Small Worlds (TV story)

Small Worlds was the fifth episode of the first series of Torchwood. It was the first story to explore Jack's past.

Synopsis
Jack encounters monsters from his past: Fairies, with the ability to choke people and change the weather, make a series of killings centred around a little girl, the Chosen One.

Plot
At the Torchwood Hub, Jack wakes from a nightmare of dead soldiers in a train carriage with rose petals spilling out of their mouths, to find a single rose petal atop his desk. Ianto informs Jack that there are strange weather patterns in the area. The next day, Jack takes Gwen to visit an old friend of his, Estelle Cole, who is giving a talk on fairies. Estelle shows them the Cottingley Fairies photographs, then compares them to photographs she had taken the day before, and claims to have found proof of the fairy's existence. After her talk at her home, Jack and Estelle discuss the photographs and the nature of fairies. Gwen asks Estelle and Jack about an old photograph she found of Jack, but they both claim that that was Jack's father who had relations with Estelle during World War II, and Jack looks just like him. Jack asks Estelle to call if she encounters any more fairies. On the way back to Torchwood, Jack explains to Gwen that the fairies are in fact creatures from the dawn of time and are not bound by linear time, and can be very dangerous. Jack instructs Toshiko to watch for strange weather patterns in the area in order to locate the fairies.

Meanwhile, a young girl, Jasmine Pierce, decides to walk home from school alone when her stepfather Roy does not arrive on time. She encounters a man, Goodson, who tries to lure her into his car. When Goodson makes a grab for Jasmine, a strong wind kicks up along with strange, ethereal voices, and Goodson is forced to retreat into his car as Jasmine continues to skip on her way home to play with her fairy friends in the nearby woods. Later, a tense Goodson arrives at the Cardiff market, still hearing the strange voices, and tries to run through it. He is attacked by something unseen by the other shoppers, and starts to cough up rose petals. He manages to get himself arrested, declaring himself a paedophile in order to seek the safety of a jail cell. However, he continues to be attacked by unknown forces, and is found the next day dead by asphyxiation. Torchwood arrives and find Goodson's mouth filled with rose petals. Jack confirms that Goodson's death was by the fairies as part of their protection of a "Chosen One", a child that will soon become theirs if Torchwood cannot find her in time.

Late at night, Estelle starts to hear the strange voices and calls up Jack to alert him. However, before Torchwood can arrive, she is killed, having drowned in a rainstorm despite the area around her being completely dry. Jack mourns her death, and Gwen realises that it was Jack himself who loved Estelle. Jack explains that he has seen the rose petals before, back in Lahore in 1909, a week after some of his troops had drunkenly run over a little girl. While on a train, the rest of his men died, their mouths filled with leaves, and he realised that the young girl was a Chosen One. Gwen returns home with Rhys to find her own house in disarray, with leaves and rock patterns on the floor. The team realises that the fairies are becoming more protective.

At her school the next day, Jasmine is bullied by two girls at school, and a large gale sweeps over the area. Torchwood arrives to learn that no one was harmed but the only one not affected by the storm was Jasmine. They make their way to her home. Meanwhile, Roy and Jasmine's mother Lynn are having a five-year anniversary party. Jasmine, helping her mother with the food, finds that the backyard has been fenced off by Roy to prevent her from going to the woods. Angrily she bites him, causing him to slap her. A sudden wind rushes up, and the fairies make themselves visible to everyone present, attacking and killing Roy. Torchwood inexplicably allows the murder to occur, but tells the other guests to leave. Jasmine and the fairies race off to the woods through a hole one of them made in the fence. Jack catches up to Jasmine and insists that she be allowed to live with her mother among humans, but they refuse, threatening that if she is prevented from going, many more people will die, with Jasmine claiming that the fairies are powerful enough to freeze the entire world and kill the human species; they would still be able to travel to the past and retrieve children from earlier eras as Chosen Ones. Jack requests a promise that Jasmine will not be harmed, and then lets them take her. Jasmine and the fairies disappear. Lynn, having witnessed this and the death of her husband, cries angrily and hits Jack over and over, with Jack only able to apologise to her and to rhetorically ask his team what else he could have done.

Back at the Hub, Gwen is sorting through the pictures in the case when a Cottingley photograph from 1917 inexplicably appears on the board room monitor. Spotting something, she zooms in on the photograph until the face on one of the fairies becomes clearly visible. It is Jasmine, smiling out of the picture, frozen in mid-dance.

Cast

 * Captain Jack Harkness - John Barrowman
 * Gwen Cooper - Eve Myles
 * Owen Harper - Burn Gorman
 * Toshiko Sato - Naoko Mori
 * Ianto Jones - Gareth David-Lloyd
 * Estelle Cole - Eve Pearce
 * Jasmine Pierce - Lara Phillipart
 * Lynn Pierce - Adrienne O'Sullivan
 * Roy - William Travis
 * Mark Goodson - Rodger Barclay
 * Kate - Heledd Baskerville
 * WPC - Ffion Wilkins
 * Custody Sergeant - Nathan Sussex
 * Man in Street - Paul Jones
 * Bullies - Sophie Davies and Victoria Gourley

Music

 * Better do Better - Hard-Fi
 * Born to be a Dancer - Kaiser Chiefs
 * Ooh La La - The Kooks

Story notes

 * This episode's plot (a young girl been taken away by fairies) is very similar to the Spice Girl's music video for their song "Viva Forever".
 * The novel trilogy "Tithe", "Valiant" and "Ironside" by Holly Black features a hidden world of modern faeries (fairies) who like to indulge in murder and torture as entertainment. As in Small Worlds, the faeries can look classic (i.e. small with wings) or large and demonic.
 * This episode is also similar to the Charmed episode "Once Upon a Time".
 * Owen claims that Harry Houdini believed in the Cottingley fairies. In reality, he didn't, and got into frequent discussions with his friend Arthur Conan Doyle over them.
 * Gwen also states that the girls who took the photos admitted the whole incident was a hoax in their later years. While it is true that they confessed to faking the photos, both women went to their graves insisting that they really did see fairies.
 * This is one of very few stories in the Doctor Who universe in which the heroes are completely defeated. In this case, Torchwood 3 has three goals: to prevent the fairies from killing, to keep them from taking Jasmine, and to protect Estelle. They fail at all three.

Ratings

 * BBC3 - 1.3 million viewers
 * BBC2 - 2.4 million viewers

Myths
to be added

Filming locations
to be added

Production errors

 * When Roy is making the fence, the overhead view shows him nailing the third post. The view from the side shows him nailing in a different post, however.

Continuity
to be added

In the present

 * Small Worlds occurs after: TW: Cyberwoman
 * Small Worlds occurs before: TW: Countrycide

For Jack in the flashback

 * Small Worlds occurs after his flashback with Alice and Emily in: TW: Fragments
 * Small Worlds occurs before his flashback in: TW: Immortal Sins

Home video releases
This episode was first released on DVD, with four other episodes entitled Torchwood: Series 1, part 1 on 26 December 2006. It was later released in Torchwood: The Complete First Series on 19th November 2007