 The man known to all as Captain Jack Harkness
- he has admitted that this is only an alias he assumed prior
to his first meeting with The Doctor, although his real name
has not yet been revealed - is easily The Doctor’s most
unique companion even before he began travelling with The Doctor,
although this was mainly due to his sexuality. While all of
The Doctor’s previous companions were generally exclusively
heterosexual - if any examples of their romantic inclination
were presented; some companions, such as Victoria Waterfield or Grant Markham, never gave any clear indication which way
they were romantically inclined one way or the other -, Jack
Harkness was blatantly bisexual, demonstrating an equal attachment
for men and women, whether human or alien, due to his origins
as a fifty-first century time agent, a point in history when
mankind had spread out so far that old definitions of sexuality
had become virtually obsolete.
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| The Empty Child/The Doctor
Dances |
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Although we learned some important
details about Jack’s
past in his first appearance - including his status as a former
Time Agent from the fifty-first century (His agency’s
connection with the time-travel experiments of the Fourth
Doctor’s
old foe Magnus
Greel were never revealed) -, we have learned
further details about his past since then. Born in the Boeshine
Peninsula - although we have yet to learn his real name at this
time as ‘Jack Harkness’ has been confirmed to be
an alias, evidence in flashbacks suggests that ‘Jack’ is
his real first name as it was used by his mother -, Jack’s
father was killed in an invasion by an unspecified alien race
when he was a child, the same race abducting his brother Gray
after Jack lost track of Gray during the attack, leaving Jack
feeling constantly guilty over his inability to save his brother.
Later joining the Time Agency as an adult - becoming a poster
boy known as ‘the Face of Boe’ due to his status
as the first Agency recruit from that part of the universe -,
Jack went on to carry out varying missions. The precise details
of his time with the agency are unknown, but it is known that
he and a friend were once captured by a ruthless enemy race
who tortured Jack’s friend because they recognised that
he was the weaker of the two, while another mission resulted
in Jack spending five years trapped in a two-week time loop
with fellow Time Agent John Hart - during which Hart was apparently
the ‘wife’ of the couple -, and it was later implied
that he may have had some kind of encounter with the Cybermen ("Cyberwoman").
Jack eventually left the agency after
he learned that they had erased two years of his memory for
unknown reasons, leaving
him increasingly comfortable about what he might have done in
those two years. Using a timeship he acquired under unspecified
circumstances, Jack became a time-travelling conman, setting
up a situation where he pretended to be willing to sell other
time travellers a valuable alien artefact that was in reality
worthless, fully aware that an event in the future would destroy
the artefact after he received some of his money but before
anyone learned what it really was while also taking care that
nobody would be hurt by the artefact’s presence. Eventually
arriving on Earth in 1941, Jack assumed the identity of the
recently -deceased American officer Captain Jack Harkness, arranging
for a Chula medical frigate to crash in a location where he
knew it would be destroyed by a bomb in a few days with the
intention of claiming that it was really a Chula warship. However,
the plan went wrong from the beginning; not only did the Ninth
Doctor and Rose Tyler respond to Jack’s signal before
anyone else could, but the Chula ship released medical nanites
that began to mutate everyone they infected into zombie-like
superhumans due to their lack of experience with human physiology.
Inspired by The Doctor’s refusal to admit defeat and his
resolve to save those infected by the nanites, Jack helped to
dispose of the bomb that would have destroyed the Chula ship
to give The Doctor time to reprogram the nanites, Rose subsequently
inviting Jack to join her and The Doctor in the TARDIS ("The
Empty Child/The Doctor Dances").
