Companions: Fifty Years of Doctor Who Assistants (43 page)

Later the Doctor almost falls into the Silo, but Jack pulls him back and wonders how the Doctor survived without him. Eventually the Doctor and Jack talk, and the Doctor explains that he had to run away from Jack because Rose not only brought him back to life, but she brought him back to life forever. Jack is, to the Doctor’s mind, wrong – a fixed point in time; he is impossible. Jack admits to being called that before. Even the TARDIS tried to shake him off. Jack finds the Tenth Doctor kind of cheeky, and rather enjoys his flirtatious nature, quite a change from the Doctor he previously knew.

After the Master steals the Doctor’s TARDIS, the Doctor uses Jack’s vortex manipulator to return them back to 2008, just in time to discover that the Master has become prime minister of Great Britain in
The Sound of Drums
. He tries to contact Torchwood but there is no response (he later discovers that the Master has sent them on a fool’s errand to the Himalayas). After Martha’s home is blown up he takes command of the situation, calming Martha down after she witnesses her parents being taken into custody. The Master makes him Public Enemy #3 (the Doctor and Martha are #1 and
#2), so the three of them go into hiding. Jack, rather reluctantly, reveals to the Doctor his association with Torchwood and the Doctor does not approve, until Jack convinces him that Torchwood has been rebuilt in the Doctor’s honour. Once again Jack demonstrates his knowledge of the Time Lords and cannot comprehend how such a society could produce a psychopath like the Master. He learns the truth about the Tempered Schism, a rip in reality, and how young Gallifreyans are brought to look into it at a very young age. Most run away, some go mad.

Jack still has his TARDIS key. The Doctor uses it to create two further perception filter keys to enable them to wander the streets unnoticed. He is amused by the filters’ effects on Martha, and the Doctor explains that it is like fancying someone and them never noticing you. At this point Jack realises Martha’s attraction to the Doctor, and how the Doctor never really notices her because his head is still full of Rose, ‘You, too, huh?’ Jack asks, understanding how she feels. Difference is, although Jack loves the Doctor, he is used to not being the most important person in the Doctor’s world.

Once aboard
Valiant
, Jack is killed by the Master’s laser screwdriver. He recovers in time to realise that the Master has unleashed death upon Earth in the form of six billion Toclafane, ordered to decimate one tenth of the Earth’s population. Knowing he cannot leave the Doctor alone, Jack gives his vortex manipulator to Martha, insisting she escapes while she can.

He spends the next year bound in the bowels of
Valiant
, constantly tortured and killed, but he still keeps up his humour. He is prepared, knowing the Doctor has a plan – he frees himself and faces several Toclafane to destroy the Paradox Machine the Master has built out of the Doctor’s TARDIS. He makes it to the bridge of
Valiant
just in time to prevent the Master from running, and is the one who removes the gun from Lucy Saxon (the Master’s abused wife) after she shoots the Master. The Paradox Machine destroyed, time rolls back a year, leaving Jack one of the very few to remember the Year That Never Was. The Doctor returns Jack to Cardiff Bay, and once again disables the time travel capabilities of the vortex manipulator. The Doctor asks Jack to join him and Martha, but Jack admits he had a lot of time to think in the last year and realises he is responsible for the Torchwood team he built and has to return to them. But before he goes he asks the Doctor how long will he live, and whether he will age (having spotted the odd grey hair), but the Doctor doesn’t know. Jack tells the Doctor how he was the first person from the Boeshane Peninsula to enter the Time Agency, and was a poster boy – the Face of Boe they called him.

Going from the evidence on screen there is every reason to believe that the Face of Boe is indeed the ultimate evolution of Jack, having lived for billions of years. In
Gridlock
the Face of Boe tells the Doctor, ‘You are not alone’, preparing him for the revelation that Professor Yana (YANA = You Are Not Alone) is the Master (in
Utopia
), and of course the Face of Boe would know because he was there, billions of years younger, as Jack. What causes him to evolve into a giant head in a jar, however, is yet to be revealed. There is a heavy implication in the episode
The Pandorica Opens
: River Song purchases a vortex manipulator from Dorium Maldovar, who took it ‘fresh from the wrist of a handsome Time Agent’. It is known that Dorium often works with the Headless Monks, who decapitate people. Could it be that River ends up with Jack’s manipulator (as well as his squareness gun) and that the Headless Monks are responsible for Jack losing his body in the fifty-first century? Is this the first step towards Jack becoming the Face of Boe?

