Howling:The Blessing IS Jack... sort of.

The Howling → The Blessing IS Jack... sort of.

There be spoilers about un-released stories here.
Run back to the forums if you're scared.

Not that Jack himself is the Blessing, but considering last season we saw that an arm and a piece of his head could reconnect and rebuild his body... what if that huge gravity blood vessel thing IS Jack? Let's go through this step by step:

• In Children of Earth, an arm and a piece of Jack's skull were able to rebuild his body. This means some pieces would have to build TOWARDS each other.
• If the Blessing IS Jack, then his blood moving toward it in Shanghai would let us know that his separated body parts would be naturally drawn toward the largest source on Earth. Currently that's the Blessing. Now here's where it gets interesting.
• Jack has been physically present on Earth from 27AD until 2010 virtually uninterrupted, and often with multiples (as many as 3) present at the same time. Meaning, the first time he'd have been off planet Earth for an extended period of time... was right after Children of Earth. For about a year.
• With Jack's blood in Buenos Aires and Argentina, they were now respectively each other's largest source of Jack. So they'd be drawn to each other. And GROW toward each other. A large lifeform now begins to dig under the Earth, meeting at its core. Just before the Miracle, they burn the blood supplies in Argentina and China, because they are no longer necessary, and the evidence needs to be disposed of before the Miracle happens.

Therefore, the Blessing is... biologically... Jack. d ●●● 18:45, September 3, 2011 (UTC)

Sounds about as plausible as any other theory, but there are a few holes in it. For one thing, whenever Jack heals, even when he blew up, the fom he takes is basically just his normal form. The Blessing obviously looks nothing like him. More importantly, that still doesn't explain how the Blessing caused the Miracle, or why Jack is now mortal. Also, the families have clealy been preparing for this for a long time, and they wouldn't have had anyway to know that Jack was buried for centuries, or that he would kill his grandson and run away from the planet.Icecreamdif 19:47, September 3, 2011 (UTC)

Organic material meeting at (or anywhere near) the Earth's core is unlikely in the extreme. The core is at about the same temperature as the surface of the Sun. Even the mantle would be a bit warm -- that's what comes out of volcanos. The stuff would need to take the long way round and stay in the upper part of the crust. --2.101.60.5 20:10, September 3, 2011 (UTC)

I've been idly wondering if they're going to join up the two shows. Last series in DW we had cracks in the walls/time, a perception filter in Amy's house and something that can't be seen out of the corner of your eye. I don't know if anyone else caught it, but in the trailer for next week's TW, there was a line about 'something you can't see, in the corner of your eye'. This series (which I assume is happening in 2011) has also had Rory be 'killed' several times, and yet he's not dead. We had perception filters and a huge crack in the wall in tonight's episode. And I also read somewhere that they wanted Jack Harkness in this series of DW but it couldn't be done because it clashed with filming TW last year...but might that explain a break in the middle of the broadcast of this series, and filming for it only finishing in July?

It's interesting to think about anyway. 109.150.43.239 20:23, September 3, 2011 (UTC)

Actually, add the fact that this would technically make Jack Harkness himself not the largest source of "Jackness", and a morphic field, and we might have something here...

• A morphic field using this "Blood Line" as the template would grant the entire planet some facet of Jack's immortality (but not his healing factor).
• Because Jack isn't the "Jackest" source on the planet anymore, technically he would be drawn to it, and likely would lose his immortality as a result. If you cut Jack in half, you wouldn't wind up with two Jacks. One side would grow, and the other would die. Likewise, Jack is now the "smaller part" that is not immortal, so long as this Blood Line is still intact.

This gives us a rationale behind why Jack is not healing (because the Blood Line is) and why everyone's immortal (because the Blood Line is). The only piece still missing is the motive. Why would someone do this? d ●●● 21:34, September 3, 2011 (UTC)

