Torchwood

About the series

Contains story spoilers.

Torchwood brings the strange machinery of Doctor Who into a city where people still have jobs, partners and police reports to finish. The original television series began in 2006, with Russell T Davies as its creator. Its Cardiff team works beneath the city, investigating alien creatures and objects that arrive through a rift in time and space. Captain Jack Harkness leads the operation, with doctor Owen Harper, technical specialist Toshiko Sato and administrator Ianto Jones working beside him. Police officer Gwen Cooper provides the way into their hidden workplace. She has a life with her partner Rhys that this new job cannot easily accommodate: extraordinary discoveries need to be kept secret, including from someone who expects to know why she is absent or upset. These selected first-season stories follow what happens when that secrecy meets frightened people, damaged relationships and technology the team cannot fully control.

Gwen first notices Torchwood when she sees its members question a corpse brought briefly back to life. Following the organisation leads her to an underground base, but finding it does not mean she is allowed to remember it. Jack gives her an amnesia drug, and the team removes computer records that might let her retrace the encounter. A murder investigation breaks through that attempted erasure. The distinctive knife involved connects the deaths to Suzie Costello, a Torchwood member who has been testing the resurrection glove. Suzie has killed people to supply her experiments, hoping to push its effects beyond a few desperate seconds. When Gwen confronts her, Jack is shot and survives an injury that should have killed him. Suzie's death leaves a vacancy in the team. Gwen joins an organisation whose first great revelation is also a betrayal from within it, while Jack admits that he cannot die.

An apparently small discovery becomes another investigation into what people can do with knowledge they should never possess. In Ghost Machine, Gwen finds a device while pursuing a man called Bernie. It lets the holder experience moments that happened in the surrounding space, carrying the emotions of the people involved along with the images. Owen encounters the fear of a woman murdered decades earlier and becomes determined to confront her killer, Ed Morgan. Bernie has also seen the crime and used that knowledge to blackmail Morgan. A second part of the device reveals a possible future, making Bernie believe he will be killed and showing Gwen a bloodied knife. Those fragments encourage the team to anticipate a particular ending, but the confrontation takes another course. Morgan drives himself onto the knife Gwen is holding. Bernie survives, Gwen is left shaken, and an object that looked like a window into time has helped bring an old crime into a new death.

Ianto's hidden life turns the team's own headquarters into a threat in Cyberwoman. He has kept his girlfriend Lisa beneath the base after rescuing her from the destruction of Torchwood's London operation. She was caught midway through conversion into a Cyberman, and Ianto believes she can still be saved. Bringing in a doctor to help instead allows her attempts to continue the conversion process to become deadly. Lisa kills the doctor and attacks the team, while Ianto's loyalty makes him resist Jack's orders to stop her. Even an attack by the pterodactyl kept in the base does not end the danger. Lisa transfers her brain into the body of a pizza delivery worker and presents that new appearance as proof that she can be human again. The team kills her, leaving Ianto alive with his loss. His rescue effort has made strangers expendable and forced his colleagues to confront how little they knew about someone working beside them.

Small Worlds offers a danger that cannot be solved by treating every unfamiliar being as another specimen. A girl named Jasmine is being protected by creatures described as fairies, whose reach extends across time. People who threaten her die, including her mother’s partner Roy. Jack's old acquaintance Estelle is killed as the disturbances intensify, and the investigation becomes a question of what the creatures want rather than how to catch them. Jasmine is their chosen child, and she wants to leave with them. Jack understands that refusing the demand could expose many more people to their violence. He allows her to go despite Gwen's objection. The decision averts the threatened catastrophe, but Jasmine's mother loses her daughter after already losing Roy. The team reaches an outcome it can live with operationally while leaving a household devastated; Gwen cannot make that cost disappear simply because Jack has judged the alternative worse.

Countrycide removes even the reassurance that an alien explanation will eventually emerge. Investigating disappearances in the countryside, the team finds a mutilated body and loses its vehicles. Tosh and Ianto are captured, discovering belongings from earlier victims while their captors discuss people as food. Gwen is accidentally shot by a frightened young man, leaving Owen to treat her as the others try to work out who can be trusted. The apparent help of a local policeman is another trap: he belongs to the same community responsible for the killings. Jack finally breaks into the confrontation with a tractor and rescues his colleagues. The perpetrators are human villagers continuing a recurring practice of taking travellers for meat. Gwen presses one of them for an explanation and finds pleasure rather than an extraordinary cause. Afterwards, the inability to tell Rhys what she has experienced draws her toward Owen. The team's shared secret has become a refuge that can also damage the life she meant to preserve.