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| The Empty Child/The Doctor
Dances |
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Although his time in the
TARDIS was only brief, Jack quickly developed a good relationship
with his fellow travellers, The
Doctor and Rose trusting him despite his background, Jack helping
them deal with such varied problems as tracking down a renegade
Slitheen ("Boom
Town"). Although his attitude as an
incorrigible flirt remained, Jack also demonstrated a strong
compassion remaining on twenty-first century Earth for a month
to help educate a caveman who’d been trapped in that time
on how to make a life for himself while The Doctor and Rose
halted the time experiments that had caused his predicament
("Only
Human"). Jack was eventually parted from The
Doctor and Rose during the Dalek assault on Satellite Five in
200 100, Jack being exterminated while buying The Doctor time
to construct a weapon that could defeat the Daleks… only
to wake up a few moments later, just in time to witness the
TARDIS depart the satellite without him, leaving him the only
living being on the satellite ("Bad
Wolf/The Parting of the Ways"). Forced to use his vortex manipulator to try
and escape back to the Cardiff rift - a rift in time and space
that The Doctor could use as fuel for the TARDIS - in the twentieth
century to reunite with The Doctor, Jack arrived in 1869 when
his manipulator overshot, leaving him confused about what had
happened to him and resigned to wait on Earth until he encountered
a Doctor who coincided with his timeline to learn what had happened
to him.
As Jack later learned - after he woke up after
being stabbed in a bar fight on Ellis Island for unspecified
reasons
-, his
resurrection was due to Rose Tyler absorbing the energy of the
Time Vortex to try and defeat the Daleks. Unused to the power
she was wielding at the time, Rose had attempted to bring Jack
back to life, but due to her inexperience she not only restored
Jack, but she brought him back forever, transforming him into
a ‘fact’ of the timeline, prompting The Doctor to
depart without him as his Time Lord senses regard Jack as automatically ‘wrong’.
To date, Jack’s immortality has only been shown to be
limited regarding how rapidly he comes back from various forms
of death, even if nothing used against him so far has managed
to kill him permanently; a bullet to the head merely put Jack
down for a few seconds, he required at least a few minutes to
heal after being shot multiple times or thrown off the roof
of a multi-storey office building, it took the better part of
a day for his body to restore itself after he was killed when
a bomb was planted in his stomach - although the fact that he
regrew himself from an arm, a shoulder, and part of his head
is unquestionably impressive -, and he remained dead for several
days after sacrificing himself to ‘overfeed’ a life-draining
demon called Abaddon.
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| Boom Town |
|
By around 1899, Jack, having spent the
last few years simply hanging around Cardiff waiting to meet
The Doctor
due to his knowledge that the Time Lord would have to refuel
at the Cardiff Rift, was forcibly recruited by the ruthless
Torchwood, an organisation formed by Queen Victorian to deal
with alien incursions and preserve the ‘glory’ of
the British Empire. Despite his distaste for their ruthless
methods of dealing with aliens - shooting any alien they discovered
simply because they were alien rather than waiting to find out
if they legitimately posed a threat -, Jack decided to remain
with them after he learned from a conversation with a mysterious
psychic little girl that it would take a century before he met
The Doctor again, hoping that he could do some good during his
time with the organisation. During the next century, Jack spent
most of his time doing Torchwood’s ‘dirty work’,
including being involved in a deal in 1965 where he gave twelve
children to an alien race known only as ‘the 456’ (After
the frequency they used to communicate) in exchange for a vaccine
for a deadly virus. On another occasion, he spent some time
in New York tracking agents of the Trickster’s Brigade
in 1927, forming a relationship with Italian immigrant Angelo
Colasanto, but the relationship fell apart when Angelo’s
discovery of Jack’s immortality caused him to denounce
Jack as the Devil in a fit of panic, resulting in Jack being
repeatedly murdered by the neighbourhood residents and apparently
sold to three men before Angelo had a change of heart and released
him ("Immortal Sins"). However, he also formed various
good relationships with others during his time in the organisation;
he even married fellow Torchwood agent Lucia Moretti in 1975,
the two having a daughter who they named Melissa, although the
marriage eventually ended with Melissa’s name being changed
to Alice Sangester, believed to be the result of her mother’s
fear of Jack’s immortality (Which Alice had not inherited).
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Captain Jack Harkness
(2005, 2007 - 2008 & 2010) |
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| John Barrowman |
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John
Barrowman was born in Glasgow, Scotland in March
1967. He moved to the USA, with his family, when
he was eight. He first lived in Aurora, Illinois
before his family moved to Joliet. He attended Joliet
West High School and for a short while he attended
the DePaul University.
