Rupert Howarth, Ianto's mentor from Torchwood One, resurfaces in Cardiff claiming to have faked his death; apparently, he'd been on the verge of finding a cure to all viral diseases, but the pharmaceutical industry felt threatened by his work and tried to kill him. Toshiko picks up a police report about a burning warehouse, and Jack, Owen and Gwen investigate to find that something has killed several homeless squatters in the same way that Howarth supposedly died. The creature kills two policemen and attacks the Torchwood operatives, taking form from their greatest fears and demanding that they turn over Howarth, "the creator"; this warehouse is where Howarth had been living rough after fleeing from Torchwood One. Jack and his operatives return to the Hub, where Howarth admits the truth: he was in fact experimenting upon the homeless with alien DNA to create a super-soldier capable of creating a primal fear response in its enemies, and his most successful experiment, a former crack addict, broke free and went on a murderous rampage. Before faking his death and going into hiding, Howarth programmed the Torchwood computer network to search for drugs that would suppress the Chimera's alien DNA; he's resurfaced and contacted Ianto because the program has had time to finish its work. Ianto is disgusted by Howarth's confession, and Howarth admits that he's ashamed of what he did. The Chimera attacks the Hub, having followed Jack's team back from the warehouse, and the team try to contain it while Owen digs up the results of Howarth's search program and concocts an antidote to Howarth's work. The Chimera overpowers the rest of the team and takes on a cybernetic appearance to attack Ianto, but before it can kill him, Howarth attacks it and injects it with Owen's antidote. The Chimera snaps Howarth's neck as it dies, but Jack assures the stricken Ianto that Howarth was inspired to make amends for his actions because of his friendship with Ianto.

The crew of a cargo ship panic and throw their weird alien cargo overboard when it begins whispering to them. Torchwood clears up the jetsam from the nearby beach, but one of the artefacts -- one of a pair of giant alien motorcyles -- has already been stolen by a biker gang. Gwen and Jack trace the cycle to the hideout of the Brimstone Skulls, but the Skulls' leader, Drew Blayney, has already boarded the cycle -- which has taken over his mind and slaughtered the rest of his gang. Back at the Hub, Tosh accidentally activates the second cycle while studying it, and becomes entangled in the circuitry and forced to pilot it. She manages, perhaps instinctively, to download the cycle's specs into the Hub's computers, and Owen and Ianto thus learn that the cycles are used as weapons in ritual duels to the death by an alien species. The pilots are pumped full of drugs to enhance their response times, and since Drew and Tosh are human, they've become overwhelmed and are running out of control. Drew is wreaking havoc in the city, but Jack and Gwen lure him to a building site and temporarily trap the cycle in the excavated foundations. Ianto and Owen manage to contact Tosh, who is suffering nightmarish visions about monsters from Japanese mythology, and remind her of a more calming fable: the story of the tea master whose acceptance of death so frightened a bullying ronin that the ronin surrendered without fighting. Tosh gains control of herself, pilots her cycle to the building site and drives straight at Drew while setting her reactor to overload. The terrified Drew begs her not to kill him, and his cycle interprets this as a surrender and shuts itself down. The cycles release Drew and Tosh, but the furious Drew attacks Tosh with a knife, and his cycle shoots and incinerates him for transgressing the surrender protocols. Furious, Tosh orders both the cycles to shut themselves down and erase their core programming.

