User blog:Pinguinus/Fan Theory on the Face of Boe



I wanted to share a quick fan theory I had the other day with all of you.

(Spoilers for Season 3 follow.)

Now, one thing that's niggled at me ever since The End of the World was the fact that five billion years in the future, when the earth itself is on its last legs and Homo sapiens sapiens has evolved into new breeds, pieces of Earth culture like "Tainted Love" and Britney Spears' "Toxic" are still remembered and associated with the ancient homeworld.

Now, I like Soft Cell as much as the next bloke, but it seems a bit unlikely that in such a fundamentally massive amount of time as five billion years anyone would remember any piece of our contemporary culture at all, let alone pop music. We don't even remember what songs our caveman ancestors were singing five hundred thousand years ago, and five billion years is longer than multicellular life has existed on this planet.

My headcanon? The Face of Boe has made his fortune marketing Earth culture, keeping it alive in the process.

The Face of Boe is strongly implied in *Last of the Time Lords* to be an aged Jack Harkness, who has lived billions of years as a function of his immortality. If this is true, then he forms a single continuous link between 21st Century Earth and the far-flung future.

Perhaps he felt a nostalgia for the 21st century--it was, after all, when his beloved Torchwood team operated, and appears to have been the setting of the last of his legendary adventures. Perhaps he recorded his favorite pieces of entertainment and kept them over the centuries, for his own personal enjoyment.

Eventually, the rest of society forgot all about them. "Tainted Love" was played for the last time, and millennia passed without anyone speaking the name "Britney Spears." Eventually, the aging Face of Boe hatched an idea: he opened a corporation for selling and distributing these classic songs, either marketing them as "retro" or passing them off as brand new. Over millions of years he learned how to time the releases perfectly with the trends of society, to the point that not a millennium passed without one of his favorite songs hitting critical acclaim across a hundred galaxies, lining his increasingly vast pockets.

That's how the Face of Boe is wealthy enough to buy a front seat to witness the end of Earth, and that's why "Tainted Love," "Toxic," and the names of cities like "New York" survived over the eons.

Is this what Russel T. Davies intended? Probably not.

Is this in keeping with what we first see of Jack Harkness, the time-traveling con man? Heck yes.

Thanks for reading.