Profiles Javic Piotr Thane aka Captain Jack Harkness

 

The Early Years and The Time Agency 

Javic was born before the year 5094 in the 51^st 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 21^st Century, the 51^st 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 17^th 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 21^st 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 23^rd 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.

 Jack and Torchwood

Harkness eventually set his Vortex Manipulator for Earth and Cardiff in the 21^st 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 19^th 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

 

 

 

 

 

Profiles Steven Carter by Alice Diggle

 

Torchwood Archive Character Profile: Steven Carter

 

Name: Steven Carter, born on 4 October 1999, was the son of Joe and Alice Carter. He was also the grandson of Torchwood’s Jack Harkness and Italian Torchwood operative Lucia Moretti.

Species: Human

Status: Deceased aged 10 years old

Significance: See file 456

Bio: The 456 incident

Steven Carter was among the children who were manipulated by the aliens known as the 456 in 2009.

The 456 used their unique abilities to communicate through the children to announce their arrival on Earth. Torchwood operative Jack Harkness is Steven Carter’s grandfather as Steven’s mother Alice Carter is Jack’s daughter. 

Jack has had dealings with the 456 in the past but the current government dealing with them during 2009 did not want his help nor his knowledge of them made public and so Steven and Alice were taken as hostages by Agent Johnson and her team who were working for the current prime minister in order to blackmail Jack Harkness to keep him quiet. This included several attempts on his life. 

Once the intentions of the 456 became known and knowing that they were capable of carrying out their threat of the human race’s destruction, having already killed the occupants of Thames House where a representative for the 456 was being contained, with a deadly poisonous gas, Jack was left no choice but to use Steven as a conduit to reverse the 456 signal that was controlling the children and ricochet it back to kill the visiting representative on Earth, as a warning to the species that he had figured out a way to destroy them.

Steven’s small body could not take the intensified signal and he died within minutes of it being transmitted, leaving his mother completely distraught as she had no idea that Jack would sacrifice his grandson in that way. 

IMPORTANT! Whilst Jack Harkness’s actions were completely abhorrent and led to Steven’s death, we cannot deny that it was a totally selfless action and one that was required to save all of the earth’s children considering the 456’s intentions for them which would have been more horrific than the way Steven died. Steven Carter died saving the world and although he will never forget and never forgive himself, we as parents will be forever in Jack’s debt. 

Other Information:  It is important to note that The Doctor was nowhere to be seen during the 456 invasion and it was left up to Jack Harkness and the Torchwood team to step up to the mark and save the world. 

R.I.P Steven – Brave to the last.

Profiles Luke Smith by Alice Diggle

 

Torchwood Archive Character Profile: Luke Smith

 

Name: Luke Smith

Species: An artificial human

Occupation: Defender of Earth

Abilities: Exceptional intelligence and an eidetic memory

Crimes: None to date.

Location: 13 Bannerman Road: London

Bio: Luke is an artificial human known as the Archetype and was created by the Bane in order for them to experiment on. He had the physical form of a teenager upon his creation, despite his actual mental age being much younger, yet he has shown a very high level of intelligence which far outweighs that of any human child of the same age.  He was named "Luke Smith" after being adopted by Sarah-Jane Smith, the onetime companion of The Doctor, when she rescued him from execution by the Bane.

As far as we know, because of the way Luke was created and because of his mother’s influence, Luke is not a threat to us in any way and has in fact helped his mother save the earth many times over.

We are unaware of his true age at this point as there is no way to calculate it but he seems more naïve than any human child of the same age which is a blessing and a curse for him as he has no way of knowing who his enemies are and with his intelligence and innocence as it is, he can be susceptible to other species taking full advantage of his vulnerability in a bid to help them invade earth. However, we know that Sarah-Jane Smith with the help of “Mr Smith” and The Doctor, will endeavour to teach him all he needs to know meaning he will mature and become an ally of earths.

IMPORTANT! We do not know if Luke Smith can age. He may stay as he outwardly represents at the moment which is as a 14-year-old. This may cause confusion for those who know him and could alert other people to the existence of non-human life forms. If this is the case, we will need to decide what happens to him after his mother passes away.

