
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