Alien warriors emerge from multiple Rift openings across the city and attack innocent bystanders. The Torchwood operatives split up: Jack heads to the university, Gwen and Ianto to the museum, and Tosh and Owen to the shopping district. They manage to deal with the first wave of attackers, and Jack takes one of the aliens captive, but it reveals that these attacks were a distraction; the aliens have declared war on Torchwood, because they believe the operatives intend to destroy them with the Rift Manipulator. Jack tries to take his captive back to the Hub for questioning, but it escapes from its bonds on the way back and attacks him; however, Tosh sees Jack's predicament and shoots out the SUV's tires, causing it to crash. Both Jack and the alien captive are killed, but as Tosh had assumed, Jack returns to life after the crash. Tosh is the first one back to the Hub -- and is thus the only one inside when it is removed from space and time. She manages to use the Rift Manipulator to prevent the Hub from being taken completely, and ends up in a black void with only the Torchwood pterodactyl and the Manipulator for company. A bald, robed alien who introduces himself as Vox claims that this void is a gap between moments of Time, which he had been using as sanctuary to hide from the empire of the Sanctified and their footsoldiers, the Harrowkind -- the same aliens that have just declared war on Torchwood. Since his bolthole has now been compromised, Vox offers up his personal rift manipulator so Tosh can pilot the larger version back to Cardiff. Meanwhile, Jack, Ianto, Owen and Gwen are trying to question a captive Harrowkind, but they are attacked by one of the scarecrow-like Sanctified before they can learn anything conclusive. The Sanctified is impervious to bullets, but just as it's about to kill Gwen, the Hub materialises back in place, cutting the Sanctified in half. Back inside the Hub, Vox identifies himself as an enemy of the Sanctified, who apparently regard Torchwood as a threat to their galactic empire. Vox's rift manipulator was burned out while transporting the larger version back to Cardiff, and since he's now stuck here, he offers to help the team when the Sanctified inevitably return...

Gwen and Owen investigate a localised Rift disturbance at Cardiff Castle, and find a giant baby playing with temporally displaced figures in the castle's great hall. Vox, who claims to have let himself out of his holding cell because he was bored, identifies it as a Zansi child; the Zansi, who are now subjects of the Sanctified Empire, are able to weave Rift energy into cradles for their newborns. Cardiff Castle has become the lost baby's playroom, and its toys are illusions generated from the history of the castle. Jack arranges for the Castle to be shut down for the six weeks that it will take the baby to mature, and Gwen volunteers herself and Rhys as babysitters. Rhys is at first reluctant to help, but soon comes to enjoy taking care of the baby as it rapidly matures into a giant boy. At the end of the six-week period, it reverts to its true alien form and departs, but not before speaking its first words to Gwen and Rhys: "Thank you." This incident ended well, but Vox warns Torchwood that it's a symptom of worse to come; the Sanctified are losing control of the Rift, and they blame Torchwood for this. The only way to prevent the Sanctified from attacking again is to let Vox help them to close the Rift permanently.

Tosh and Gwen locate a Rift energy spike at Winston's department store, and arrive just as a herd of dinosaurs crashes out of the building and stampedes off down the street. Nearby, a a baryonyx attacks a bus and a group of pub crawlers before Jack and Owen's eyes. Ianto arrives with a harpoon gun and tangles up the baryonyx's legs, causing it to trip and knock itself out. While Owen and Ianto secure the baryonyx, Jack, Tosh, and Gwen trace the other dinosaurs to the open, grassy area of the Millennium Stadium. Theorising that the dinosaurs will panic and retreat back through the Rift if they catch scent of a predator, the Torchwood operatives tie the baryonyx to the bus and drive it past the stadium. It proves surprisingly easy to herd the herbivores out of the stadium and back to the department store, as if they're used to being shepherded -- and as Ianto abandons the bus, he catches sight of a bar code branded on the baryonyx's skin. Jack realises that this event was part of a bigger picture, but nobody yet knows that Vox, who claimed earlier that he wanted to stay at the Hub to study Earth culture, has in fact secretly been observing the team's activities.