He returned to the UK for a Shakespeare semester with the United States International
University of San Diego, but left to star in the musical production of Anything
Goes, with Elaine Page. He later went on to star London West End productions
of Miss Saigon, Matador, Rope, and Hair.
He also played the Beast in the London Musical of the Disney animated film Beauty
and the Beast at the Dominion Theatre in 1991.
His first film appearance was in 1987 as an extra in The Untouchables.
In 1993 he presented the children's television show Live & Kicking.
Other television appearances include 21 episodes of Central Park West (1995-1996)
and 14 episodes of Titans (2000-2001). In 2006, after appearing in 3
stories of Season
27 (New Series 1) of Doctor Who as Captain Jack Harkness, he became
the lead role, playing the same character, in the spin-off series Torchwood.
Also during his time on Doctor Who he acted as a judge in the Andrew
Lloyd Webber audition shows How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? (2006), Any
Dream Will Do (2007) and I'd Do Anything (2008) as well as hosting
the quiz show The Kids Are All Right in 2008.
Since leaving Doctor Who he has appeared in 5 episodes of Desperate Housewives in
2010 as well as appearing and performing in various shows. |
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| Bad Wolf/The Parting of the
Ways |
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By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Jack
was left in control of Torchwood Three - the Cardiff branch
of the organisation that had been established to monitor the
Rift - when the organisation’s leader killed himself and
his team on New Year’s Eve 1999 after witnessing a horrific
vision of the future due to exposure to an alien pendant, believing
that they were ill-prepared for the challenges the future would
present. Now with superior authority, Jack recruited his own
small team to protect Earth his way, rescuing ex-UNIT scientist
Toshiko Sato from prison after she was blackmailed into developing
a sonic modulator device to sell to Russian terrorists to save
her mother - Jack noting that she had successfully completed
the device despite the fact that the plans she’d acquired
were wrong and couldn’t actually create a working modulator
- to serve as his technical expert, later recruiting Doctor
Owen Harper as the team medic after his fiancé was killed
by an alien parasite in her brain ("Fragments"). Following
the destruction of Torchwood One in London during the Dalek/Cyberman
war in the Battle of Canary Wharf ("Army
of Ghosts/Doomsday"),
Jack vowed to rebuild Torchwood in The Doctor’s honour,
allowing ex-Torchwood One employee Ianto Jones to join his team
only after Ianto helped him capture a pterodactyl that had been
trapped in the present ("Fragments").
Although Jack’s attitude towards life at
this point was originally based simply on the premise of keeping
alien activity secret, following policewoman Gwen Cooper’s
discovery of Torchwood’s existence, as well as the subsequent
suicide of Jack’s former second-in-command Suzie Costello
after she was discovered committing murders to try and perfect
her control of an alien gauntlet that could bring people back
from the dead for a couple of minutes, he was convinced to start
using the technology salvaged from Torchwood to help the innocent
beyond simply containing aliens ("Everything Changes").
During this time, despite such problems as the discovery that
Ianto had joined Torchwood Three in order to gain access to
technology to help his girlfriend Lisa after she was partially
converted into a Cyberman ("Cyberwoman"), and Suzie’s
temporary resurrection when they discovered a man committing
murders due to his previous association with her ("They
Keep Killing Suzie"), Jack generally displayed a good bond
with his team, although Gwen was the only one aware of his immortality
(And she only learned of it due to her witnessing him come back
after Suzie shot him), he and Tosh sharing a particular bonding
moment when they travelled back in time to 1941 due to a Rift
anomaly and encountered the original Captain Jack Harkness before
his death ("Captain Jack Harkness").
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| Utopia |
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Following a dramatic confrontation with the demonic
Abaddon - apparently connected to The Beast ("The
Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit") in some manner -, Jack was finally
reunited with The Doctor, now in his tenth incarnation and travelling
with Martha Jones, although they ended up on the planet Malcassaro
near the end of the universe due to the TARDIS’s attempts
to shake Jack off due to his status as a ‘fact’ ("Utopia").
