Original Transmission
Crew
Plot Outline from Wikipedia After the team gets signs of an unidentified life form, they (apart from Gwen, who is running late) go to investigate. Searching an abandoned building, the team discover it is a trap and the building is bombed. The resulting explosion causes the team to be trapped under piles of concrete rubble. Gwen and Rhys arrive (Rhys having given Gwen a lift), and as they dig everyone out, the team's lives flash before their eyes revealing how Jack, Ianto, Owen, and Toshiko got recruited to Torchwood.
Jack lies cold under piles of rubble, and we flash back to '1392 deaths earlier'. In the Victorian era, Jack is picked up by two female Torchwood Three officers who have noticed his immortality, and his references to the Doctor. They examine him, including a couple of more attempts at killing him by electric shock and shooting him in the head). Jack recognizes that the technology being used in his interrogation is more advanced than Earth technology of the time, he asks his captors who they are. They identify themselves as being part of Torchwood and offer Jack a job with them. Jack initially disagrees to the offer learning that the officers belong to Torchwood and that they view the Doctor as a threat. He agrees to the assignment after being told that if he doesn't cooperate he will be treated as a threat himself. He takes an initial assignment (written on paper that has a "T" in a hexagon), which is to track down and capture an alien. While they have the alien in a small cell, Jack asks if they are going to examine the alien. However the dark haired officer who is with him pulls out a gun and shoots the alien in the head without any warning. Jack disagrees with this policy, and refuses the next assignment they try to give him. As he leaves the office, the blonde Torchwood officer (who seems to be the leader) tells him that he will change his mind before the morning. Jack goes to a bar, where the young female fortune teller from "Dead Man Walking" comes to his table and offers to "read [his] cards" and doesn't listen to Jack's refusal. She tells him that he will not meet the Doctor for another century. He returns to the Torchwood office and opts to join Torchwood for that century.
The blonde officer hands him the assignment again, and when he leaves, starts to write on another sheet of paper. She starts writing what seems to be a report on Jack and then sets up a filing cabinet with his name on it. Next is a montage of images, with different officers of Torchwood Three writing about Jack, and setting up more files. Handwritten reports turn into ones typed on a typewriter. Photographs are added to the reports, and at least one more filing cabinet is set up, with an updated Torchwood symbol on the label. The reports then changes to being typed on a computer with the familiar font and background of the current Torchwood computer system. He is still working for Torchwood in 1999, when he comes back to the Hub on New Year's Eve to find that one of the team, possibly the leader, has murdered the rest, out of fear for the future. He has in his hand some locket or pendant, and he claims to have seen the future in it and killed the rest of the team out of a sense of mercy that the immortal Jack cannot benefit from. Based on the vision from the locket, he states that in the next century is when everything changes and that Torchwood isn't ready for it (which is a play on Jack's voiceover during the opening credits and several episodes where Jack refers to the 21st century being when "everything changes"). He commits suicide, leaving Torchwood to Jack as a "reward for a century of service." With the rest of the team dead, Jack will have to recruit a new team.
In the present, Gwen and Rhys free Jack from the rubble, Rhys commenting that he couldn't find Jack's heartbeat. Jack decides to go find Ianto while Gwen and Rhys go for Tosh. Toshiko awakens under layers of bricks, and begins to scream for help and in pain. We flash back to a seemingly meek Tosh, working for the Ministry of Defence. After her boss leaves, however, she immediately breaks into his office, and retrieves a passcode for the security room. Once inside, she obtains secret files for a Sonic Modulator. At home, she begins constructing a mock version, and once complete, takes it to a secret base. She gives it to a woman, one of her mother's captors, in the hope of her mother's release, but in seeing Tosh's potential, they decide to have her work for them. Tosh refuses, and so the captors set off the Sonic Modulator, sending an ear-piercing sound around the room that brings Tosh and her mother to the floor as their blood vessels begin to pulse violently. At that point however, UNIT soldiers break in and arrest both the captors and Toshiko and her mother. Tosh is locked in a plain empty cell, and told she will have no communication with anyone, and they refuse to answer her questions to her mother's whereabouts. After living in solitude for some time, Tosh hears over the intercom that she will have an inspection. She asks from who, and the door opens to show Jack. Jack chats to her, and states that she'll be imprisoned indefinitely. He recognises, however, Toshiko's talent and high intelligence in building the fully operational device from plans that could not possibly work, and offers her a pardon if she takes a job at Torchwood. Gwen and Rhys find Toshiko, but are unable to free her at first, and so Gwen leaves Rhys to look after her while she finds Jack.
Ianto's hand scrambles out from underneath some rubble, and he yells in pain. His flashback shows him helping Jack fight a Weevil. Ianto asks for a job, but is rejected by Jack. The next morning, Ianto gives Jack a coffee outside Torchwood. Jack recalls a large amount of knowledge about Ianto, stating that he researched him after he was able to identify a Weevil. Ianto again asks for a job, as his old job was lost when Torchwood One was destroyed. Jack states that he had severed all ties with Torchwood One. That night, Ianto steps in front of the SUV, and once more asks for a job. After Jack threatens to erase his memory, he tells Jack that he is pursuing a pterodactyl. After a long battle, the pair of them capture it, and Jack tells Ianto that he expects to see him at work the following morning. Gwen and Jack find Ianto and manage to pull him free. Ianto states that he thinks his shoulder is dislocated, and so Jack hits it back in for him. Ianto realises that they should try to find Owen soon, since he is unable to heal any injuries he may incur.