While chasing a Weevil through a dark alley, Jack and Gwen fall through the Rift into a forest circa 600 AD. The local tribesmen attack Jack and Gwen, trying to drive them away from an alien spaceship that has crashed nearby; Jack and Gwen overpower their attackers, but Gwen then picks up a sword and turns on Jack, also trying to force him away from the ship. Jack overpowers her and helps her to shake off the alien influence. Back in the 21st century, Vox drains the Rift energy into a device similar to those used by the Sanctified, but this leaves Jack and Gwen trapped on the other side of the Rift. Ianto reminds Vox that they all need to work together if they're going to win this war, and Vox concedes the point and allows Owen and Tosh to reopen the Rift using the energy stored in his device. Claiming that he has prior experience with this kind of thing, Vox steps through the Rift and joins Jack and Gwen inside the alien ship; its sole crewmember is an empathy pilot, a brain-like alien in a globe of life-support fluid. The alien was simply acting out of fear; its ship crashed, and it was trying to drive away beings that it perceived as threats. Vox sends Jack and Gwen back through the Rift, and follows them a moment later, telling them that he helped the pilot on its way. He does not tell them that he did so by smashing its container and killing it.

1918: Torchwood operative Gerald Carter is captured while spying on a group of cultists clustered around a stone circle, waiting for aliens called the Children of the Stones to take them away to a better life. Harriet Derbyshire arrives to rescue him in a tank that she "borrowed" from a British army captain, but as she drives it into the centre of the circle, the stones begin to glow... In the present day, Vox and the contemporary Torchwood team visit the circle, which focusses the energy of the Rift through itself every 80 years. Jack hopes to monitor the energy flow and learn how to control the Rift, but Vox insists upon destroying the circle to prevent the Sanctified from using it to destroy the world. An old man then arrives at the circle and pulls a knife on Gwen; he was the leader of the cultists in 1918, and he's been waiting eighty years for the stones to come back to life and grant him the immortality he sought back then. Rift energy discharges through the stones -- and Harriet, Gerald, and the tank swap places with Toshiko and Ianto. Tosh drives back the enraged cultists with a neural screamer, but then the angry army captain shows up, pulls a gun on them and demands to know where his tank is. In the present day, Vox leaps into the tank and drives it into one of the stones in the circle, knocking it out of alignment before Jack can stop him. Ianto and Tosh return to their own time, as do Gerald and Harriet, who dismiss the army captain's angry demands for an explanation. In the present day, the disappointed cult leader dies, his aged heart giving out.

Continuity: Harriet and Gerald first appeared in the TV episode To the Last Man.

Note: There appears to be a discrepancy in dating: if only eighty years had passed since 1918, then "the present day" would be 1998 rather than 2008. According to the BBC's Torchwood website, Harriet Derbyshire died in 1919, so the date of 1918 is presumably accurate. The duration between events must have been 90 years instead of 80 as stated... even though it's stated repeatedly, by different characters. Either that, or the confusion about whether the UNIT stories took place in the '70s or '80s (as referenced in the Doctor Who episode The Sontaran Stratagem) has spread to Torchwood.

After three weeks of silence, the Rift opens at the Queens Arcade shopping centre. Gwen and Jack investigate, and encounter an alien robot that transforms into a double of Johnny Depp, dressed exactly like his character on the poster for the movie Frontier. Mobbed by fans, the Depp duplicate ducks into a storeroom containing menswear posters, and emerges looking exactly like one of the menswear models. Three Harrowkind then materialise and attack, and in the confusion, Jack is shot in the chest and Gwen in the shoulder. Refusing to let anyone die for his sake, the shape-shifter grabs both Jack and Gwen and transports them to safety in a strange virtual reality that he claims is inside him. He is Omicron, an artificial intelligence created by a race called the P'Shem to explore the Rift, and he has mapped a model of the Universe onto the interior of a quantum tesseract fold inside his body. He is also the last of his kind; the P'Shem are long extinct, as something came through the Rift and ate their world. The Harrowkind are hunting him for the information stored in his body, which could enable the Sanctified to conquer countless worlds. Jack convinces Omicron to return to the Hub and help Torchwood find a way to keep him out of the wrong hands. Omicron returns Jack and Gwen to the real world, but the Harrowkind detect the energy release and descend upon the shopping centre en masse. The other Torchwood operatives, including Vox, have followed Jack and Gwen to the Arcade, and bystanders are put at risk when the Harrowkind open fire on them. Omicron steps forward and absorbs the Harrowkind into himself, as he had done for Gwen and Jack, intending to release them once he's found somewhere safe. But before he can do so, Vox shoots and destroys him, coldly telling the appalled Torchwood operatives that sacrifices must be made in war.

