Captain Jack (John Barrowman) returns in time for Season Two, walking into the middle of a hostage situation, in which Torchwood faces an alien blowfish (Paul Kasey). Jack solves it by shooting the blowfish in the head. Back at the Hub, the team asks him where he’s been, and he says he went to see his doctor. They go back to work when a corpse bearing alien energy is found in a carpark. In the middle of this, Jack receives a phone-call on his Vortex Manipulator.
He meets with a fellow Time Agent and former lover called Captain John Hart (James Marsters). He had caused a death and a public disturbance at a nightclub. After a kiss and a fight, Captain John tells Captain Jack that the Time Agency has been disbanded. The Torchwood team turns up and is introduced to John. He tells them about three cylindrical devices located in Cardiff, which are radioactive cluster-bombs, and he needs help defusing them. They split up: Jack and Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd) search an office block, Owen (Burn Gorman) and Tosh (Naoko Mori) search a warehouse, and Gwen (Eve Myles) and John search the docks.
Not terribly surprising, John turns on Gwen. He paralyzes her and locks her in a box, where she will be dead in two hours if not found. He finds Owen and Tosh and shoots Owen. He lets Ianto go, but confronts Jack, who realizes the bombs are a 51st Century con. Jack tosses the device off the building, and John does the same to Jack. John goes to the Torchwood Hub and takes an alien object from the blowfish in the morgue. The team saves Gwen, and all arrive at the Hub (Jack returning from the dead). John admits that the bombs will only triangulate the location of a diamond he is after. But it seems there is no diamond and the former lover he stole it from set a trap for John—a bomb that is now attached to him, counting down from ten.
John handcuffs himself to Gwen and swallows the key. Gwen plans to use the Rift to save the city at the cost of her own life. Jack and the others catch up with John and inject him with their own DNA, confusing the bomb, which detaches from John. Jack throws it safely into the Rift (one wonders who’s on the other side) and John frees Gwen. Before leaving, he tells Jack that he found Gray. Jack is disturbed by the news.
James Marsters asked to appear in the series, and the episode was written for him. He is mostly known as the punk vampire Spike on the Buffy and Angel series. He just calmly walks out of the Rift. Both the kiss and the fight in the bar were done by Barrowman and Marsters, mostly without stuntmen. The scene took a whole day to shoot. The blowfish was supposed to be like Finding Nemo, but evil. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang obviously refers to James Bond. There are little jokes about Buffy from James Marsters. Jack was voted rear of the year in 5094. Seeing a blowfish driving a sports car was a startling opening. The episode was accused of blending soft porn with Scooby-Doo but liked anyway for its bonkers humour.