1. The Year After I Died by Guy Adams
Set in the year 200,101, on an Earth ravaged by the Daleks, Jack struggles to save humanity from its oldest enemy.
2. Wednesdays For Beginners by James Goss
Jack and Jackie Tyler must unite to rescue the Powell Estate from a force whose name Jackie can never say.
3. One Enchanted Evening by James Goss
Captain Jack and Alonso Frame have only just met. But why did the Doctor want them to be together?
4. Month 25 by Guy Adams
He’s the young star of the Time Agency, and his whole life is about to fall apart. But that’s not going to stop him winning.
THE LIVES OF CAPTAIN JACK: THE YEAR AFTER I DIED
Here’s an interesting idea for a spinoff set: stories about the life of Captain Jack Harkness outside of Torchwood. That’s “The Lives of Captain Jack,” and the first story in the set, “The Year After I Died” from Guy Adams, explores Jack’s life in the immediate aftermath of “The Parting of the Ways.” As mentioned in “Utopia,” Jack has no idea that Rose resurrected him – indeed, at this point he doesn’t even know that he is effectively immortal. All he knows is that he was cornered by Daleks, blacked out, and woke up later to find himself the only survivor of the attack. Adams takes an interesting approach to the character: this is not the brash, confident Jack we’re all used to. Instead, he’s cautious and even nervous, as he knows he was given a second chance at life and doesn’t want to lose it again. So he tries to avoid conflict, but like all Doctor Who heroes, he’s drawn into it whether he wants it or not.
In this case, the story takes a harsh anti-corporate message: in the months after the Dalek attack, wealthy outsiders swooped in to the ravaged Earth to loot the planet for resources. These resources include the people, who are taken away to have their organs harvested and their blood drained. A journalist investigates this, Jack gets involved, things go south, and soon he finds himself compelled to risk his life to save others. After a brief Tennant-like moment of doubt, he commits, dies, and revives in the usual way minutes later. It’s obvious at this point that there’s still a long way to go before Jack becomes the man we see in Torchwood, but Adams still presents a landmark moment in his character progression. It’s interesting, it’s written and performed well, and it fleshes out a character we already know. It’s a great example of spinoff media, in other words, even if the plot is a bit weak.
8/10
THE LIVES OF CAPTAIN JACK: WEDNESDAYS FOR BEGINNERS
Pairing up Jack Harkness and Jackie Tyler seems so natural, so obvious, that I was actually surprised to realize that the characters had only met once before, in “Journey’s End.” This is the main drawing point of “Wednesdays for Beginners” from James Goss, the second story in the set. The story is basically a two-hander between John Barrowman and Camille Coduri, which means that they spend a lot of time together – but it also means that Jackie spends most of the first half of the story talking to herself. Admittedly, she’s one of the best possible characters to do that, but it feels less like an exploration of Jackie’s scatterbrained personality and more like all the money ran out and they couldn’t afford a supporting cast.
That’s my only complaint with the story, though. Much like the first story, “Wednesdays for Beginners” focuses primarily on the characters, showing how much Jackie misses Rose yet how much she respects the Doctor, and then showing the ways in which Jack is and is not like the last Time Lord. He’s oddly prone to long-winded technical explanations here, but he lacks the Doctor’s preternatural ability to divine the solution to every problem. So we end up with the two characters working together, trying various solutions, succeeding and failing and building a rapport throughout. I liked how the plot tied into this, how Jackie walked right into the invaders’ trap because of her love for Rose and her trust in the Doctor. It’s entertaining and compelling, and the exact opposite of the “idiot plot” – it feels like we’re right back in the heart of the RTD era, and for me that’s quite a compliment.
8/10
THE LIVES OF CAPTAIN JACK: ONE ENCHANTED EVENING
At the end of “The End of Time,” David Tennant’s final Doctor Who story as the lead actor, the tenth Doctor visits all of his old companions one last time before his regeneration. This includes Jack, freshly damaged from the events of “Children of Earth” – and the Doctor sets him up with Alonso Frame (Russell Tovey) from “Voyage of the Damned.” The third installment in The Lives of Captain Jack, “One Enchanted Evening” by James Goss, picks the story up from there: what happened after the Doctor left? Well, it’s not just an hour-long sex scene – they’re interrupted by an alien invasion.
I think the character work trips up a little bit in this story. While I’m not sure if “The End of Time” ever specifically confirmed that Jack was coming off “Children of Earth,” that’s clearly what we’re meant to think – and yet “One Enchanted Evening” makes virtually no mention of this. Jack doesn’t even seem particularly upset, and you’d think that there would be at least one reference to Ianto. The story is in part about moving on from tragedy, and that’s a legitimate angle to explore, but we see much more of Alonso’s pain from the Titanic incident than we ever do of Jack’s. The other problem is that the plot is threadbare: an almost comically evil alien invades the station and attempts to steal a giant diamond, and that’s it. This does nothing to help us understand Jack or Alonso, and while Katy Manning is delightfully over the top as Mother Nothing it’s difficult to understand how it all fits together. The ending is odd, too – Alonso gets some sort of catharsis out of the experience, but Jack just loses another person, which seems to be the exact opposite of the Doctor’s intent. This does not seem intentional.
In any case, the story is entertaining, Barrowman and Tovey are great, Manning is unrecognizably enjoyable, and the story moves along at quite a clip. But after the character focus of the first two stories in this set, “One Enchanted Evening” is something of a disappointment.
6/10
THE LIVES OF CAPTAIN JACK: MONTH 25
The final story in The Lives of Captain Jack, “Month 25” by Guy Adams, takes us back to a time we’ve never seen before: when Jack worked for the Time Agency. It’s so early that he hasn’t even taken the name Jack Harkness, and as a result we learn his real name: Javic Piotr Thane. The story even deals with the missing two years that Jack mentioned in his TV debut and then never came up again. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do any of these things particularly well.
Every story in this set has tried to focus on Jack as a character, and “Month 25” is no different as it shows us what Jack was like before we met him on television. The answer just isn’t very interesting: he’s arrogant, brash, somehow even more sexual, and self-obsessed to the point of narcissism. The story even throws in a future Jack for the sake of comparison – but makes a serious misstep by not really showing Javic taking any steps down the road to becoming Jack. Even at the end, when he has risked everything to save the day, he’s just as insufferable as he was at the beginning. Javic is rather one-note, to be honest; if not for John Barrowman’s boundless charisma, this might have been a boring listen.
As for the missing two years – the twenty-four months prior to the one in the title, presumably – there really isn’t much to it. Jack was used as an assassin by the Time Agency, who wiped his memory after every mission. I admit Adams is in a bind because we know from TV that Jack still doesn’t know what happened in those two years by the time he meets the Doctor and Rose, but the inevitable memory wipe at the story’s conclusion still drew an eye-roll from me. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what the point of this one is: it’s “The Adventures of Young Jack Harkness” with nothing to say beyond that. I suppose Javic’s plan to save the day is interesting? A disappointing end after such a strong start to this box set.
5/10