This is something of a hard episode to get a grip on. At its heart, it's simply recounting how each member of Torchwood bar Gwen (who we already know about) joined Torchwood Three in Cardiff. As such there's not really any sort of storyline or a thread to follow all the way through the episode -- instead, "Fragments" relies on the audience being interested in the main characters and wanting to learn more about their back stories.
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| Jack is interrogated by Torchwood Cardiff. ("Fragments") ©BBC |
Fortunately, each of the four storylines are relatively interesting; Jack's is probably the best, simply because he's the most intriguing character on the show, and there's still a lot we don't know about him. It's also neat to see a younger Jack, one who's ended up in post-1879 Cardiff and is waiting for the Doctor to show up. This is what brings him to Torchwood's attention -- remember, they've been told that the Doctor is Public Enemy No. 1, and Jack's apparently been going around saying things like, "The Doctor, he'll be able to fix me." Torchwood at this point is a distinctly nasty bunch (well, pair) -- they seem to be taking genuine pleasure in torturing (and repeatedly killing) Jack, and when Jack helps them bring in an alien, they shoot that alien (a "kid", according to Jack) in the head in front of Jack. The only reason he stays with them, it seems, is because he won't see the Doctor for over a hundred years, and he needs something to do. (And he hopes to change Torchwood Three for the better from the inside, it seems -- this isn't explicit, but it seems like a reasonable bet.) It seems he's considered something of a troublemaker for most of this time (judging from the various files we see bits of), and it isn't until New Year's Eve 1999 that he gains control -- after the leader kills everyone else to save them from the coming "storm".
The other stories aren't quite as intriguing, just because they don't tie into the history of Torchwood (and
Doctor Who) quite as much, but they're still neat to see. Tosh was stuck in a UNIT prison without hope of appeal or release because she built a sonic modulator for some villains so that they would release her mother when Jack got her out in exchange for working for him (and boy, UNIT sure became a lot more intimidating and brutal since Jon Pertwee's time -- it's clearly meant to parallel the War on Terror and prisons like Guantanamo Bay, but still); Ianto begged his way into the organization after the Battle of Canary Wharf and the destruction of Torchwood London; and Owen was a doctor whose fiancée had a brain tumor that turned out to be an alien lifeform -- his efforts to find out what happened, and what happened afterwards despite the Torchwood cover-up, sufficiently impressed Jack to recruit him as Torchwood's medic. They're all decent stories, and they work better because we've come to care for these characters -- but one does wonder what someone whose first episode was "Fragments" would make of this.
Still, it's nice to get some of the team's past details filled in before the series 2 finale, and even if there isn't a thread linking all these together (beyond "everyone's (Torchwood) life flashes before their eyes"), what we get gives us some nice insights into the characters. That's enough to sustain the episode, and it seems we actually get a cliffhanger -- Captain John Hart is back to cause trouble for Jack, and he's brought Jack's brother Gray along with him...