Jack makes a triumphant return to
Torchwood
, and builds a deeper connection with each member of his team – no longer stand-offish as he has found
his
Doctor and got the answers he needs. Much happens during the second series of
Torchwood
, and Jack learns as much about himself as he does about others. Owen Harper, Torchwood’s resident doctor, dies at one point, and Jack brings him back to life – ostensibly to get codes only Owen knows, but Jack later reveals in a quiet moment between the two of them that he just wasn’t ready to give up on Owen. It is also clear that Jack is deeply in love with Gwen Cooper, the
facto
leader. It is a mutual love but they both realise she needs someone more reliable so Gwen marries her long-term fiancé, Rhys. He also engages in a more open romance with Ianto Jones, and develops a much deeper respect for Toshiko Sato, the technical buff on the team.

Along the way Jack enlists the help of Martha, who takes over as Torchwood’s doctor during Owen’s enforced leave after his death. They reminisce over their experiences in the Year That Never Was, and Jack tells his team that he would trust Martha to the end of the world. Jack is also reunited with another former Time Agent, and ex-lover, Captain John Hart (almost certainly an assumed alias, since they exchange dialogue which heavily implies John is wearing someone else’s identity, much like Jack is). We meet Jack’s brother, Gray and see flashbacks to Jack’s childhood on the Boeshane Peninsula, wherein we discover that his real name is indeed Jack. Blaming Jack for abandoning him Gray buries him alive in 27AD, in the grounds of what will become Bute Park, next to Cardiff Castle, and Jack spends 1,874 years constantly suffocating, dying, being brought back to life, suffocating, dying, etc… until he is found in 1901 by Torchwood and is, at his own request, for fear of crossing his own timeline, suspended in Torchwood’s cryogenic facility until he is revived again in 2009, where he forgives Gray and chloroforms him – storing his brother in the deep freeze. By this point, however, both Owen and Tosh are dead as a result of Gray’s revenge scheme.

Jack returns to
Doctor Who
once more in the two-part story
The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End
, this time with the remainder of his Torchwood team. It takes place shortly after the events of
Torchwood
series two, with Jack, Gwen and Ianto still dealing with the deaths of Owen and Toshiko. When the Earth is shifted across space to the Medusa Cascade by the Daleks, Jack’s first port of call is Martha, now working in New York on Project: Indigo for UNIT. Neither has heard from the Doctor. Martha is surprised to learn that Jack knows of Project: Indigo, a mobile matter transmitter, cannibalised from Sontaran technology. Jack doesn’t think it will work, and believes Martha dead when she uses it to escape the Daleks’ attack on the UNIT building. Once Harriet Jones enables the subspace network, and Jack discovers that Martha is alive, he is very relieved and finds out the base code that fixes his vortex manipulator, which he uses to take him to the Doctor. Before he goes, though, he promises Gwen and Ianto that he will be back – he will not leave them wondering again, as he did in
Torchwood: End of Days/Doctor Who: Utopia
. Upon seeing the Doctor on the subspace network his first remark is an angry, ‘what kept you’, before he compliments Sarah Jane Smith on her work with the Slitheen (
The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Lost Boy
), and even flirts a little with her. He destroys a Dalek, which almost kills the Doctor, and helps Rose to get the Doctor into the safety of the TARDIS. Despite being the first time he has seen Rose in over two thousand years, Jack doesn’t get to share a happy reunion with her, since the Doctor half-regenerates before the TARDIS is transported to the Dalek Crucible. Jack has a very blasé attitude to regeneration, once again revealing his knowledge of the Time Lords, and when confronted with the Daleks and Davros, he intentionally gets himself shot knowing his ‘dead’ body will be removed, freeing him to work against the Daleks while the Doctor keeps them distracted. Nothing is made of the fact that Jack is now at least twice the Doctor’s age, although clearly with little of the wisdom or experience.