Owen lies trapped under bricks, as a pane of glass dangles precariously above him. Owen's flashback shows him before he was employed in Torchwood, working as a regular doctor and planning a marriage. His fiancée, Katie, begins to exhibit signs of Alzheimer's Disease, and is taken in for a brain scan. The doctors, in fact, state that it is a tumor, and decide to operate. While Owen waits outside, he hears a loud noise in the operating room, and enters to find all of the surgeons dead on the floor. Jack enters, and states that there is an alien parasite residing in his fiancée's brain that gives off a toxic gas when threatened. Jack attempts to take the brain, but Owen protests, and so Jack knocks him out with chloroform. Owen wakes up in a hospital bed, but because Jack has erased all evidence of himself, there was no proof of Owen ever seeing him and telling him about the alien. The doctors come to the conclusion that Owen is traumatised and they prescribe him 3 months of rest. Visiting his fiancée's grave, Owen sees Jack and confronts him for answers, saying that he was right and Jack was not just a figment of his own imagination. Seeing Owen's potential, Jack convinces him to start up at Torchwood as a medic for the team. In the present, Gwen finds Owen, who warns her about the glass. They manage to get free just as the glass falls and smashes below. When the team reunites, they discover that the SUV is missing. Jack receives a holographic message from Captain John Hart, who reveals himself to be behind the bombs and shows Jack an image of his long-lost brother Gray. He then vows to tear Jack's world apart, so Jack would spend time with him.
Analysis by Cuisle This is a story I would have liked to have written. I would have done it a little different if I had, mind you. There are some things about the backstories of the characters that I didn’t like. But there you go. That’s the thing about writers. They see things differently. The premise is a brilliant one. Four of the five members of the team are involved in an explosion. They are all unconscious, though still alive, and dream of what brought them to Torchwood in the first place. Now, here, actually, there is a bit of a plot hole. I’ve seen enough episodes of CSI, NCIS, Bones, and other realistic forensic investigator programmes to know that being as close as out gang was to a bomb they ought to have been in several burnt pieces, if not reduced to soup. It was a bit like the start of George of the Jungle where the narrator tells us that nobody dies, they just get boo-booed. The Torchwood gang were seriously boo-booed.
Jack, dreamt he was back in 1899, in a frock coat and sideburns that made him look like Wolverine from X-Men. There, he met two attractive and dangerous women who tortured him to find out what made him tick and then forced him to work for Torchwood. Well, that explains that. We also saw how he became head of Torchwood Three on Millennium night, when his former boss, Alex, murdered the whole team because he had seen some kind of horrific prophecy of the future! The 1899 version of the Hub and the 1999 one were both quite fascinating set designs. In 1899, the office overlooked a jetty with a submarine berthed in it. I wonder what happened to that. In 1999, the metal fountain hadn’t been put in place with the rift manipulator. Very neat historical touches. We next see how Toshiko joined the team, and this scenario I didn’t find terribly convincing. Toshiko worked for MI5, or something of that nature, and stole secrets to give to some unknown terrorist group who had her mother as a hostage. When U.N.I.T. busted the operation they put her into some kind of very nasty prison from where Jack rescued her, asking her for five years of her time in return for dropping the charges.
Now, although it was well acted, and well scripted, I just didn’t believe that. In the past two series, Toshiko has never acted like somebody on ‘parole’ as it were. She always came across as somebody with far more pride. The idea that Jack had some kind of hold over her was never hinted at. That story completely didn’t work for me. Owen’s story, on the other hand, was beautiful. Owen has always come across as a cold fish relationship-wise from the beginning. When he seduced the girl with the alien pheromones, when he seduced Gwen, only to dump her, his attitude towards Toshiko, all pointed to somebody for whom love wasn’t on the agenda. His affair with Diane was a lapse that only pushed him further into his own dark place. And now we learn that the reason for his coldness was that he lost his fiancée in the most horrific circumstances, and his work for Torchwood, ever since, has been an attempt to reconcile himself with her death. Suddenly, Owen makes sense. But sadly, too late, since he is apparently going to die in the next episode.
Ianto’s story was charming, and funny, but it didn’t fit my vision of his character. I don’t figure Ianto for an average student and a drifter, for one thing. He has a brilliant mind. He knows the Hub inside out. He was the one, right back at the start, who hacked Gwen’s computer and stopped her writing about Torchwood. He is quick-thinking in situations that need quick thinking. I just didn’t see him as anything less than a post-graduate. I also had the idea, especially after the revelation about his father being a master tailor, that the suits came natural to him. But this seemed to suggest that he changed from casual clothes just to impress Jack. It didn’t quite fit that Ianto was the one who first discovered the Pterodactyl, though we know so little about her that he may as well have been. The scene with the two of them with Myfanwy in the hanger was funny, especially when Ianto complains that Jack wants the pterodactyl but not him. The line about eating pre-killed dinosaur after the asteroid crashed was completely pointless, sloppy stuff. No way does Jack go back THAT far. And the critics will hate the scenes of Jack being flown about by Myfanwy. It wasn’t the best modelwork I’ve ever seen. But it worked. Of course, we all know that he wanted into Torchwood in order to hide Lisa and get help for her. Knowing that, puts that scene into perspective.
And then, of course, we learn that all this was a plot by Captain John, setting it all up for next week! Heaven help us. Personally I could have done without him. I didn’t like him the first time. Some critics have wondered why we haven’t had the backstories before now. But actually, it comes about right. By all accounts, we lose at least one of the team next week. When else would we get to hear their stories? It was right. And but for a niggle or two about Ianto and Toshiko, it was a well written, well constructed montage.
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