The stuff about something in the corner of your eye was in this week's episode. The family member in Shanghai was telling Jilly that that's how people felt around the blessing. I doubt that they would want to join the two shows. Torchwood is trying to appeal to a new audience who is not familiar with the show, and Doctor Who generally tries to appeal to children who are not allowed to watch Torchwood. As fo the blessing being Jack, that could work, but there has to be more to it than just Jack's blood trying to join together once Jack left the planet.Icecreamdif 23:35, September 3, 2011 (UTC)

also, i'm also interested in what happened to the rest of jacks body after the explosion. there must have been more than the arm and the head or whatever they found. there must have been pieces left, even just single cells, that wouldn't have reconected to his body. so, what happened to those? would they really just have died, as someone above suggested? or would they have turned into something else? here's just a wild theory, but maybe because the explosion from children of earth happened on a rift, it could have scattered some of his remains arround the planet, including those cities. then, they are trying to join togeter with each other and the rest of jack like the parts that were recovered from the explosion did (the bits that were found grew back together even though there was no attachment). so those bits could be the blessing running through the center of the earth to join together and also why jack's blood started moving there. i have no idea if this theory could work or how it could connect to the miracle (unless maybe bits of jack got into the water supply and is making the people who have drunken him immortal or something), but that's what i'm thinking. Imamadmad 02:06, September 4, 2011 (UTC)

• 109: Moffat wanted Jack as one of the allies the Doctor recruited for A Good Man Goes to War.

2: _Anything_ going through the core of the Earth is incredibly unlikely. Like a Dalek drill, or the Racnoss (who are, come to think of it, organic matter themselves).

Anyway, the Blessing certainly seems to be organic, and it's got ends sticking out of two opposite ends of the Earth, so the problem you're bringing up seems to be there with or without d's theory, which means it's not a great argument against the theory.

In fact, it could even be part of the story: The bits of Jack were trying to grow straight through the core, but were unable to connect up because they burned up faster than they could grow. Maybe the bits eventually started spreading out into a sphere around the upper mantle because it was the only way they could connect up, which turned the localized Blessing into something global that the Families could finally use for the Miracle. And that's also why it looks nothing like Jack; what we're seeing are the extreme tendrils of something that's trying to grow into a Jack in the center of the Earth but can't; normally, they would have long ago been sucked into the center or vanished, but they can't because Jack couldn't regrow.

I don't think motive is a huge problem, or at least no more of a problem than already exists.

This biggest problem with this theory is that the Three Families seem to have discovered the Blessing decades ago, and were certainly planning for the Miracle all that time, but the Blessing couldn't have appeared until 2010 if it's Jack's remains from CoE. Maybe you could explain this away. (For example, Imamadmad brought up the rift; it could have scattered his remains across time as well as across the planet, since that's what the rift does, so… actually, I'm still not sure how it works, because even if you scattered the two biggest bits back to 1927, there were a couple of complete Jacks around in 1927.) But without such an explanation, there seems to be a big hole.

A smaller problem is that it seems like, even when there are two Jacks in the same time, they're both generally immortal, and they don't try to merge together like multiple Nöel Cowards.

And finally, how would the biggest bits of Jack happen to end up in Argentina and China, exactly across the world from each other, and thousands of miles away from Cardiff in two different directions? It seems like someone would have had to deliberately plant the two bits in those locations. Which isn't at all impossible, but it's an extra bit of story to explain.

Anyway, it's definitely an intriguing idea, but I don't think it's complete yet. --173.228.85.35 04:15, September 4, 2011 (UTC)

• That's precisely it, though. The latest episode said that two blood banks were burned to the ground days before the Miracle: one in Buenos Aires, and one in Shanghai. Two locations that, due to the prevalence of the Phicorp "ϕ", does appear to be premeditated. Also, your notion of the tendrils not quite going through the core but more around it is pretty much bang on what I'm thinking. d ●●● 05:52, September 4, 2011 (UTC)

Which problem do the blood banks answer? They obviously imply PhiCorp involvement, and therefore presumably Family involvement (because the Families seem to use PhiCorp as a tool in their schemes), and they imply that the Family did something active to turn the Blessing into the Miracle (it's not something that just happened because Jack returned to Earth—although maybe getting Jack back to Earth was necessary to their plan?). But it doesn't seem to explain how or why the Blessing had been in those two cities for decades before that. Are you suggesting that they brought bits of Jack to those two cities back in 1927 knowing that he was going to leave the planet in 2010? Even then, how did they "discover the Blessing" decades ago if they created it last year? I feel like I must be missing something obvious here; if I'm being dim, please don't be afraid it would be patronize or anything to point it out. --173.228.85.35 07:06, September 4, 2011 (UTC)