Other Information: Are there others like Luke Smith on Earth? Did the Bane make more specimens for experimentation? At this present time, we do not know!

 

Profiles George by Alice Diggle

 

Torchwood Archive Character Profile: “George”

 

Name: George Thompson

Species: Tenza

Occupation: Alien Symbiotic

Abilities: A psychic field and a perception filter which was used to convince his human parents that he himself is human. George's psychic abilities caused his thoughts to manifest and alter reality.

Crimes: Although it cannot be documented as a crime as all victims involved were returned to normal, George was responsible for kidnapping 2 adults from his housing estate, locking them in a dolls house in his bedroom wardrobe and turning them into dolls. This was done though fear of rejection and neglect from his human parent’s and so the actions undoubtably come from the mind of a frightened child.

Location: Bath, in Somerset.

Bio: Tenza are by species, children and are born in space, where they drift until they find a habitable world and a family that they could live with and infiltrate. The Tenza infant would adapt itself to suit its environment which would mean altering the memories of the parents it chose to “adopt” so that they assumed the child was biologically theirs. In the case of George, the Tenza child disguised itself as human and as the only child of Claire and Alex Thompson.

We do not know a lot about this species or why the Tenza forget who they really are after assimilating with their adoptive families but it seems this way especially in the case of George where he thought himself to be human and had no idea, he was in fact alien.

If the Tenza felt threatened, its telepathic abilities played havoc with its environment to keep it safe casing reality to change either physically or part mentally so that only the child would experience it. Some professionals would claim this to be part of the autistic spectrum which would lead us to enquire just how many children on the spectrum are actually Tenza as we have no way of knowing or documenting this and so far, George is the only one, we have encountered.

 As the Tenza had advanced, though subconscious, psychic powers, allowing them to live among other species then it could be said that maybe they have no corporeal body until they find a surrogate family, that they are just mass or light until they find a planet and species in which to give them form. Were they a race before they advanced? Did they have their own planet, did they live peacefully for years until their resources ran out? Is this why they decided to spread their young across the stars, in the hope to save their species? We have no way of knowing this! 

It is clear though that the Tenza child in any species form would display different characteristics to what is considered normal for that race.  Again, as far as human children are concerned, this could mean that the child has a medical condition which is why its hard to document the existence of Tenza on Earth, but in the case of other alien races who clone children rather than birth them to all look and behave the same way, if one of their offspring were to act differently especially in times of trouble, fear and panic then we could document the amount of Tenza across the stars, but this is yet to become practice. 

IMPORTANT! Whilst we think the Tenza are for the majority a pretty benign race, we can’t help but wonder why they seek to infiltrate other species rather than live among themselves and why they forget their origins on assimilation. Could this be another sleeper agent scenario? We just don’t know. 

Other Information: The Doctor in his 11^th regeneration first encountered George in 2011 when he was 8 years old. He had somehow managed to make contact with the Doctor’s psychic paper asking for help, although that we can assume was the underlying Tenza and not George himself. The family Gorge had adopted were having trouble with him as a human child because he seemed to be behaving in odd ways. At this point they assumed George was their own son but their memories started to unravel with a visit from the Doctor who made them remember that they in fact could not biologically have children of their own and so it is assumed that the Tenza felt their need to have a child and that child became George. The couple have since accepted him for who he is and decided to keep him as their own.  Does this make the Tenza a peaceful race or does it make the human race an easy target?  Unless we can find more of them, we might never know the truth. 

The Doctor had promised to revisit the family at the time of puberty as he stated it would be a difficult time. This must mean he knows much more about the species than we do and we hoped that he might share this information with us.

 

Profiles The Tenth Doctor

 

Torchwood Archive Character Profile: “The Doctor”

 

**WARNING!**

 If you see this man, if he has come into your life, then your life is in danger! 

Known Aliases: The Doctor/ John Smith.

Species: Time Lord

Occupation: Alien Tech Operative U.N.I.T / Time Lord.

Abilities: Regeneration. Time Travel.

