Torchwood/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• When watching Torchwood I always wondered why the hell in the first series, Torchwood was all hush-hush. Yet, in the second series, almost everyone in Cardiff knows about (and seems to despise) Torchwood. It wasn't until rewatching Utopia that I realized why. While Jack was gone, Gwen was in charge. Gwen is also the newbie who has no idea how to do stuff. It is perfectly plausible that somehow, she managed to f*ck something up so badly, that the general populace knows about the existence of Torchwood. Tropers/Margo196
  • Torchwood was barely hush-hush in season one, though. It's a little hard when they have a big van that says "Torchwood" and whenever Jack enters a crime scene Jack loudly announces Torchwood's presence. It would be inaccurate and baffling to blame Gwen and Gwen alone when the whole team lacked subtlety. - EMY 3 K
• A lot of people have complained that it was stupid of the government in the Children of Earth miniseries to try to kill Torchwood to keep the past dealings with the 456 secret, instead of asking an elite monster-fighting force for help with the current 456 situation. Well yeah, it was, but it wasn't supposed to not be stupid of them. We're talking about politicians here. It's in keeping with reality for covering their asses to be their number one priority over things like saving the world.
• Lots of people hate "Countrycide". Me, I didn't, but only because I realized it was making a not so subtle point: At times, human bastardry is far more freaky and twisted than any alien presence could be. True, it is disappointing there was no alien presence at all, but when Jack just wanted to kill them all (correctly, knowing they were sick sociopaths far more twisted than an alien threat) and Gwen (naively, in a case of Wrong Genre Savvy, thinking they just had a Blue and Orange Morality she wanted to understand) tried to figure them out, I realized RTD was basically foreshadowing the true horror we humans can be capable of in Children of Earth and Miracle Day. - Rpgingmaster
• Why did the 456 constantly flail around and puke over the walls of its enclosure? Well, it's an alien junkie!
• From the flashback in "Fragments," we find out that Ianto only started wearing suits after trying to get a job in Torchwood several times and getting summarily rejected by Jack. Ianto probably interpreted Jack's rejection to be in part due to his youth and wears suits around the workplace to be treated like an adult, much like how a lot of interns or entry-level employees dress more formally to be taken more seriously!
• Gwen speech from "Children Of Earth" theorizing the Doctor hasn't shown up because he ashamed of the humans action. Letting millions of children be used as drugs seems rather out of character for The Doctor no matter how mad he is, until you relies Gwen doesn't really know the Doctor aside from the man who occasionally save the world, so it makes sense that she might think that even though Doctor Who fans who watched him years would disagree.

Fridge Horror

• In "Exit Wounds," John Hart ties Jack by the arms to the ceiling while Jack is dead. When Jack wakes up, he spends a few seconds screaming and struggling. It didn't hit me until after I finished the episode that, just for those moments, he thought he was back on The Valiant. - Maxwell_Edison
• In "Exit Wounds", Jack's brother is kept in suspended animation at their base. The base that just happened to, y'know, completely blow up destroying everything inside in series 3.
  • The big one in "Exit Wounds": Jack decides to let himself be buried underground for 2000 years... yet a few minutes/2000 years later, he pops up again fresh as a daisy fully remembering why he was buried and not being at all mad from it. Clearly he's gotten so mad he's looped back round again. Or something.
  • In the same episode, Owen, the team's literal walking dead man whose consciousness inhabits a corpse that can't repair itself, gets trapped in a room about to be flooded with the waste from a nuclear reactor and desintegrated. Which means, basically, he's just been transformed into a cloud of sentient, conscious radioactive particles. And you thought Jack's fate was bad. Was Chris Chibnall asleep at his keyboard that day or what?
• In the episode Captain Jack Harkness, we learn that our beloved Captain stole his name from an officer who died in a training accident. Our Jack meets and falls in love with said officer, and snogs him in full view of all his colleagues the day before he is destined to die. It's entirely possible in that era that the original Jack was then murdered by his comrades for being a homosexual, and his death passed off as a training accident.
  • Plausible, however there were more casualties than the original Jack Harkness. But then again it would be rare for an event such as original Jack's death to be a fixed point in te so the cause of death could be the afformentioned hate crime.
• What happened to the Torchwood team in the Year That Never Was? Chances are they were all murdered for the Master's amusement or just for trying to raise rebellion against him. No wonder Jack becomes much mellower and more protective of them in Season 2. Also worth noting is that he takes his relationship with Ianto much more seriously, even asking him out soon after he came back!
  • Confirmed. The Master sent them on a wild goosechase to the Himalayas where they probably either died in a blizzard or were killed there. Jack goes nuts upon hearing it.
    • Word of God says that the Master caused an avalanche, but that the team survived and managed to crawl back to basecamp. What happened after they got back to Cardiff, however, was undoubtedly horrific.
• Red is Ianto,Owen and Tosh's color.-Lillium
• In Doctor Who The End of Time, the Master changes every person on Earth into his genetic clone, including those who are dead and buried. There's already Fridge Horror there in that we aren't told whether the dead went back to being dead once the effect was undone; it gets worse when you remember that Tosh and Ianto were buried on Earth.
• In "Out of the Rain", there was a circus group who was stealing the breaths of people to add to their audience and the only way to restore the victims back was to get the vial. Near the ending scene, the villain tosses the bottle, killing off everybody except a child. While it sounds like a happy ending, keep in mind that those killed included that said child's entire family. Enjoy life as an orphan!
  • Made worse that they mentioned they didn't completely wipe out the threat either.