Although the three were able to help the humans on Malcassaro
depart the planet, they were forced into a new, more desperate
battle when Martha accidentally ‘awoke’ The Doctor’s
old enemy The Master - disguised as the kindly Professor Yana
using a Chameleon Arch -, The Master returning to Earth and
regenerating into a new, younger body that he used to become
elected Prime Minister under the pseudonym Harold Saxon. Although
The Master was able to conquer Earth, keeping The Doctor and
Jack prisoner for the following year while Martha travelled
the world, Martha and The Doctor were eventually able to undo
The Master’s reign, Jack deciding to remain with his team
at Torchwood as he concluded that he belonged with them ("The
Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords").
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| The Stolen Earth/Journey's
End |
|
Reunited with his team, Jack resumed his
defence of Earth, even beginning a more official relationship
with teammate
Ianto Jones, while simultaneously facing more personal problems
in the form of his former Time Agency partner Captain John Hart
("Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang"), as well as a confrontation
with Bilis Manger, Abaddon’s ‘servant’, who
revealed that Abaddon had actually been required to defeat an
alien intelligence known as the ‘Dark’, although
Jack still defended his decision to defeat Abaddon and stop
the loss of innocent life while helping Manger stop the Dark
in Abaddon’s absence ("The Twilight Streets").
A particularly difficult adventure during this time featured
a reunion with Martha Jones that resulted in the death and resurrection
of Owen Harper while investigating the medical facility known
as the Pharm ("Reset"), resulting in Owen coming back
to life in a ‘living dead’ state, capable of independent
motion and thought while being physically deceased and unable
to heal from injuries such as a broken hand ("Dead Man
Walking"). Although the team attempted to cope with Owen’s
new state during such problems as a raid on the house of a man
who collected alien artefacts ("A Day in the Death")
or Gwen being impregnated by an alien flesh-eater on her wedding
day ("Something Borrowed"), the return of Captain
John Hart changed everything when he revealed that he had discovered
Gray, Jack only learning afterwards that Gray’s lifetime
as a prisoner of the aliens who captured him had turned him
into a complete psychopath. Determined to have revenge for his
brother ‘abandoning’ him, Gray forced John Hart
to take Jack back to 27 A.D. and bury him in the area that would
become Cardiff, subsequently returning to the present and killing
Tosh while triggering an overload in a nuclear power plant while
Owen was trying to shut it down, the radiation released by the
plant apparently causing Owen’s body to dissolve. Fortunately,
Jack was discovered by Torchwood in 1900 and frozen in cryogenic
stasis to emerge in the present and preserve the timeline, chloroforming
Gray in the hope of helping him in the future ("Exit Wounds").
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| The End of Time |
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Despite their more limited resources, Jack, Gwen
and Ianto continued their work in Cardiff; not only did they
play a vital role in thwarting the Daleks’ theft of Earth
when The Doctor used the Rift to ‘tow’ Earth back
to its proper place in the universe ("The Stolen Earth/Journey's
End"), but they also confronted such other threats
as the return of the Torchwood Assessor - a woman kept in cryogenic
suspension unless Torchwood activities risked endangering innocents
on a large scale - ("Risk Assessment") or a race of
aliens who fed on temporal paradoxes caused by Jack’s
impact on the residents of a house he had lived in during the
early 1900s, Jack defeating this threat by using the temporal
rifts they were creating to delay the house’s original
construction so that he bought a different house, thus causing
the aliens to feed on themselves as the reason for their interest
in the house ceased to apply and they became the strongest paradox
in the area ("The House That Jack Built"). However,
the team faced their greatest threat when the 456 returned to
Earth, now demanding ten percent of Earth’s children or
they would destroy the world, seeking to use the children as
drugs by absorbing certain chemicals from their bodies. Despite
Jack’s best efforts to stand against the 456 even after
the government tried to kill him to conceal their role in the
456’s presence, the subsequent confrontation not only
resulted in the death of Ianto Jones when the 456 poisoned the
atmosphere of the building he and Jack were in when Jack attempted
to force the 456 to stand down, but also resulted in the death
of Jack’s grandson, Steven Carter, when Jack was forced
to use Steven to transmit a signal on a frequency that would
damage the 456. Although his plan saved the children of Earth,
Jack departed Earth a few months later after a last meeting
with surviving teammate Gwen Cooper, unable to cope with his
grief ("Children of Earth"). While absent from Earth,
Jack was briefly seen drinking in an alien bar when the on-the-verge-of-regenerating
Tenth
Doctor left Jack a note pointing him towards a potential
partner, Jack giving The Doctor a last salute before The Doctor
left ("The End of Time").