Crimes: Mass Genocide, Murder, Crimes against the crown. Bigamy. Theft. Deception.

Location: Time & Space

Bio: The alien known as “The Doctor” is a species called a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous located in a binary star system 250 million light years from Earth. He is approximately 900 years old and he has been recorded on Earth throughout history for many hundreds of years and we know that he has spent time in excess of our own and has occupied time and space in Earth’s past, present and future.

His first recorded appearance on Earth has not been documented but from testimonies and the personal experience of Torchwood Founder Captain Jack Harkness, he has also travelled from the day the Earth was created to the year 100 trillion where he witnessed the end of the universe. 

His home planet Gallifrey was destroyed by him during what he refers to as the time war, a crime he has admitted to and taken responsibility for and will stand trial for in front of his own species.  He is accused of ending his own civilisation as well as destroying another alien species known as the Daleks. He has also destroyed many other aliens that have come to invade our planet and whilst he has done so in our defence, he has also committed the act of murder against an unknown species of an unknown quantity, destroying the work of government to enact a peace treaty throughout the stars.

His motives and his actions alone are the main cause of Earth’s invasions as he is notorious throughout time and space as the undefeated champion of Earth, a reputation that invites alien attacks on the human race in a bid to defeat him, a self-imposed reputation and title not authorised by the human race. 

He is a trickster, a man who has lived many lives and can change his face using a Time Lord process known as regeneration which causes his whole physical appearance to change from one person to another giving him the perfect place to hide should he need it. We have on file every regeneration so far and believe him to be on his 10^th life cycle. 

IMPORTANT! The Doctor travels in a time machine he calls the T.A.R.D.I.S which stands for Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. It is currently recognised as a 1950’s police box or sometimes called the blue box. Through an alien technical anomaly known as dimension transfer, the TARDIS is much bigger on the inside as it would appear to be on the outside, in fact, the outside of the ship is a facade for the inter dimensional interior which expands indefinitely to suit the needs of its passengers. 

Other Information:  There is a historical document on file dating back to1879 claiming the Doctor defended Queen Victoria from an alien werewolf attack which killed many members of her family and royal guards, highlighting her to the presence of aliens on Earth, an insight she said no human had the right to possess over another. This led to her majesty establishing the original foundations of the Torchwood Institute, to help defend Britain from further alien attacks whilst keeping her empire safe from the knowledge of their existence, and the Doctor’s banishment from the British empire declaring that, if he should return, he should beware, because Torchwood will be waiting, ready to deal with him. Many hubs and loyal followers continued her work throughout the years all over the world until the downfall of Torchwood London in The Battle of Canary Wharf in 2007 when the institute was used against Earth’s natural defence to open a rift in time and space which allowed two cyborg armies, the new Dalek empire and The Cybermen into our galaxy to wage war on each other for the Earth, killing thousands of humans before the rift in Torchwood was finally shut down by The Doctor and his then companion, Rose Tyler who died in the battle. 

We do not know if the law set by Queen Victoria still stands but Torchwood has been rebuilt from the ashes and redesigned by Captain Jack Harkness to help The Doctor defend Earth, not banish him from it as he believes The Doctor is our ally, not our enemy. 

There is a list of the dead following this man. He travels with human companions who rarely survive and are willing to die in his name and whilst he is guilty of all the crimes set before him and many more we do not know about, there is no one greater and no one more willing to defend Earth and the Human race. Does that make him friend, or foe? 

Torchwood honours him, Earth owes him a great debt, yet can he really be trusted when he is feared by many ancient alien races throughout time and space and across the galaxies where he is known as “The Oncoming Storm!” 

Some of the Doctor’s former companions:

 

Rose Tyler: Deceased. 

Martha Jones: Medical Doctor U.N.I.T

Donna Nobel: Temp from Chiswick.  

Captain Jack Harkness. Torchwood Operative

Sarah Jane Smith: Journalist.

Mickey Smith: Torchwood operative

Astrid Peth: Waitress.

