Tony’s broken after
listening to the latest Torchwood audio.
‘How do you know your bullets will harm me? Did you think
of-’
BANG.
‘Well,
they make your arm bleed.’
There are sudden,
punch-in-the-face moments in long-running shows, and then there are shorelines,
accretions of change over time that turn the texture of the show from one thing
into another – just as there are in real life.
In Torchwood, one of the greatest
shoreline shifts was the change in Ianto Jones, from the buttoned-up,
relatively unforthcoming reception-boy and coffee-maker into the full team
member and lover of Captain Jack Harkness. It was a seismic shift in his
emotional life, finally having what he thought he needed to cure his girlfriend
Lisa of her part-Cyberisation, and failing so dreadfully, but in the wake of
that moment, he seemed to drift further and further into action, into danger,
and into Jack’s arms.
Many Torchwood fans see Jack
and Ianto as a grand romance – and certainly by the end of their time together,
there were good solid reasons to regard them that way. But while on screen we
saw glimpses of the process of their edging towards each other, what’s never
been especially clear in the on-screen world of Torchwood is how Ianto came to
recover from Lisa’s death.
One of the many joys of
the Torchwood audios from Big Finish is that they have scope to scan the whole
history of Torchwood – the history we’ve seen and the history we haven’t – and interweave
their stories against that incomplete background. In Joseph Lidster’s Broken,
we get a fairly definitive version of Ianto’s journey from post-Lisa heartbreak
through some of the on-screen adventures of Series 1, including Countrycide and
Greeks Bearing Gifts, to a confrontation with both Jack and Ianto’s own sense
of increasing despair at having, as he says, ‘nothing else’ in his life besides
work and sleep.
Let’s say this so we’re
clear – this is not Ianto as the comedy hero, as he was in Fall To Earth. This
time out, in the first story to properly unite Jack and Ianto at Big Finish,
we’re in the relatively relentless territory of Series 1 Torchwood, and we’re
peaking behind the armour of Ianto’s perfect suit, and what we find is
desolation. Ordinary, human desolation.
Like Countrycide, this is
Torchwood in one of its bleakest colours, and ultimately, it’s all down to
human beings – what they do, and the effects they have on each other. That
makes Broken a harder listen than many of the releases in the range, because
even where it could be, Lidster resists the urge to pepper it with too much in
the way of tension-breaking comedy. That’s a good decision – any way out, any
capacity to laugh too hard at itself or at life or at the things that Torchwood
does would puncture the fundamental structure of this story. So don’t, whatever
you do, go in thinking ‘Jack and Ianto – let the good times roll.’ Good times
have pretty much left the building this time around.
That said, what you get
here is an hour-long compulsion, a kind of hour-long Leonard Cohen song – and
we mean that in the best sense. Yes, it’s depressing, but it’s depressing in
that way that makes a kind of gritty poetry out of everyday life. There are
angels of mercy, and devils of corruption, and humans in between trying to just
get by and have some meaning, make some difference, find some smile that
doesn’t feel like a lie or a suit of armour. Ianto, finding a pub he can call
his local, with a good-hearted barmaid he can tell his troubles to, gradually
unfolds the depths of his despair, his feelings of pointlessness, of being
nothing and having nothing. Melanie Walters as Mandy the barmaid is very
naturalistic as she becomes Ianto’s confidante, and potentially his life-saver
when things just get too dark and hopeless for the local boy. In fact,
Lidster’s story is almost a two-hander most of the way through, David-Lloyd and
Walters narrating their way through Ianto’s Torchwood life, without ever giving
too much away about the work of the Institute. Everything comes to a head
though when Jack walks into the bar, in search of alien shenanigans responsible
for missing people. The themes are dark, and they don’t get any lighter when
Captain Cheekbones shows his face – in fact, they come to a head of
confrontation, not just as a way of allowing Ianto to exorcise some ghosts and
some self-loathing, but in a very literal reclamation both of power over his
own life and the people in it, and a rather more notional reclamation of his
‘soul’ by what he decides to do with the power he regains.
This is one of the most
intense hours you’ll have spent in Torchwood’s company since early in Miracle
Day, and very possibly the most relentlessly dark of the audio stories so far,
despite many of them having a twist or two. This is Torchwood living up to its
adult brief, not by titillating its audience, but by treating its characters as
real, fragile, ‘broken’ human beings simply trying to get through an ordinary
or extraordinary life. While our focus is on Ianto, and David-Lloyd delivers a
solidity of performance that the on-screen show rarely demanded of his mostly
clammed-up character, it’s telling that the investigation Jack is conducting is
into people very like Ianto who have no Torchwood to save them, everyday people
who find themselves ‘broken’ by the world.
Walk any street. Whether
you see them or not, the broken are everywhere. Jack even makes the point here
that on some level, we’re all broken, all just trying to get
through a life and a human experience that’s doing its level best to beat us
down and make us quit. And Ianto goes through hell in this audio story to come
to terms with Lisa and what was done to her, the impact of that on his life, and
his relationship with both Jack and the Torchwood team as a whole. Coming
through it, he determines that he can no longer be passive, no longer be that
‘nothing’ person in an impeccable suit – and at the end of the story, we see
him take the first steps both to a fuller involvement in the work of the
Torchwood team, and to a relationship with Jack, even if, like many
relationships, it begins in catharsis, in a moment of what’s needed right there
and then.
Barrowman takes very much
a back seat in the drama here, and really speaking, despite notionally being a
‘Jack and Ianto’ story, it’s really very much Ianto who carries the
storytelling burden. Perhaps more than any of the other audio stories to date,
Broken takes us into the deeper levels of a character with whom we think we’re
familiar. As such – and because Ianto’s story is so particularly harrowing –
you may well need a lie down in a dark room and a nice cup of tea after
finishing Broken, and it’s not one you’ll immediately want to go back and re-listen
to, because it’s real enough to put you through the wringer. That said, you’ll
never forget you’ve listened to it the once, because it fills in so much
contextual and character detail about a much-loved member of the Torchwood
team, and you will go back and listen to it again eventually, once you’ve
gotten over it, and probably called all the friends you have for a solid
catch-up and a listen to the woes in their lives.
Joseph Lidster has done
perhaps the most difficult job in Torchwood audio – he’s explained the shift in
Ianto’s character and life, and he’s done it without cheap shots, without
looking away, and while making a valid sociological point into the bargain. Yes,
sure, there’s an alien involved, but really, this is the most human of
Torchwood audios to date. Get it, listen to it, have the lie down and the cup
of tea and call all your friends. Everybody’s broken somehow. It’s only through
sticking together that any kind of fix can come.
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