What starts out as a quiet night suddenly turns violent when Gwen and Rhys, Ianto, and Owen are individually attacked by mobs of shambling, golem-like creatures who are chanting Vox's name. Tosh looks up from her work in the Hub to find herself surrounded by Sanctified, and when Jack arrives in the Hub minutes later, there's no sign of her. The Rift Manipulator flares into life, and Vox shoots Jack, revealing that he's responsible; he's been observing Torchwood ever since he arrived, and has finally learned enough to turn the Rift Manipulator into a focal point for all of the energy flowing through the Rift. Using a globe he stole from the alien empathy pilot, Vox absorbs all the Rift energy into his own body, becoming a godlike being with incredible power. But before he can dispose of Jack, Tosh arrives and shoots him with an alien gun from the armoury, forcing him to withdraw while he recovers.

Tosh collapses, and the other operatives return to the Hub, claiming that the golems seemed to lose interest in them and walk off. One of the Sanctified then emerges from Tosh's body, revealing that it possessed her briefly in order to communicate with them. The Sanctified were once warriors, but now they are a peaceful people who farm dinosaurs; Vox is a renegade Sanctified who has lied to both Torchwood and his own people, keeping them at each other's throats while he worked out how to tap into the power of the Rift. The Sanctified have realised the truth too late, and no longer have the power to stop Vox. The Sanctified disappears after delivering its warning, but Jack realises that Vox damaged the stone circle in order to prevent the Rift energy from flaring out through it. Ianto thus "borrows" a bin lorry from Splott with which to manoeuvre the fallen stone back into place. Vox reappears and tries to stop them, but the Harrowkind arrive riding a herd of dinosaurs, distracting Vox just long enough for Torchwood to heave the final stone back into place. The energy that Vox was tapping flares out harmlessly, and a mob of golems arrives from nowhere, overwhelms Vox through weight of numbers, and disappears. The Sanctified thank Torchwood for their help, but Jack warns them never to return to Earth again. As the team returns to the Hub, Tosh theorises that the golems were antibodies created by the Rift in response to Vox's interference, which would imply that the Rift itself is alive.

On Seal Island, just off the north coast of Scotland, something is killing fishermen by stripping the skin from their bodies -- and when Torchwood Glasgow alerts Jack to the situation, he fears he knows what's causing it. The dead men's widows seem unconcerned when he interviews them, but then Mrs Garrow bursts into the pub in a panic after finding her husband Coll's windbreaker abandoned on the cliff. Jack and police sergeant Allison head down to the shore to investigate, and Jack catches a glimpse of something huge tossing Coll's body between its teeth. It's gone by the time he gets there, but he now knows what it is. According to local legend, selkie are enchanted seals with the power to control the weather and protect the island from harm; they're said to strip their victims' skins and wear them to disguise themselves as human. But Jack knows what the selkie really is: an alien that he brought to Earth in a moment of pity when he found her alone on a dying planet. She's found a new purpose in life; most of the dead men have arrest records for domestic violence, and although Mrs Garrow insists that Coll was a good man, she's wearing an amulet that he stole for her from the island's old ruins. The selkie isn't just killing men who have abused their wives, she's killing men who steal from the island. Realising that Sgt Allison has disappeared, Jack follows his car to the cemetery, where he finds the barmaid Ailsa's mother watching over Allison's discarded skin while the selkie goes about its business, as the women of the island have done for centuries. Jack descends to the shore to confront the selkie, and when it attacks him, he shoots it in the neck with a crossbow harpoon. He then stands on the store to watch it die, knowing that all of this was his fault.

SYNOPSIS

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Notes: This was an exclusive comic strip published via the UK TV Watch website to coincide with the broadcast there of season 2. + Read the Strip +