Transplant is directly inspired by an X-Files graphic novel I read years ago in which the ghost of a man who had wrongly been used for organ transplants wants his body parts back. I grounded this story in slightly more realistic terms. The perpetrator was a flesh and blood Human being with a religious mania not a ghost.

Or was it? In the first draft the Torchwood team simply drove away from the retreat feeling depressed because they couldn’t prevent the deaths of the two Anderson brothers.

“I actually thought it was some kind of alien force using the re-animated body of Michael Anderson to take back his own organs or...”

Coming from anyone other than a man who couldn’t die because aliens tinkered with his DNA, that would have sounded far-fetched.

Owen sighed.

“I wish it bloody well had been. I know how to handle aliens. And those two sad buggers would still be alive. I wanted justice for the people who had died, and for Francine’s ordeal... I wanted to save Anthony Devlin’s balls. I didn’t want anyone else to die. And certainly not like that. I feel pretty damn shitty about this day’s work.”

I later rewrote it with Munroe casting doubt on the straightforward Human nature of the murders...

This was just humans fucking it up as usual.”

“I don’t know, boss,” Munroe said. “Maybe there WAS something more to it. The lad did the murders, right enough. But think about it. How could he have extracted the marrow from every bone in the first victim’s body by himself? Or punch through a woman’s chest to reach her heart and lungs? And I’ll swear that when I took those bandages off it was the first time that body had been unwrapped since the body was embalmed. The lad might have had some kind of supernatural help.”

Owen considered that and sighed again.

“Oh, bugger it,” he said. “I hope you’re wrong. I don’t want to have to tell Anthony Devlin there’s a GHOST after his balls.”

“It was Frazer’s obsession, fuelled by his brother’s religious mania that set it all in motion,” Munroe again pointed out. “Both of them are dead. If they had inadvertently raised something beyond nature, there’s a good chance it might lie quiet with them, now.”

“Meanwhile, this goes in the ‘fucked if we know’ file,”

I think this is a stronger ending than the original, with an element of doubt about whether the case is closed.