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Fragments

21ST MARCH 2008

(50-MINUTE EPISODE, PART 1 OF 2)

Given the BBC’s incessant chopping and changing of Torchwood’s transmission

day and its resident channel, I was incredibly fortunate to catch BBC Three’s first broadcast of the season’s penultimate episode, Fragments. And believe me, had I missed this one, I would’ve been devastated.

Oddly enough though, had I missed this one, it would not have taken me all that long to get back up to speed as the actual events of Fragments can be summed up in a just a few sentences: Captain John Hart sets a booby trap for the Torchwood team. Searching an abandoned warehouse, John’s bomb goes off causing Jack, Tosh, Ianto and Owen to be trapped under piles of concrete rubble. Shortly after Gwen rescues them, the team are greeted by a hologram of Captain John who reveals that he has Jack’s long-lost brother, Gray, in custody, and that he intends to seek retribution against Jack and his whole team.

However, despite being key in setting up the impending season finale (which it looks like I will have to wait a bloody fortnight for), Fragments is really another story entirely.

The penultimate episode of the 2006 series, Captain Jack Harkness, quietly explored

some of the ghosts of Jack’s past whilst in the background, Catherine Tregenna pushed

all the pawns into position for Chris Chibnall’s explosive End of Days. And the second series shares a certain symmetry with the first as, whilst the fires are hotting up for Jack’s showdown with John in Exit Wounds, Chibnall takes us on a journey into the respective pasts of the four members of the Torchwood team that we still know little remarkably little about. As their lives flash before their eyes, we learn how each of them was recruited to

Torchwood, and a whole lot more to boot…

1,392 deaths earlier… The first fragment of the episode deals with how Jack first came to work for Torchwood. Now on the face of it, this part of the episode is quite easily the most alluring as it lifts the veil further on the enigmatic Captain’s past. However, there isn’t really anything here that will come as a surprise to viewers – his sideburns and wig aside, that

is. Even so though, Jack’s painful induction into Torchwood is told with the writer’s typical aplomb: in Victorian Cardiff, having died and been reborn many times already in public, Jack comes to the attention of two Torchwood femme fatales who first beat the crap out

of him and then recruit him.

“The Torchwood Institute was created to combat the threat posed by the Doctor and other phantasmagoria.”

Jack’s first mission serves only to highlight the moral gulf between how he did things with the Doctor and how Torchwood did things back in 1899. There is a beautiful sequence where Jack is sickened by one of the femme fatales casually executing a harmless Blowfish that

he has arrested. Stricken, he goes off to consult a tarot card reader (who bears an uncanny resemblance to the girl that he consulted in Dead Man Walking) who tells him that he will not cross paths with his version of the Doctor for well over a century. Suddenly it dawns on Jack that to survive on Earth for all that time, he is going to have to take the blood money and do Torchwood’s dirty work.

“The 21st century Jack. Everything’s gonna change. And we’re not ready.”

We then flash forward a century to New Year’s Eve, 1999. As the eighth Doctor battles the Master in San Francisco, Jack returns to the Hub to find that his boss, Alex, has used an alien device to peer into the future and witness the horrors that are to come. So grave have been the effects of these premonitions, Alex has slaughtered the whole of Jack’s team in what he calls “a mercy killing”. He then kills himself, passing the gauntlet to Jack and leaving him with a new team to recruit.

5 years earlier. Once Gwen and Rhys have rescued Jack from the rubble, the episode goes on to tell of how Tosh came to join Torchwood. Much to my surprise, Tosh’s tale is incredibly dark and really quite sad. In a nutshell, some cyber-criminals capture her mother and hold her to ransom. In exchange for her mother’s life, the baddies want Tosh to build some sort

of sonic modulator for them, which she does. Unluckily for Tosh though, just as the exchange is taking place UNIT storm the baddies’ lair and incarcerate everyone there. Eventually Jack comes to see her and offers her a way out – work for him for five years, and he will have her pardoned. Needless to say that she bites his hand off.

Naoko Mori looks to have relished the opportunity to get her teeth into some great character material; she is superb throughout the whole sequence. Even though Tosh’s part of the story does feel slower somehow, it’s still very compelling. It also has the virtue of explaining a hell of a lot about Tosh and why she is the way that she is.

21 months earlier. As, chronologically speaking, Owen was the next to join Torchwood after Tosh, I expected his part of the story to follow hers. Instead, Chibnall breaks up two distinctly grim stories with the much more light-hearted tale of how Ianto wore Jack down.

“We’re nothing to do with Torchwood London. I severed all links.”

With Torchwood London gone, Ianto Jones found himself out of a job. So what did he do? He saved Jack from a Weevil. Showed up outside the Hub with a coffee for Jack. Compli-mented Jack on his retro coat. Tamed a pterodactyl with some dark chocolate… Suffice it

to say that Ianto’s story, whilst still gloomy in places, is without a doubt the most amusing of the four.

4 years earlier. Burn Gorman seems to be getting all the best scripts this season. You would think that the writers would struggle to top killing his character and yet keeping him around,

but this poignant little story shows us yet another side to Owen Harper; a more sympathetic side. And, in a stroke of real genius, all of the following takes place whilst Owen is facing the prospect of being sliced in half by an particularly jagged looking and precariously balanced pane of glass – edge of the seat drama in itself.

“What’s the point of my doing this job if I can’t help my own fiancée?”

Owen was busy planning his wedding when his fiancée, a beautiful young Doctor by the name of Katie Russell (Andrea Lowe), presented with what looked like the earliest onset

of Alzheimer’s Disease in history. For a few fleeting moments, I really thought that Chibnall was actually going to play the thread out and either have Katie slowly deteriorate with early onset Alzheimer’s or perhaps even have her leave Owen because of her condition. But hey, it’s Torchwood, and so why have Alzheimer’s when you can have a malevolent alien being growing inside your brain?

Gorman and Lowe play their traumatic scenes so very well together; the first few minutes of their story, where Katie struggles to even make a cup of tea, are particularly outstanding.

“You’re life doesn’t have to end with her.”

Katie dies on the operating table as the Doctors try to remove her ‘tumour’, and who does Owen find beside her body? Jack. For a while, Owen thinks that he has lost his mind, but when he sees – and brutally attacks – Jack at the Cemetery, he begins to realise that he wasn’t hallucinating. Jack is real. Torchwood is real. Aliens are real. And Torchwood need

a medic…

At the end of the day this episode feels like something of a belated pilot. Arguably though,

it is far more gripping than most pilots because, simply put, no-one really cares about a show’s characters at the time of the pilot. Tease your audience for twenty-five episodes – substantially longer in Jack’s case – before revealing their back stories, and then you will doubtless have their undivided attention. Fragments certainly had mine.

Copyright © E.G. Wolverson 2008

E.G. Wolverson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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