Lady Christina de Souza: Jewel Thief

 

 

 

Profiles Lady Christina deSouza by SF Cambridge

 

Torchwood Archive Character Profile: Lady Christina deSouza

 

Name: Lady Christina deSouza

Species: Human

Occupation: Higher ranking member of the aristocracy. Thief. 

Abilities: Trained in martial arts & acrobatics. 

Crimes: Stealing King Athelstan’s golden chalice from the London Museum. Stealing a red route master bus. Wanted criminal for other robberies. 

Location: Last seen in London, currently on the run. 

Bio: Lady Christina deSouza is not just your average jewel thief, nor is she your average member of the aristocracy, she is well known to the police by her pseudonym and calling card, “The Lucky Cat”.

It is unknown at this stage just how much Lady deSouza has stolen or what she does with the artifacts she takes as she isn’t a modern-day Indiana Jones, more of common thief who steals literally for the thrill of getting caught. Currently uncaptured and currently not a person of interest for Torchwood in her current capacity. She is however a known associate of “The Doctor” and all investigations into her whereabouts are now handled by U.N.I.T and this reason alone, now makes her a person of interest to Torchwood. 

Lady deSouza engaged with The Doctor on an alien planet made entirely of sand. With his help she saved the lives of 5 other people and quite possibly saved the Earth from destruction. However, this does not negate any of her past and quite possibly current crimes and she is still public enemy No. 1 and still very much wanted in connection to several museum robberies that have taken place since her past dalliance with The Doctor. 

IMPORTANT! We do not know if she is still in contact with him, but if she is then we would like to talk to her, to find out where he is, to find out if she has any way of contacting him or finding him. Earth is at risk and she may be the one and only person at this present time who can help. 

Other Information: Christina is not to be trusted! Eye witness accounts and the statements from those aboard the route master bus confirm that whilst they were trapped on the alien planet known as San Helios, she carried all manner of tools and equipment with her and she seemed to take over the situation aboard the bus to establish herself as the leader in a situation that did not seem to faze her at all. The other survivors of the interdimensional time travel which killed the bus driver, all feared for their lives at some point and some needed counselling afterwards. Lady deSouza however, maintained an air of ease and even excitement at times which did lead to some speculation that she wasn’t quite what she seemed. 

We have been unable to trace any living members of the deSouza family and only have one recorded record of her father’s death, but considering her own attempts at leading a double life, it is not to say that any information we have about her is accurate and as a foot note we advise caution around her and to notify Torchwood immediately of her whereabouts.

Profiles Adam Smith by SF Cambridge

 

Warning! This document contains sensitive material and information from the Torchwood archives.

“Adam”

Name: Adam Smith

Species: Alien – Unknown 

Origin: The Void 

Age: Unknown 

Appearance: Adam looks like an average human male in his mid-20’s, whether this is his natural appearance or whether he can morph from species to species is unknown. 

Abilities: Adam has the power to infiltrate minds and place himself within your past memories purely by touch. This makes him dangerous as you would never know he had done this; you would only know whatever he wanted you to believe. 

Personality: Adam is a very insecure character with a need to be loved and remembered for doing great things. He wants to be the best friend, the shoulder to cry on, the rock of support and the ultimate loved one and he achieves all this by inserting himself into the memories of others so even though they may have only just met him, Adam could change their whole past to make it feel as if they have known him their whole lives. 

Adam has spent a vast amount of time in the void, the dead space between worlds where nothing exists. How he got there is unknown, as is the length of time he spent there before infiltrating Torchwood. It is thought that he came through a crack in the fabric of reality and assimilated himself to the human world by taking on a human appearance, therefore it is possible that Adam’s true form has no natural corporeal body. 

