Theory:Torchwood television discontinuity and plot holes/Small Worlds

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This page is for discussing the ways in which Small Worlds doesn't fit well with other DWU narratives. You can also talk about the plot holes that render its own, internal narrative confusing.

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• Captain Jack claims he does not sleep (TV: Ghost Machine) but at the beginning of this episode he does.

He could have simple being closing his eyes, or attempting to get some sleep. It could also be possible that Jack was simply exaggerating or simply lying. He may have just meant he doesn't need sleep and not that it is biologically impossible for him to sleep at all.

Exagerating makes sense. Anyone would say "I don't sleep" while only having trouble to sleep. And Jack being haunted by his past every night makes sense. In retrospect, Jack is actually eluding Gwen's question in Ghost Machine being about where he sleeps, since there is somewhere he at least tries to.

• Fairies kill people who cause harm to chosen ones, then why did they kill Estelle who wouldn't hurt a fly?

They don't just kill those who harm the Chosen Ones. They're not kind faeries, as Jack stated. They kill anyone who gets too close, it is also possible that they were worried if people knew about them, they would develop a way to stop them.

You also have to think about the mess at Gwen's place. She did nothing against the Chosen One as such. A possible explanation is that the faeries travel through time, as the ending of the episode suggests, from Jack's first explanation "backwards and forwards through time", and from Jasmin's answer in the ending scene "they'll find us, back in time". So the faeries knew that ultimately, it would be Jack's decision to let the Chosen One go. Killing Estelle gives their threat "lots of people will die" weight. As Gwen is the only one witnessing the scene, the mess in her place would have the same purpose.

• If several people were chocking at once wouldn't there be choking noises

I assume this question refers to the flashback scene with Jack's squad. At this point in the episode, we only saw the child molester's choking, and it was noisy. But in the end scene, we see how Roy dies : the faery plunges his arm inside the victim's mouth, there is no choking as such, and it actually isn't noisy. There still should be noises from the struggle. Yet, the episode suggests that the power of the faeries is much stronger than what we witnessed, as Jack (explaining to the Torchwood team) and Jasmin (in the ending scene) state it, they control the elements.

• Why didn't they kill Jack? Assuming this was before Rose made him immortal.

Jack hadn't done anything. Or, if this was after Rose made him immortal, and the faeries wanted him dead anyway for whatever reason, they may have known he was immortal and decided that killing him would be a lost cause.

The entire squad was killed and quoting Jack "some of them got drunk, drove a truck into the village, ran over a child, killed her". The faeries did not make any difference between the members of the squad while only some of them were responsible, so an explanation on the basis that Jack hadn't done anything wouldn't be consistent.

An explanation, while complicated, could be on the faeries' capacity to travel through time. When Jack's squad was killed, the faeries could have known his future decision to let go the Chosen One. The explanation seems paradoxical at first, since Torchwood is useless all throughout the episode, only being able to intervene on time in the barbecue scene, even there not being able to save Roy. Yet, even then, without Jack, Jasmin would have "come away" anyway. But we don't know what Cardiff's Torchwood would be without Jack. In Doctor Who's Utopia episode, Jack claims that he changed Torchwood, departing from their old brutal ways, that was seen in some Doctor Who episodes (for example The Christmas Invasion). Even Jack himself states that the Doctor changed him in The Parting of the Ways, refering to him willing to sacrifice his life for humanity's sake. The Doctor might also have shown to Jack that he could negociate with non-humans (in their first encounter, in The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, the Doctor takes the risk of letting a mother touch her lethal child in order to rectify the nanogenes' misunderstanding of a human body) leading him to accept that Jasmin could go with the faeries instead of fighting for her to stay with her mother.