The Twilight Streets

The Twilight Streets features Torchwood Season One's only recurring villain, the mysterious Bilis Manger. The plot starts out centering on a mysterious neighborhood in Cardiff called Tretarri, that makes Captain Jack physically ill to enter (and has done ever since Jack arrived in Great Britain in the late 1800s). The rest of the plot is hard to explain as it's rather complicated, but basically we learn that the God/Demon/Alien entity named Abaddon (destroyed by Torchwood in the big climactic episode of Season One) was a necessary force to keep in check a rival God/Demon/Alien entity named Pwccm.

Bilis Manger, it seems, was the "Seconder" (helper?) for Abaddon, while Bilis' twin/doppelganger/relative (?) named Cafard Manger was the Seconder for Pwccm. Anyway, Abaddon's destruction upended the balance between Light and Dark, so the balance has to be put right and the details of exactly how that works is quite fuzzy in my head, but it involves kidnapping Torchwood, holding a big street party, and all kinds of other weird stuff. I think there's time-travel and metaphysics involved too, and how any of this relates to a consistent Torchwood mythos I have no idea.

If the balance isn't put right, a possible alternate future is shown where the Dark (or the Light?) will possess Tosh and Owen and lead them to create the "Torchwood Empire" which has almost unlimited power by harnessing the power of Jack's ability repeatedly rise from the dead. These scenes are interesting, much like the original X-Men Days of Future Past storyline.

Plot gymnastics aside, there are some other interesting things in the book.

* We get a look at World War II Torchwood, as Jack ferries a captured alien from Torchwood One (London) to Torchwood Three (Cardiff). Torchwood Three, at that time, seems to be made up of a woman named Llinos King, a very hard-nosed woman boss named Tilda Brennan, and a guy Jack has a big crush on named Greg Bishop.

*In the modern day, we meet an interesting new character named Idris Hopper, who works in the Mayor's office and is immune to Ret-Con pills (at least the first version, which only 1/80,000 people are immune too; Jack says they've developed a new version that works on all but 1/800,000). UPDATE: Wikipedia informs me that this is a character from the Doctor Who episode "Boom Town." Yay continuity!

*We learn that Torchwood Two (Glasgow) is helmed by a strange old man named Archie, who isn't very technologically proficient (touched on briefly in the Torchwood Magazine # 14's comic strip "The Selkie").

* There's a brief but well-written discussion between Gwen and Ianto on the latter's bisexuality.