I believe when they refer to "discovering the Blessing" they mean discovering Jack himself in that basement. However, future references to the Blessing wind up meaning the Blood Line. d ●●● 16:02, September 4, 2011 (UTC)

I don't see that Jack leaving the planet or not has anything to do with this. My guess is that the families developed a way to clone Jack's blood samples (The Blessing), until there was a sufficient mass of it to "out-Jack" Jack. The cloning locations were obviously in Shanghai and in Buenos Aires, creating the Blood Lines through the Earth. Add in some morphic field mumbo jumbo and you have The Miracle. 187.113.71.45 13:39, September 4, 2011 (UTC)

The whole thing about Jack's blown up remains seems unlikely, unless the families actually let the 456 know that humman children made good drugs, and talked the government into blowing Jack up. I suppose that's not completely impossible, but its getting convoluted. They also couldn't possibly have planned for Jack to leave the planet, or known that he'd been buried their for centuries. The cloning theory might work, although I'm not sure that a clone of Jack would be immortal. His immortality isn't really genetic is it. If the blessing is the largest source of Jack, that could explain why Jack is now mortal, but it still doesn't explain how everyone else is now immortal.Icecreamdif 15:10, September 4, 2011 (UTC)

For the last part: The theory _does_ explain why everyone is immortal. What morphic fields do (in real-life pseudoscientific nonsense, and in the Whoniverse) is guide cellular development according to a template. It makes sense that overriding the "standard" template for human cells with the template for an immortal human would make people immortal. So, growing a big mass of Jack and spreading it around the world (and then presumably using some kind of alien tech to amplify the morphic field) would be exactly what you'd need to create the Miracle.

However, I agree about the first place. Assuming the Families don't have a TARDIS or a Time-Space Visualiser or something, there's no way they could predict or create the events of CoE, even with decades of preparation. But maybe, as 187 implies, Jack leaving the planet isn't the key; maybe they just needed Jack to get blown up badly enough that the bits they held were the Jackiest thing round (anyone who watches Jack for a few months could guess that would have to happen eventually…), and they were prepared to act as soon as it finally did. (And maybe it _was_ actually him leaving the planet that made the difference anyway, but they weren't relying on that.) But then why weren't any of Jack's previous explosions good enough? Or the time he was missing before returning in Sound of the Drums? --173.228.85.35 06:33, September 5, 2011 (UTC)

Well, there was another him in the vaults at the time, wasn't there. This theory may be partially right, but there still seem to be some flaws in it. Icecreamdif 15:59, September 5, 2011 (UTC)

Relying on Jack eventually getting blown up would be a safe bet only if the timing didn't matter. However, what's been revealed so far seems to show the Three Families making preparations for the Miracle -- preparations that wouldn't remain sufficiently effective and certainly wouldn't remain sufficiently secret unless it occurred round about the time it did. Possibly they could have coped with a few months of uncertainty -- even a year or two -- but not decades. Suppose Jack hadn't got blown up until 2047, or 2103, or whatever? Anyway, they don't seem the type to be content to wait for things to happen without having a good idea when they'll happen. They seem much more the type who set out to make things happen -- and at a time of their choosing, too. --2.101.52.174 18:26, September 5, 2011 (UTC)

Well, it is of course possible that the families had people in the British government and working for Johnson who took the first available opprtunity to suggest blowing Jack up. Still, even when Jack blew up wouldn't the most concentrated source of Jack still be the werckage of the Torchwood hub?Icecreamdif 20:24, September 5, 2011 (UTC)

So a really large, stretched out, incomplete version of Jack? Could this be how he becomes The Face of Bo? Brotherbard 23:16, September 5, 2011 (UTC)

Probably not. The Face of Boe is a long, long way down his timeline. Anyway, I think RTD & co. will want to keep using John Barrowman for a while yet. --2.101.50.177 23:48, September 5, 2011 (UTC)

TheFace of Boe was implied to just have to do with the aging thing. After a couple hundred years he begins to go gray, so in billions of years he becomes a giant disembodied head in a tank.Icecreamdif 02:05, September 6, 2011 (UTC)

I see the point about the timing problem, but I think Icecreamdif is right that it isn't that much of a problem. If they needed him gone in 2010, then he was going to be gone in 2010 one way or another. When the events of CoE happened, they took advantage of them by engineering the destruction of the Hub through their agents in the British government, but if something different had happened, they would have found some other means to blow him up real good.

