'Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang' by Chris Chibnall

In pursuit of a humanoid Blowfish driving a fast car, the Torchwood team corner the alien hoodlum in a suburban house. Taking a young girl hostage, the Blowfish shoots her father and spitefully taunts Gwen, Owen, Toshiko and Ianto; but then a shot rings out and the thugs falls lifelessly to the floor – Torchwood’s missing leader, Captain Jack, is back! Returning to the Hub, Jack is impressed with how his teammates have coped without him; they in turn are both pleased to see him and angry for his leaving in the first place. Elsewhere in the city, a rift opens atop a multi-storey car park and a good-looking, extravagantly dressed man steps through. After saving a man from a mugging by throwing his assailant off the roof, the stranger casually walks into a bar, picks out the clientele he likes, and then clears the place by brandishing two large, futuristic-looking weapons. Detecting the rift, the Torchwood team visit the scene and find the corpse of the mugger; Jack then receives a holographic message on his wrist communicator from the stranger, who invites him to a rendezvous; Jack immediately drives off in the SUV, leaving Gwen, Owen, Toshiko and Ianto to follow in a taxicab. Arriving at the bar, Jack and the stranger face off, kiss passionately, and then proceed to gleefully beat the hell out of each other. When the fight ends in a standoff at gunpoint, the two men resort to drinking the contents of the bar; the stranger, a fellow Time Agent calling himself Captain John Hart, tells Jack that the Time Agency has shut down, and that only seven agents are left. After Gwen, Owen, Toshiko and Ianto arrive on the scene, Jack introduces them to his former partner – in every sense of the word. Although extremely distrustful of John, Jack takes him back to the Torchwood Hub, first ensuring that the agent hand over every weapon he has hidden about himself. While flirting with most of the team, John explains that he has come to Cardiff on the wish of a dying woman: it seems that three radiation cluster bombs have fallen into a rift storm and are now somewhere in the city – unless they can find these devices, they will break down and infect the population… Still distrustful of John, Jack agrees to help him on the condition that he leave Cardiff – Jack's territory – immediately afterwards; Gwen is also sceptical, sensing that underneath his charm and banter John is a compulsive liar. When Gwen demands to know where Jack has been, he reluctantly reveals that he went travelling with the Doctor, but came back to be with his team – especially her; but although it is clear Gwen feels the same about Jack, she is now engaged to Rhys… The Torchwood team split up to locate the canisters: against Jack’s recommendations, Gwen decides to go with Captain John to keep an eye on him. Arriving at the docks, Gwen takes a call from Rhys and then finds the bomb inside a cargo container; however, John kisses her before she can grab the device, paralysing her with the toxic lip-gloss he is wearing. Throwing Gwen’s phone away, John locks the powerless woman inside the container – in two hours, her body will shut down, killing her… Owen and Tosh locate their canister inside a warehouse, but before they can retrieve it, John arrives, overpowers Tosh and shoots Owen point blank… Searching an office block with Ianto, Jack successfully asks his colleague out on a date and then head for the roof; searching the offices, Ianto is confronted by John, who advises him at gunpoint to find his colleagues before they die… As Ianto speeds off in the SUV, John joins Captain Jack on the roof; having found the third bomb, Jack is hardly surprised to learn that the search was merely a distracting scam set up by his ex-partner; turning down John’s offer to join him in causing mischief and mayhem amongst the stars, Jack throws the canister off the roof – but John immediately responds by pushing Jack off after it. Taking the safe way down, Captain John retrieves Jack’s wrist computer from his corpse and sets off for Torchwood’s Hub… Having traced his colleagues’ phone signal, Ianto rejoins Tosh and an injured Owen and together they set off to locate Gwen; finding their friend’s discarded phone at the docks, Tosh uses her alien tech to pinpoint the area where Gwen last called the phone network; when they find Gwen’s paralysed form inside one of the nearby containers, Owen turns to his antitoxin kit in a race against time... In the Hub, John extracts three sections of a high-tech device from each of the ‘bombs’, then retrieves a small pyramidal object from the Blowfish’s corpse; he is about to combine them together when he is confronted by a very armed and very angry Torchwood team – including Jack, somehow back from the dead. John admits that he murdered the woman so that he could obtain the pyramid, which contains the location of a valuable Arcadian Diamond; however, to his annoyance John’s dying victim created a rift storm and threw the device into it. John activates the pyramid, which plays a holographic message from the dead woman who, to his surprise, reveals that there is no diamond; instead, the device unleashes an explosive device keyed to the DNA of her killer, which immediately attaches itself to a startled John’s chest. As the device begins a ten minute countdown, a desperate John handcuffs himself to Gwen, swallows the key, and demands Torchwood’s help; however, Gwen pragmatically decides that to prevent the explosion from destroying the city she and John must re-enter the rift, and so she, Ianto, Tosh and an unwilling John take the SUV and race for the car park. They arrive with just forty seconds to spare, but before they can reach the portal, Owen and Jack arrive with their alternate plan: injecting John with a synthesis of the Torchwood team’s DNA samples, they trick the explosive device into detaching itself from the rogue Time Agent, allowing Jack to toss it into the rift. As the device safely explodes inside the portal it causes a temporal displacement, sending the team back in time to the point when John first arrived. Having released Gwen and returned Jack’s wrist comm John asks to join Torchwood; Jack immediately refuses, and tells John to use the residual rift energy to leave. Kissing Jack goodbye, John steps into the rift – as he vanishes he gives Jack one last cryptic piece of information: he has found “Gray”…

John Barrowman (Captain Jack Harkness), Eve Myles (Gwen Cooper), Burn Gorman (Owen Harper), Naoko Mori (Toshiko Sato), Gareth David-Lloyd (Ianto Jones), Kai Owen (Rhys Williams), James Marsters (Captain John Hart), Tom Price (P.C. Andy), Menna Trussier (Old Woman), Paul Kasey (Blowfish), Jonathan Hart (Voice of Blowfish), Crispin Layfield (Mugger), Nathan Ryan (Victim)

Directed by Ashley Way
Produced by Richard Stokes
Executive Producers Russell T. Davies and Julie Gardner
A BBC Wales production

TX (BBC2):
16th January 2008 @ 9.00 pm

Notes:
*Featuring Captain Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato and Ianto Jones

*First appearance of Time Agent Captain John Hart

*Working title: 'Seperation Anxiety'

*This episode was repeated on BBC3 at 11:30 pm, and then in a specially-edited pre-watershed version the following Wednesday, 23rd January, on BBC2 at 7.00 pm