twincityhacker

This came up in a locked post, but it just sort of crystallized some things I've been working on for Jack. Namely, why does he keep showing up in World War II? He's fought in the war there, he's met at least four of his great loves there (Rose, the Doctor, Estelle, Jack), and he looks like he's from the 1940s.

So, this is the part I get to speculate from.

First, I have to mention that 99% of the fandom codes the Daleks as Nazis. From their extreme efficiently to cause suffering for whom ever they run across to their emphasis on racial purity, their for all intensive purposes Nazis - only they time travel, and they're aliens.

This coding as Daleks equals Nazis allows us to extrapolate some of human history onto universal history. Which is probably because is somewhat petty, but it's all metaphor anyway, right?

Anyway, in "Captain Jack Harkness," Torchwood!Jack tells Real!Jack that he went to war as a boy, against the "worst possible creatures imaginable." We also leaned in "Bad Wolf" that he's seen those ships before, and that they were all supposed to be gone.

These statements taken together could mean that he fought against the Daleks, but... I can't help but think that he didn't.

During the War War II people allied together who wouldn't touch each other otherwise, and the alliance blew apart pretty much the second that they started fighting. But, it didn't go further than spying on the homefronts of the countries in question, though there was fighting between the two sides in other places on the globe.

But what if it didn't?

The Daleks started invading someplace, then one day they just vanished. And if they were holding off the Daleks, even just barely, those people must have been organized. But they were organized for war, and those who could organize for peace weren't at the top or dead in the war.

So, of course, someone does something stupid. A group betrays the alliance and tries to grab power, plunging the whole group to civil war. And everyone hates betrayal, usually worse than they hate the people who just go about killing things.

So, what does this all mean? Maybe Jack's "worst creatures you could possibly imagine" were betrayers to the alliance. And extending it he went to war "as a boy" against the betrayers, he was probably too young to fight against the Daleks. Which leaves him just watching something like the Blitz or Dresden or Warsaw just happen - which is why he recast himself in the RAF, so he could do something about it, on the definite "good guys" side.

Because, really, I'm not sure what side he was on earlier.

Of course, I could be completely wrong and he got caught up in the very beginnings of the Time War. Or he saw the Daleks while he was working at the Time Agency. Or any sort of thing, really.

Though, the idea that Jack had done a lot of things before we meet him in "The Empty Child" is obvious.