Torchwood / WHO

Torchwood’s origins dated back to an incident involving the Tenth Doctor, Rose Tyler and Queen Victoria in the mid-19th century. At Torchwood House in Scotland, a monastic group called the brethren stored a Werewolf, which menanced the countryside and the Queen. With the monarch’s assistance, the Doctor and Rose killed the werewolf. Victoria knighted them for their service, then banished them from the kingdom, declaring the Doctor in particular a threat to the Empire. Now aware of the reality of alien and supernatural life forms, Victoria ordered an organisation be created to protect the British Empire from the Doctor and threats such as the werewolf. She named the organisation the Torchwood Institute, after the location of the werewolf encounter. . She issued a royal decree establishing the Institute on 31 December 1879.

In 1889, agents Eliza Cooper and Robert Lewis attempted to capture the Tenth Doctor when they realised he had been stranded in London. They came across H. G. Wells, and interrogated him about the Doctor. Wells led them to the TARDIS, which disappeared, apparently leaving the Doctor behind for them to arrest. The man was found not to be the Doctor when he was dissected.

By 1899, Torchwood Three, which was based around a rift in space and time, was founded in Cardiff. In 1899 Cardiff, Jack Harkness was recruited by two of this branch’s operatives, Alice Guppy and Emily Holroyd as a freelance agent of the Institute. His first mission was to apprehend an intelligent blowfish alien; he succeeded, but was greatly disturbed when Guppy summarily executed the creature before his eyes. He continued to work for Torchwood largely against his will, having been told by a fortune-telling tarot card reader that he would have to wait more than a century before seeing the Doctor again. Meanwhile, he needed money to live. He continued to work for the organisation over the decades that followed, although he remained disturbed by the Institute’s callous disregard for alien life forms. At some point, Victoria also established Torchwood India to collect all things alien in the British Raj.
20th century Edit

In 1901, Alice Guppy and Charles Gaskell dug up a future version of Jack Harkness that had been taken from the 21st century and buried in 27 AD Cardiff. He told them to freeze him in the cryo-chambers so he could defeat his brother Gray. Subsequently, Jack’s future self resided in the cryo-chambers even as his younger self continued to work nearby.

In 1906, Eliza Cooper and Robert Lewis used a machine they commissioned Professor Alexander Hugh to build to travel to another planet thousands of years into the future. Neither Cooper nor Lewis returned; the former remained on the planet while the latter was killed. Professor Hugh was returned home by the Tenth Doctor.

Torchwood was planning to use alien weaponry during World War I, but eventually decided against it

In 1918, Torchwood Three investigated ghost sightings in a hospital in Cardiff. As present and future blended, they caught glimpses of 2009. At this time they had a team of five, the leader being a man called Gerald Carter. They already had equipment capable of detecting disturbances in time.

Circa 1919, Harriet Derbyshire, one of the investigators of the hospital sightings and in only her mid-twenties, died in action.

Jack continued to work as an operative throughout the 20th century. In 1909, he was put in charge of a group of soldiers, ( and in the 1920s worked undercover with a travelling circus in pursuit of the Night Travellers, though it would appear the latter mission was unsuccessful as he failed to find them for eighty years.

In 1923, thanks to a Professor Livesy-Smythe, Torchwood found evidence that an alien race called the Pyroviles invaded Earth at Pompeii in 79 AD.

In 1924, Torchwood sent Jack Harkness to India to close down the branch there before the fall of the Raj

In 1927, Jack Harkness was sent on a mission to New York City in order to thwart a plot by the Trickster’s Brigade to infect Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a Brain parasite and change the course of history. With assistance from his lover Angelo Colasanto, Jack succeeded in eliminating the parasite.

By 1953, the London branch was influential enough that London police feared its involvement when investigating the strange occurrences provoked by the activities of an alien entity known as the Wire

In 1965, the government asked five highly ranked officers, including Jack, to give twelve children to the 456 as a gift. It was decided that the children would be taken from a Scottish orphanage as they wouldn’t be missed. Despite eleven children being taken, Clem McDonald managed to escape.

Circa 1984, Torchwood bought the London-based security firm H.C. Clements.

Circa 1997, Torchwood recovered a Jathaa sunglider and reverse-engineered weaponry from it.

At the end of 1999, Jack became the leader of Torchwood Three when one of its members, Alex Hopkins, killed the rest of the team and himself after being driven insane by an alien artefact that revealed the events of the coming years.
21st century Edit

Over the next few years, Jack rebuilt the Torchwood Three team, recruiting Suzie Costello, Toshiko Sato and Owen Harper. Disapproving the ethics of Torchwood One, Jack told Tosh of his plans to reform the organisation to greater benevolence. (TV: Fragments) Tosh was sent to London to investigate the alien lifeform recovered from a crashed spacecraft.