After making his way through the Crucible, tracking human signals on his vortex manipulator (which appears to have almost sonic screwdriver-like abilities), he finds Mickey, Jackie and Sarah. Mickey calls him ‘Captain Cheesecake’ while he calls Mickey ‘Mickey Mouse’ – still, they share a hug, obviously having missed each other. It is a bit odd that more is made of their reunion than that of Jack and Rose. He teams up with Sarah, using her warp star, an explosion waiting to happen. Alas, before the device can be used, the four of them are transmatted to the vault and a final showdown with Davros and Dalek Caan.

In his time Jack has flirted with every companion he has met, from Rose through to Sarah, including Mickey, but the only companion to really show an interest in Jack is Donna. As soon as she sees him on the subspace network he catches her eye, and when the Doctor survives his almost-regeneration, hugs abound and Donna tells Jack, ‘You can hug me’, but he just laughs it off. Later, when all the companions are helping the Doctor pilot the TARDIS and tow Earth back to its correct place in space, Donna tells Jack that she thinks he is the best. Once Earth’s spatial location is successfully restored and everyone is celebrating, Donna pulls Sarah away from Jack so she can get a hug in.

Jack leaves with Martha, telling her that he is not ‘sure about UNIT these days’, suggesting she should join Torchwood – who does, of course, need a medic. Mickey catches them up and the three of them walk off into the distance, possibly to more adventures together.

Whether or not Mickey and Martha worked with Torchwood is never revealed, since by the time we return to Jack in
Torchwood: Children of Earth
he is in the process of looking for a new medic. Martha is off on her honeymoon and Jack refuses to interrupt that. In this five-part story we discover that in 1965 Jack, under direct order from the government, gave up twelve children as a ‘gift’ for the 456. These aliens return in late 2009, wanting 10% of the Earth’s children – who are a drug for the 456. During this story Jack finds himself having to confront his own mistakes, and along the way a bomb is planted inside him, which not only blows him up but destroys the Torchwood Hub. He survives, but is buried in concrete. He is eventually rescued by Gwen and Rhys, and together they seek to find a way to defeat the 456, but the only way to do so is to use the children of Earth against them. Jack is forced to use the only child available to him – his grandson, Steven. As a result Steven is killed, causing Jack much pain in the process. So much so, in fact, that he cuts himself off from everyone, including Gwen. Alice, his daughter, walks away from Jack, never able to forgive him for killing her son – there should have been another way. He spends six months travelling the Earth, trying to run away from his pain, but it is not enough, and so he catches a lift on a cold fusion freighter which is at the edge of the Solar System. Gwen tries to tell him that he cannot just run away, but a distraught Jack says, ‘Yes I can. Watch me,’ and does. Jack is thus declared dead under the 456 Regulations.

His last, brief encounter with the Doctor (so far) occurs some time later in
The End of Time
, at which point he is in some alien bar still drowning his sorrows. The Doctor gets the bartender to pass on a note to Jack, which offers him an introduction to Alonso Frame (whom the Doctor met during
The Voyage of the Damned
). It is not clear, but there is a suggestion in this scene that the Doctor is aware of Jack’s actions on Earth, and as his tenth incarnation nears its end, the Doctor is offering Jack some kind of forgiveness for the sacrifice he made to save Earth.

Jack returns to Earth in
Torchwood: Miracle Day
, seemingly having been monitoring it since he discovers that the word ‘Torchwood’ is being emailed all across the world. He uses malware to expunge all references of Torchwood, before heading back to Wales to save Gwen from assassins, and along the way discovers he has lost his immortality just as, across the globe, humanity discovers that it has become immortal. This turns out to be a result of the Three Families introducing Jack’s immortal blood to the Blessing (which runs through the centre of the Earth). Jack and Rex Matheson are able to reverse the effect by introducing more of Jack’s blood (which, through transfusion, now runs through Rex) to the Blessing. The result is as hoped; except Rex joins Jack in the immortal stakes (perhaps Rex is one of Boekind, mentioned in
The End of the World
?). Although he is still plagued by the guilt of his grandson’s death, saving Earth once more seems to have helped Jack rediscover himself and he decides it is time to resurrect Torchwood…