Crimes: Adam changed the personalities of all Torchwood employees in just 3 days. He made Toshiko fall in love with him and convinced her they had been in a year long relationship. He convinced Owen that he was jealous of their love affair and that he harboured secret feelings for Toshiko himself yet made him feel unworthy of her. He made Jack think he was his best friend and the only one he could rely on, tricking him into revealing past memories of his childhood for Adam to manipulate at a later date and he convinced Ianto that he was a murderer and killed innocent women. It was only when Gwen returned from her holiday with her partner that Jack began to suspect things weren’t quite right when on her first day back at work, she had no idea who Adam was as he had arrived whilst she was away and seemed genuinely worried as to what was going on. This was soon remedied when Adam placed his hand on her shoulder and fed himself into her memories by touch. Jack’s suspicion was even more aroused when in doing so, Adam inadvertently removed Gwen’s memories of her partner and she forgot all about him.  It was only after finding Ianto in a state of derangement when he thought that he had killed someone that Jack took matters into his own hands and found CCTV footage of Adam feeding himself into Ianto’s past. 

Current location: After revealing to the rest of the team who Adam was, Jack gave them all temporary amnesia pills so that they would forget him and everything that had happened in the few days he had been around. Adam only survives if he is remembered and so as everyone forgot him, he faded away and died. It is not known if he has gone for good or if he returned to the void.

Conclusion: These aliens may only exist in the void, they might be born there which would explain their need to become part of something else, something more than the feeling of emptiness. It is possible to feel sorry for them in some way and maybe if Adam had been more honest with his intentions then the Torchwood team may have been able to help him and find him a permanent home in the memories of another life, but Adam showed that he was untrustworthy when he twisted Ianto’s memories to ones of horror and admitted he got a rush out of the dark stuff implying that he had done it before. He also took Jack’s last good memory of his father and destroyed it as a pure act of wickedness meaning that whoever Adam really is, or how old he is or how long he has been in the void, it is possible that he is still a child among his own kind. One that likes to play very twisted, sinister games. 

This is the only image on file. If you see this man, if he is in your life, you need to contact Torchwood.

 

This file was created by Torchwood before we chose to forget.

Profiles Echelons of the Cybermen by Tony J Fyler

You will be like uzzzz, says Tony.

Ahhh, the Cybermen.

Remember when the Cybermen were simple? When they came from Mondas, escaped to Telos, and from there went stomping metallically all over the galaxy?

These days, the Cybermen have more origin stories than you can shake a Cyber-stick at – to slightly misquote the Twelfth Doctor and the Master in World Enough And Time, the Cybermen are easy, they’re inevitable, and they happen almost everywhere. That’s an interesting take on Doctor Who’s silver medal monsters – the Daleks are always the Daleks, even when, in the likes of Tranquil Repose in Revelation of the Daleks, they can have started out as something else. But the Cybermen begin everywhere.

There’s something in this notion that speaks to why the Cybermen are actually more scary than the Daleks. The Daleks depend on a sense of superiority, of supremacy, of racial gubbins – in essence, they depend on believing a lie. Whereas the Cybermen depend, ultimately, on an inescapable truth – the truth of decay and death, and the fear that inevitability instils. Cybermen are what you get when the fear of pain and ageing and death meets the technological ability to render them irrelevant.

The Cybermen will be along directly.

Throughout the history of Doctor Who of course, it’s not just the origins of the Cybermen that have changed and expanded. The range of Cyber-types there have been have expanded as necessary too, to tell different types of story.