On Christmas 2006, the alien Sycorax invaded Earth, using blood control and a ship built from an asteroid which hovered over London. (TV: The Christmas Invasion) Torchwood had developed a weapon for just such a contingency, based on alien technology scavenged from a Jathaa sun glider. At the same time, in Torchwood Tower, the Institute examined the Void Ship (though they did not call it by that name), an obviously alien artefact they struggled to understand; it was discovered that tapping into the resonance around it produced massive amounts of what seemed to be free energy. A side-effect of these experiments was the appearance of millions of “ghosts” all over the world: humanoid figures that glowed with an unearthly light.

The Tenth Doctor became involved. He explained to the then-administrator Yvonne Hartman that their experiments were weakening the barrier between dimensions, which would eventually lead to drastic problems in their own world, perhaps resulting in the collapse of their dimension. His warnings were not heeded, and the experiments continued. As a result, a massive invasion force from another dimension came through the ‘hole’, allowing the Earth to be conquered by the Cybermen for approximately an hour.

At the same time, the Void Ship opened, revealing a hidden cadre of four Daleks, (TV: Army of Ghosts) members of the secret Cult of Skaro, come to Earth to help restore the Dalek race with a stolen piece of Time Lord technology called the Genesis Ark. They promptly killed a Torchwood technician while stealing his knowledge of current events. They saw the Cybermen as an impediment to their own return and began a war against them, despite an offer from the Cyber-Leader to form an alliance.

The ‘hole’ in space time created by the Void Ship also allowed a resistance army from another dimension to cross over, initially with the intention of stopping the Cybermen. With the advance of the Cybermen and Daleks, a rather sudden and uneasy truce began, with Torchwood militia and the Preachers fighting together against the Daleks and Cybermen. This turned Torchwood Tower into a battleground. The fighting did not end until the Doctor found a way to reverse Torchwood’s power machinery and send the Daleks and Cybermen into the Void. Rose Tyler was recruited by the version of Torchwood that existed on the parallel Earth nicknamed Pete’s World, having been trapped there after the reversal sealed the gap between Normal Space and Pete’s World.
With the vast majority of the Torchwood administration in London killed or ‘upgraded’ by the Cybermen, the organisation was crippled. [additional sources needed] Following the battle, Jack recruited Canary Wharf survivor Ianto Jones ) as well as Gwen Cooper. By the time of Gwen’s recruitment, Torchwood Four had disappeared.

In 2008, a major event occurred with the opening of the Cardiff rift, resulting in massive temporal displacements and the release of the demon Abaddon. Shortly after, team leader Captain Jack Harkness mysteriously disappeared. Subsequently, Saxon sent Torchwood Three on a “wild goose chase” mission away from Great Britain to the Himalayas.

After a few months had passed for Torchwood Three (and about a year for Jack, who had lived through the Year That Never Was) Jack returned to Torchwood Three. Although Gwen had taken charge during his absence, Jack resumed command. (Some months later, the Torchwood Three team was depleted by the deaths of two members and the survivors became involved in helping the Tenth Doctor restore the Earth to its original location after it was moved by the Daleks to the Medusa Cascade.

Perhaps due to their influence during alien invasion, by the late 2000s, Torchwood was beginning to be known by the public at large, although more by name and reputation than by actual purpose.

In 2009, the Institute was left in disarray due to an intentional effort by the British Prime Minister Brian Green to destroy Torchwood to prevent the revelation of previous dealings between the UK and the alien race known as the 456, in which Jack had been involved. The Cardiff Hub was destroyed by a paramilitary unit headed by Agent Johnson, and attempts were made on the lives of the surviving members of Torchwood Three. Files held by the British government indicated that by this point, Torchwood Two had been disbanded.

After the defeat of the 456, Torchwood was left with only two surviving operatives: Jack and Gwen, the latter pregnant. Six months later, Jack, having spent some time travelling the world and beyond on his own, made the decision to leave Earth, leaving Gwen — now heavily pregnant — as the last known Torchwood operative. It was at this point that the Institute disbanded.
In 2011, during the events of Miracle Day, Jack returned to Earth, and while the Institute was no more, he and Gwen, along with several new members, formed a new team that continued to use the name “Torchwood”. At one point during the crisis the team established a relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency (for whom newly recruited members Rex Matheson and Esther Drummond were agents) though Jack resisted the CIA’s efforts take control. Shortly after the resolution of the crisis, which resulted in Esther’s death, Jack left Earth and Rex returned to work as CIA agent, and Torchwood once again ceased to exist.

By 2012, the name (if not necessarily the function) of Torchwood was widely known to the public, to the extent that the Battle of Canary Wharf had come to be known as the “Battle of Torchwood”.

It would appear that Torchwood Institute reformed or was reestablished at some point, because by the 2060s, Torchwood Three was capable of controlling the Rift.

The Institute still exists , as the Torchwood Archive, today…..