TORCHWOOD
Before he got approached to ressurect Doctor Who in 2005, Russell T Davis had another idea for the scifi genre. It involved aliens, it involved action, it involved sex. He was looking to write what he felt was a scifi series set in "the real world". And then the Beeb signed him up to revive their legendary flagship. Whether RTD originally planned to set his idea in the Doctor Who universe or not is unknown but that's eventually what happened, starting with references to the organisation before finally, it branched off into its own show. After the kids had gone to bed would be the Doctor Who universe seen from it's darkest angle.
One familiar face that would be turning up was Captain Jack Harkness. We'd last seen him as a short lived companion to the Doctor, fighting off the Daleks on a space station in the far future. So far though, only glimpses of the chilled out 51st century conman that Doctor Who fans had known. The bisexual American is now immortal, unaging and far from home in every way possible, stranded for almost a century while hoping to one day track down the Doctor for answers.
In the meantime, he's managed to take command of Torchwood Three, the organisation's Cardiff base. It exists primarily to watch over a timerift under the Welsh capital that has often been exploited to allow easy travel between planets, time periods and alternate dimensions. The organisation as a whole is accountable to no one and it's larger structure is still a mystery though it's known to have at least had it's main base in Canary Wharf, London(Torchwood One) before Cybermen from an alternate reality overran it. Torchwood Two is in Scotland. Torchwood Four is missing. The organisation's name is known to every authority on Earth, its purpose to no one.
And so when Cardiff WPC Gwen Cooper finds the Torchwood Three team ressurecting dead people for questioning, she was curious...and that curiousity led to her becoming Torchwood's newest recruit, Jack believing that unlike the rest of the team, she could use her outside life with boyfriend Rhys to ground her and help add a degree of morality to the team's decisions. That's turned out to be easier said than done, Jack and Gwen's ideas of morality frequently crashing while Rhys's patience with his girlfriend's devotion to her new job wears thin, forcing the former police officer emotionally out of her depth.
Matters aren't helped by Owen Harper. He's the team's 2IC and medical expert though how he earned his authority I don't have a clue, given that he's the definative dodgy geezer. He'll have sex with any woman he finds(including Gwen), no matter what methods he has to use(including alien aphrodisiacs) and is unused to having any emotional connections at all. He is known to act rashly and his disregard for the bigger picture has left him only hanging on to his place on the team by the skin of his teeth.
The main tech-head on the team is Toshiko Sato, a Japanese-born woman whose mother died some time ago. She's a former pathologist who's been with Torchwood three years. A generally private person, the one individual who she's ever been seen to seriously open up to was a woman who called herself Mary. Tosh went on to go as far as having a lesbian relationship with her...only for 'Mary' to turn out to be an alien kidnapper and murderer. She's also had a unique view of Jack's past due to an unexpected trip to 1941.
Finally, there's Ianto Jones, bisexual, Welsh as you can get and officially the main guy to tidy up the team's messes while giving Jack the odd bit of gay action. However even he turned out to have his secrets, namely some history from when he used to work at Torchwood One. He'd fallen in love with a girl called Lisa only for her to get partially 'upgraded' during the Cyberman attack. Ianto desperately tried to reverse the process in secret but his failiure left the base under threat from within, forcing Ianto to kill the woman he loved
So, there you have it, the fate of 21st century humanity(or at least Cardiff) is in the hands of a bunch of what can best be described as screwballs. Led by a man that his teammates know hardly anything about...only that "Captain Jack Harkness"does not exist and only Tosh knows that the ex-conman took that alias from a KIA World War II pilot. And they're currently left with another mystery - the dissapearance of their leader. Unknown to them, what can only be the Doctor's TARDIS was heard just before he left.
How the team handle the situation remains to be seen.
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