Jack eventually returned to Earth following the
mysterious ‘Miracle Day’, when every human being
on Earth suddenly became incapable of dying - although they
could still do everything else, such as getting old, sick, or
mortally injured, even if they wouldn’t actually die of
their conditions - at the same moment as an e-mail was sent
to every intelligence agency on the planet with the word ‘Torchwood’ as
its only content. While investigating the e-mail, Jack sustained
a wound to his arm that didn’t heal despite his usual
enhanced healing, prompting him to speculate that whatever had
made humanity unable to die had also rendered him mortal. Reuniting
with Gwen and Rhys as their house was attacked, Jack and Gwen
were extradited to the United States by CIA agent Rex Matheson
to better investigate ‘Miracle Day’ while Rhys remained
in the UK with his and Gwen’s daughter Anwen, quickly
learning that they were dealing with a conspiracy. While investigating
the Miracle, Jack’s new team - consisting of Jack, Gwen,
Rex, and Rex’s assistant Esther - discovered evidence
that suggested that PhiCorp, a major pharmaceutical company,
had been preparing for Miracle Day by stocking up painkillers
and other drugs in a dimensionally transcendental warehouse,
followed by the discovery that ‘concentration camps’ were
being established for patients to cope with the NHS overflow,
with patients suffering from essentially ‘fatal’ injuries
- such as serious brain damage or comas - being incinerated
to stop them draining resources. Shortly after the camps were
created, Jack learned that Angelo Colisanto had been involved
in the original plans for the Miracle as the three families
who had ‘bought’ Jack used his blood and ‘the
Blessing’, a rift going through the planet linked to the
human race’s morphic field, to ‘disperse’ immortality
across the planet by introducing Jack’s blood to the Blessing,
causing the morphic field to change the human race in response
to the perceived ‘attack’ from Jack’s immortal
blood. The Three Families intended to use immortality to force
the world’s economy to collapse and rebuild a new society
under their control, cutting out anything that they perceived
didn’t work, sending the e-mail to draw Jack back to eliminate
him before he could introduce his mortal blood to the Blessing
and restore mortality to the planet. With Rex having been given
a complete transfusion of Jack’s blood to keep their supply
safe, he and Jack introduced their blood to the Blessing at
each end by allowing Gwen to shoot Jack in the heart while Rex
opened a wound he had sustained on Miracle Day, the blood causing
the Blessing to reset humanity to its mortal state, restoring
Jack’s immortality in the process (Although Rex apparently
also became immortal due to Jack’s blood being in his
system at the time).
Although Jack’s future is uncertain - particularly
now that Rex also appears to be immortal -, a comment he made
about his nickname ‘The Face of Boe’, from his time
as a poster-boy for the Time Agency after becoming the first person
in the Boeshine Peninsula to join them, has prompted speculation
that he will become the enigmatic ‘Face of Boe’ by
the year five billion, a mysterious giant head who encountered
the Ninth and Tenth Doctors in "The
End of the World" and "New
Earth". If the Face and Jack are the same person, Jack
will finally die in "Gridlock" in
the equivalent of the year 5 000 000 000 043, after helping the
Tenth Doctor save the last
of the human race by sacrificing his energy to release the survivors
from a contained motorway that he had sealed them in to protect
them from a lethal airborne virus, his last words being to inform
The Doctor that he was not the last of his kind (Foreshadowing
The Doctor’s later encounter with The Master ("Utopia")) |
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