The Cyberman

Your common-or-garden Cybermen is the essential unit of every Cyber-army. Throughout the history of the show, even quite what is inside a Cyberman has evolved. Initially, in the Mondasian version, they were meant to be mostly organic, but with more and more spare parts added and more and more meat removed, giving them an ability to withstand enormous cold, deliver enormous strength and pressure, as essentially outlast any organic life – unless, for some reason, their planet was destroyed, as they drew their energy directly from it. Over the years, the process of Cyberization too has evolved – while for decades, they seemed to grow and evolve in tubes (from The Invasion all the way through to Earthshock), and while in their ice-tombs on Telos they appeared to automatically evolve and upgrade themselves (from Tomb of the Cybermen to Attack of the Cybermen), the business of becoming a Cybermen seemed to remain a fairly straightforward one, along the lines described in The Tenth Planet – bits removed, bits added. It seemed like a longish, surgical process, with an element of mind-control (as in The Moonbase, where humans are put under Cyber-control, without undergoing the physical mutilation necessary to properly upgrade). Attack of the Cybermen, as was perhaps fitting for the Sixth Doctor’s era of questionable violence, took the whole process of Cyberization to a newly gruesome level, showing humans mid-upgrade, and what happened when the conditioning necessary to accept Cyber-conversion didn’t work – Stratton and Bates being partial Cybermen who’d retained their own minds. The gruesomeness was retained when the Cybermen returned in New Who, with images of saws and rotating cutters and the sounds of screams turning human beings into Cybermen in industrial quantities. Where the lack of emotion had always been assumed to be a part of the conversion process, the time of the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors went down the route of emotional inhibitors, rather than brain surgery – making the Cybermen as vulnerable to emotion as they’d once been to gold or solvents. That whole business has been tinkered with in the years since the Tenth Doctor, with whole people being encased in Cyber-bodies in Closing Time and Death in Heaven, but also in Death In Heaven, Cybermen being created from corpses in graves – so, little more than skeletons, certainly with no organic, squishy brains as part of the process. Along the way, there’s also been probably the most forward-looking approach to conversion in Nightmare In Silver – the Cyber-Mites (about which, more in a minute), which appear, like the nanobots of Dark Water and Death In Heaven, to eat the organic tissues of their victims away, seeding Cyber-technology, programming and interfaces as they go. These microscopic upgraders are very much a 21^st century, forward-looking approach to Cyber-conversion – as mentioned in Death In Heaven, this is technology that allows the Cybermen to build their armies from the dead as well as the living, that requires no giant processing plants or factories, and which gives them the numerical supremacy that can genuinely evolve them from the sick, agonised, ever-living zombies of World Enough And Time (and, the imputation is, therefore of The Tenth Planet) to the hordes of the occasionally-mentioned Cyber-Wars, so implacable, so unstoppable that the standing order of armies by the time of Nightmare In Silver is that if you’re standing on a planet with the Cybermen, you blow up the planet.

Cyber Leaders
If we approach the idea of the Cybermen logically – and let’s, it’s what they’d want – the notion of a necessary command structure should be irrelevant. If there is a supreme authority, every Cyberman’s orders should come from that authority, and teams and squadrons and research divisions and so on should simply carry out those orders, indefatigably.

But of course, that would put enormous strain on the processing power of the likes of Cyber Planners and CyberControllers. Particular groups or task forces are therefore put under the sub-command of a Cyber Leader. There have historically been visual signs of ‘command’ in Cyber Leaders, usually extending to a differently modulated vocal unit and a darkened set of head-handles for instant recognition in a race which thrives entirely on the basis of uniformity.

Cyber Leaders are very much ‘first among equals’ in their group of Cybermen – tasked with group-specific orders, and identified as the commander of the group, so as to get specific tasks accomplished for the advancement of the Cyber-race.

It has also, historically, been useful for the Doctor to have a point of contact or debate with the Cybermen, and Cyber Leaders have often been the highest delegated Cyber-authority with whom the Time Lord has been able to discuss the possession or not of emotion, the skulking defeat of the Cyber-race by glitterguns, the pleasures of a well-prepared meal, the life or death of the CyberController, or the pleasure of jazz.

Interestingly, there’s less logic to the idea that any Cyber Leader needs a designated Cyber Lieutenant, particularly when there are only relatively small numbers of Cybermen in their troop – but certainly, Cybermen went through a phase where any activated Cyber Leader had a ‘faithful’ (or indeed, relatively frequently, a ‘right gobby’) Cyber Lieutenant to argue with them, put counter-logic or, if necessary, lead patrols into catastrophic Cyber-killing massacres. The only real sense to the notion of the Cyber Lieutenant would seem to be that as they are a species governed by logic, for every Leader you need a Lieutenant precisely to be a gobby little git, to regularly test the logic of the commands and decisions made by the commander of a group.

Or perhaps – just perhaps – Cybermen are perpetually trapped in their metal bodies and have no emotional context to their lives, so they just really need someone to talk to.

