Lute - Are you sure sentience is a requirement? 
StG
I always heard him reffered to as a “Try-Sexual” - he’ll try anything.
Well, they wouldn’t let us hear Eve Miles say “hard-on.”
But Gordon Ramsey’s use the word several times–on Sunday morning!
I’m reasonably sure that he won’t attempt to copulate with Felis silvestris; those cat-women, on the other hand…
So… Jack ends up becoming William Shatner, then?
The bald one only went after women. 
A few points about Jack’s background that nobody mentioned yet
Before Jack was a conman he was a Time Agent. (It’s not quite clear exactly what that is, some sort of Time Police, perhaps). His face was used on recruitment posters in the Boeshane Nebula, so he became known as The Face Of Boe.
One day he discovered that his employers had erased two years of his life from his memory. This is the reason why he left, and became a conman. We don’t know yet what happened in those two years, nor why they were hidden from him. Presumably all will be revealed later.
Jack Harkness isn’t his real name. He borrowed the name from a pilot that was killed in WW2. He actually met the original Jack shortly before his death in an episode of Torchwood. He was gay, too. I don’t think we know his original name.
Thanks, all! I had seen the episodes, I just couldn’t remember the details. Much appreciated.
It’s “Boeshane Peninsula” and it’s not clear eactly when he was a poster boy but presumably it’s before he became a Time Agent.
aw man… no offense, but he’s such nice man candy! it’d be a darn shame for us hetero girls if he wasn’t ‘available’ to us… 
I think it is pretty safe to assume that Cap’n Jack and The Face of Boe are one and the same.
In the future when the face is dying he tells the doctor that the doctor is not alone. He knows this because in TFOB’s past when he was still Cap’n he and the doctor meet up and play with The Master. Yet at that point in the Doctor’s timeline when TFOB tells him he is not alone the Doctor had not yet met up again with the Master.
Or as the Doctor put it (in “The Doctor Dances”): “So many species, so little time.”
On the topic of Torchwood being censored: Whether any scenes have been cut by BBC America will have to be answered either by people who’ve seen the UK-aired episodes, or after the DVDs come out. As for language, in addition to the F-word being bleeped, Gwen called Owen something in “Day One”, probably “cunt”, that wasn’t bleeped but blurred into a sort of a coughing sound.
I’ll take your word for it.
I thought he was a poster boy FOR the Time Agency, i.e. after he joined. And he was one of their earliest recruits, too. The first of the few.
As Jack puts it, he “used to be a poster boy when [he] was a kid in the Boeshane Peninsula.” Unless he considers himself a kid when he signed up, this was before that.
Yer missin’ the point.
I wasn’t completely sold on the show until the kiss between the Captains Harkness. That was the most realistic kiss I’ve seen on TV. I’m in for season two.
I’m curious which series/episodes clarify these, particularly the erasing two years.
Most of the info on Jack’s background is revealed in the Series One “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances” two-parter and the Series Three “Utopia/Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords” episodes. The two lost years is from, I think, “The Doctor Dances”.
Jack’s history as a Time Agent, including, I believe, the missing years was in The Empty Child.
The implication that he’s the Face of Boe, due to having that nickname as a model on the Boeshane Peninsula before being a Time Agent was in Last of the Time Lords.
The stuff about his name was in the Torchwood episode Captain Jack Harkness.
Ooh, having recently ordered (but not having yet received) DVDs of Sapphire & Steel, I wonder if the “Time Agent” bit is a reference of more or less obliqueness to the “Operatives” of that series? Were any of the time people referred to as “agents” in S&S?