Torchwood's juicy bits...........

Captain Jack Harkness reveals, "the 21st century's when it all changes, and you gotta be ready." Jack was last seen at the end of Doctor Who series one, exterminated in the Dalek war in the 2002nd century, before being resurrected by Rose Tyler, when she had channelled the Time Vortex and became the Bad Wolf. For reasons unknown, Jack - a promiscuous bisexual former intergalactic time-agent-turned-con-artist-turned-hero - has found himself in 21st century Cardiff as head of Torchwood. We last saw Torchwood's London office - then a neo-fascist organisation headed by Tracy-Ann Cyberman - destroyed in the Dalek vs Cyberman battle in season 2's finale of Doctor Who. That, along with the Sycorax invasion on Christmas Day last year, has been explained away as a kind of psychotropic terrorism; where the water supply is causing mass hallucinations. As a top secret organisation outside the United Nations, the BBC aren't giving much away, but The Guide has managed to uncover the following information ...
Torchwood House
One of the Scottish Highlands' stateliest homes, Torchwood House was home to the MacLeish Family since the 1500s before being bought by the crown in 1853. Legend has it that in the wake of the werewolf massacre of 1851, Queen Victoria banished a stranger calling himself "the doctor" and his "naked" young companion, Rose Tyler from the British Empire for consorting with demons and magic and stuff. Realising that Britain had enemies beyond her understanding, she founded the Torchwood Institute, to investigate such occurrences, and arm its borders, should this doctor ever dare to return.
Weevils
Among the less-than-savoury visitors to tumble through the rift are a couple of hundred "weevils" (nobody knows what they're actually called, they just sort of grunt and rasp). They look (and communicate) a bit like Paul Danan gone reptile and live in the sewers feeding off human shit. Except that every now and then they will go rogue and attack - like the one that takes out a hospital porter early on in episode one, in a spectacular shower of blood and gore.
The Torchwood Hub
To the naked ape it looks like Cardiff Millennium Centre, and it probably serves that purpose as well. But deep beneath lies the Torchwood Hub, base to the Torchwood team and their pet pterodactyl, who access it via a big hole in the floor that acts as an invisible lift all the way down. So why can't people see them going down? Because there's some sort of perception filter of course, perhaps the result of, say, a police box having landed there sometime during series one of Doctor Who. As Jack explains to Gwen, shortly before drugging her and wiping her memory, probably the result of "a dimensionally transcendental chameleon circuit placed right on this spot which welded its perception properties to a spatial time programme." "But if there's a great big hole in the ground don't people fall in?" wonders Gwen. "That is so Welsh! I show you something fantastic, you find fault."
Resurrection Glove
The first episode begins with Gwen seeing more than she should, as the team take over a murder scene, placing a robot glove on the back of his head, reviving him for minutes and asking him how he died. Except it's not so refined, only working for two minutes, and only on the recently deceased. The more violent the trauma, the stronger the resurrection. (It works a little better on flies). Obviously, if such technology fell into the wrong hands, that would be very bad ...
Book Assimilator
Technical expert Toshiko Sato takes stuff home with her; though she's not doing it to get laid, she's doing it to learn (boring!) She owns a handheld phaser-type thing that scans a copy of A Tale Of Two Cities, beams it into a computer and reads the whole book in seconds. Or something. OK, we don't really understand, but it'll no doubt lead to all hell breaking loose by Xmas.
Sex Parasite
If, like caddish young Owen Harper (Burn Gorman), your job was being the medical expert in a top secret institute that scavenged alien technology, and you were going to break protocol and take something home, you'd probably nick the spray that works as a kind of opposite Rohypnol. One spray to your own face and any woman will take you home and shag you instantly. Even if that does mean the only way of avoiding a beating by said woman's boyfriend is to respray him and make him want to do the same. You wouldn't necessarily know that in doing so you were letting loose a sinister alien intelligence that would unleash a doomed sexual anarchy upon the world. On the upside, if your life was actually part of an adult sci-fi cop show, it would mean that episode two could contain an awful lot of boning.
· Torchwood, Sun, 9pm, BBC 3; Wed, 9pm, BBC2