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.
Jack and Torchwood
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