The CyberController

As the Daleks have Davros, the Supreme Dalek and the Emperor Dalek at the top of their command structure, confusing the bejesus out of the cosmos - and frequently themselves – about where their ultimate loyalty lies (Let us never again speak of the absurdity that is the Parliament of the Daleks), so the Cybermen too, as a species, have had various points of control and command at the top of their organisational pyramid. One of the most persuasive of those ‘rulers’ was the CyberController – the biggest brain in CyberTown, with a fairly chunked-out body to boot, so as to fit in more processing power and system resilience. First introduced as the leader of the Telosian Cybermen in Tomb of the Cybermen, the fact that it emerged from the deep freeze with its warriors suggests that the CyberController had been in charge of previous CyberOperations – perhaps, though this is pure speculation, the CyberController was a Telos-specific Controller, charged to ensure the success of the cryogenic operations there. Certainly, when it emerged again in Attack of the Cybermen, the inference is that it’s been ‘merely damaged’ on Telos from the time of the Tombs episode until the Cybermen returned to Telos, captured a time vessel and tried to prevent the destruction of Mondas – nobody’s entirely clear as to why they would do such a thing for what must have been their Mondasian predecessors, but then nobody’s entirely clear of a whole heck of a lot about Attack Of The Cybermen.

What’s certainly true is that when the Cybermen evolved on an alternative dimension with an entirely different origin story, their creator, John Lumic, was hailed as the CyberController despite, it seems, keeping more of his emotional intelligence intact than is usual for the CyberController units. Lumic was even given a kind of Steel Throne, to maintain his inputs and outputs to his growing Cyber-Army, only rising to the legs he hadn’t used in years when absolutely necessary to capture escaping fugitives. Depressingly, the extra-chunky CyberController body-form was unable to master the physics of climbing a rope ladder at speed, suggesting – as the previous versions of the CyberController also had – that if you’re going to build an extra-brainy Cyberman, it’s best to keep them safely computing, rather than joining the action in any especially meaningful way.

The CyberKing And Miss Hartigan

Talking of steel thrones, it’s worth noting how the Cybermen survive in extreme circumstances. Spat out of a never-ending nullity in the Void, the Cybermen who terrorised Victorian London were on the steampunk side – physical order-updates via info-stamp, rather than wifi connection to the Cyberiad for order-updating, the use of children as a captive labour force to build a mobile Cyber-processing plant (we can only assume this would have involved an old-style physical, flesh and steel-melding upgrade). And as these Cybermen were from a reality in which they had a CyberController, they intended to put a human into their Controller’s role, cunningly renamed the CyberKing as the controlling intelligence behind their mobile upgrade-plant of the same name. Mercy Hartigan was…a less than ideal choice for the role, perhaps, as she brought a scarred and victimised and vengeful personality to the equation, but on the one hand, she’s the poster girl for everything the Cybermen think they bring to the party of the universe – freedom from the messiness of emotion, the powerlessness of pain – and on the other, when it turns out her emotional mind can subdue the cold logic of the Cybermen, she’s an example of what the Cybermen would be without their famous logic. They’d be an army in service to a central, emotional intelligence. In Miss Hartigan’s case, that emotion was vengeance. In Craig Owens’ case, when they tried the same trick in other extreme circumstances in Closing Time, the emotion was love, and in both cases, the Cybermen fared badly, the incompatibility between the reason they exist and an emotional Controller enough to cause them severe logic-issues. But whereas the random stab of love Craig felt for his human life and his son was enough to destroy them (famously to ‘blow them up with love’), Mercy Hartigan’s vengeance-filled mind actually seemed able to bend the Cyber-force to its will. Revenge of the Cybermen, indeed…

