Dr. Rupesh Patanjali is a supporting antagonist in the Doctor Who spinoff show Torchwood, appearing in Children of Earth: Day One. He is a doctor at the St. Helen's Hospital A&E and a member of Johnson's team charged with infiltrating, and later destroying, Torchwood Three. He was portrayed by Rik Makarem.
Biography
Patanjali was approached by the British government asking him to help infiltrate Torchwood Three, the only remaining branch of the Torchwood Institute. Accepting, he was placed under the supervision of Agent Johnson, and ordered to attempt to attract Torchwood's attention.
After months of fruitless attempts to make contact, Patanjali came across Torchwood Three agents Jack Harkness and Ianto Jones extracting an alien from the corpse of a dead patient. Patanjali attempted to lure them by reporting a series of disappearances of the bodies of ethnic minorities from the mortuary (a plan carried out by him in an attempt to attract Torchwood's attention), but Jack responded that it was a problem for the NHS before leaving.
Patanjali later killed a patient named Chow Lee Jee in order to create another missing body, before accosting Jack (who had returned to the hospital to interrogate a child about an incident where all the children in the world chanted "We are coming" in unison) and telling him that another ethnic man had died. When Jack agreed to examine the body with him, Patanjali shot and seemingly killed him, having received orders to destroy Torchwood Three because the incident with the children heralded the return of The 456 to Earth.
However, when Johnson and her team arrived, Jack appeared to have recovered, as he was immortal. Realizing this, Johnson shot him again, before having her team plant a bomb inside Jack while he was unconscious so that he would unintentionally blow up Torchwood Three. As Jack had survived being shot by Patanjali, he was comprised and Johnson saw him as a liability and decided he needed to be silenced. When Patanjali figured this out, he tried to run away, but Johnson shot him in the back. His body was then taken to the covert Ashton Down facility.