As for the most concentrated source of Jack, as someone pointed out earlier, maybe blowing him up right on top of the rift was part of the plan; that caused him to disperse much more. Or maybe by 2010 they had big enough hunks of Jack that none of the explodey bits outweighed them (in whatever way matters).

At this point, my biggest problem with the theory is still the multiple-Jacks thing. For example, Jack came back to life (over and over and over) while buried, even when there was another Jack running around being immortal at the same time. Neither one became mortal, and the two didn't merge together or anything. So, there has to be more to this than just "the biggest bit of Jack is immortal, any other bits are not". But that's pretty much the cornerstone to the theory—it explains why the amplified morphic field from the Blessing can make everyone immortal, and why Jack himself is mortal. Still, it's so tantalizingly close to working that I want to find an answer to that problem rather than giving up on the theory. --173.228.85.35 02:58, September 6, 2011 (UTC)

Maybe multiple Jacks can remain immortal if theyre about equal in size, but notw that here's the huge blessing, it cancels out any other one. Except didn't the PhiCorp guy that Jack spoke to say that he heard about the Blessing years ago? Besides, how can the families possibly know exactly how Jack's immmortality works. Even with his blood they would have no way to figure out that the largest source of Jack is immortal. This theory is probably pretty close, but still not quite there. The moving blood does make it obvious that this thing is somehow very closely related to Jack, unless Oswald's right and that is just some Chinese custom that none of us have ever heard of.Icecreamdif 03:36, September 6, 2011 (UTC)

Watch out for apostrophes when you're editing in source mode…

Anyway, however Jack's immortality works, it presumably has more to do with his morphic field than his biology, and they could have figured out that much without learning all the details. Decades of experimenting with state-of-the-art and even alien biotech trying to transfer his immortality to a non-Jack cell got them nowhere, but then some alien morphic field amplifier did the trick, and they knew they were on the right track. Something like that.

Meanwhile, I just thought of another problem with the theory: Near the end of the last episode, when the Family woman in Shanghai is talking to Jilly, she says, "The feeling, it started as soon as we dug deep enough." That, and the rest of the discussion around there, implies that they dug up the Blessing, they didn't plant it. Also, when Jilly asks whether it's a living thing, she says, "We have no idea", which implies that they didn't create it out of Jack bits. And, going along with all that, "the Blessing shows you to yourself"—that doesn't sound like a particularly Jack-like talent.

However, even if the Blessing has nothing to do with Jack, this theory could be on the right track. They discovered Jack bits in 1927, but couldn't figure out how to use that to create immortality. They discovered the Blessing a few decades later, but again couldn't figure out how to use that. Then they discovered that the two of them together could do something that neither one separately could do, at which point they put their plans in motion. They blew up the blood banks, mixed their two biggest Jack bits with normal human blood (while the rest of him was off-planet), fed the results to the Blessing, caused it to grow into a planet-wide shell, turned on their alien morphic-o-matic, and voila, Miracle. --173.228.85.35 04:43, September 6, 2011 (UTC)

to settle the problem of jack not be comming mortal whan other coppies of himself are arround, i think that it is only if the jack bits are in the same point of his timestream. ie, meeting a past or future self wont cause this effect but finding a part of himself that is exactly the same age would. Imamadmad 06:23, September 7, 2011 (UTC)

It still doesn't work, since in between 1927 and 2011, he travelled back in time and sent about 2000 years buried and frozen. If the blessing is Jack, Jack should be significantly older than it.Icecreamdif 20:27, September 7, 2011 (UTC)

not anything found in the wreckage of the hub... Imamadmad 20:44, September 7, 2011 (UTC)

Imamadmad: I assume you mean that Jack wouldn't be older than any bits and pieces of himself that had been found in the wreckage of the hub. That's probably true but I don't see how it's relevant. The Blessing, if it is in fact derived from the Jack who was in New York in 1927, would be from a Jack about 2000 years younger than the one who is running around trying to find out what and who caused the Miracle.

Note: I say "probably true" because we don't know what Jack was doing while he was away. If he'd indulged in time travel, he might have lived through many years, decades or even centuries, before returning to Earth only a couple of years after he left. In that case, he would be older than any traces of himself he'd left behind on Earth. --89.242.67.85 02:23, September 8, 2011 (UTC)