Cyber Planners And The Cyberiad

As the Cybermen evolved and advanced, they appear to have moved away from the strictly linear command structure of their supposed humanoid origins, and to have taken on more of a colony-model. With more Cybermen spread across greater and greater portions of space, the need for Cyber Planners became more evident, as a strategic interface between Cyber-bodies on the ground of particular operations and the rest of the Cyberiad (or hive). The Cybermen used a local Cyber-Planner in their invasion of Earth involving Tobias Vaughan, and in their operation against the Wheel In Space – both of which appeared to be mostly machine components. By the time the Eleventh Doctor encountered the Cybermen on Hedgewick’s World, they had advanced enough to appreciate the flexibility of wetware once more, and planned to use the brain of an organic creature – first, some children, then the Doctor himself, with his knowledge of time travel (executive class) and regeneration to add to the Cyberiad’s knowledge-base. It’s implied in that story that in his case, they would be prepared to make him the overall Cyber-Planner, rather than any local mesh-level Planner overseeing operations in a given territory, showing that while the Cybermen had out-evolved their linear hierarchies, they were by no means averse to making use of a centralizing authority, presuming it brought enough to the species as a whole and its ability to advance and conquer.

Cyber-Pets

If you’re going to conquer the universe, you’re going to need underlings. Sub-creatures to do your dirty work for you. Daleks have Robomen, Ogrons, pig-slaves and, depending on the work, any random humanoids they happen to find.

The Cybermen, as in many areas, have always been rather more elegant in their approach to underlings. Almost as long as we’ve known of them, the Cybermen have come with ratlike creatures called Cybermats, which were their version of the Sonic Screwdriver – multi-purpose tools, but sneaky and able to hide from sight. They could chew through cables, gnaw through base walls, and even discretely infect organic creatures with poisons, diseases or other useful toxins, to minimise the likelihood of Cyber-casualties. While mostly seen in the Classic series, the Cybermats made one appearance in New Who (Closing Time), where their original organic form was revealed. It’s possible of course that given the variety in shape, size and design of the Cybermats to which we’ve been exposed on TV that the Cybermats – like the Cybermen – are not all from a single species, but are creatures local to the time and place of any given Cyber-operation, upgraded and set to work as needed.

That would certainly seem to be the way of things with the CyberShades – doglike creatures used by the Victorian Cybermen, with a particular ability to run up walls, and a faceplate more steampunk, brass and angular than those of the Cybermen who evolved elsewhere. It was never made entirely clear in The Next Doctor why the CyberShades had been created, except perhaps for the necessity of doing the hard, fast sheepdog work of keeping the locals in line, given that there were limited number of ‘Void’ Cybermen in Victorian London and the existence of wolfhound-like creatures to convert was likely to make for an easy, logical and resource-light solution to the crowd control problem.

If we’re taking the Cybermen in new directions though, Neil Gaiman must be credited for one of the biggest leaps forward in terms of Cyber-pets, creating as he did the Cyber-Mites – mostly, it seems, machine creatures, that can infect organics with Cyber-technology and begin their conversion process. The Cyber-Mites were a very 21^st century approach, a halfway stage between the Cybermats of old and the next, logical evolution of Cyber-conversion, the nano-cloud, as seen in Death in Heaven.

The Nanocybes (they’re not called that, not anywhere, but hell, that means the word’s mine now) are perhaps the ultimate Cyber-pets – somewhere between Cyber-fleas and Cyber-leucocytes – which can, individually or in numbers, convert any viable organic creatures into Cybermen, CyberShades, Cybermats etc, depending on body-type.

Once you’ve reached this point in Cyber-evolution of course, the question becomes – as Gaiman mentioned in Nightmare In Silver, and Stephen Moffatt in Death In Heaven – how you win against an army that can turn the rain against you and weaponize the dead.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, after reaching this pinnacle-point, we went back very significantly to basics at the end of the Twelfth Doctor’s time, to the almost-Mondasian Cybermen, focusing on their pain, their need to escape from that pain, and the extremes to which they could be driven in a monstrous quest to live forever.

When the Cybermen return to meet the Thirteenth Doctor (as is at least rumoured for Series 12), it’ll be interesting to see whether the show takes the Cybermen forward from the point of their practical invulnerability (oh, and did we mention, they can fly now?!), or backward, artificially engineering a new weakness into the Cyber-design or mentality (to go along with solvents, gravity, radiation, gold, emotion, more gold, love, specifically, etc) to make them defeatable again. Or will the writers – dare the writers – add something new to the echelons of the Cybermen, that helps explain the way in which these walking avatars of ageing, death and fear go about the business of conquering the universe?