Look behiiiiiiind you,
says Tony.
Ohhhh, the creepiness.
Torchwood – We Always Get
Out Alive is at least a two-change-of-underwear audio release. So don’t say you
weren’t warned.
The genius behind it
though lies in Guy Adams’ story construction, and the nailed-to-your-ears
naturalism of Eve Myles and Kai Owen as Gwen Cooper and Rhys Williams
respectively. The normality of their bantering, their bickering, their
finishing each other’s sentences and frequently skipping what’s actually said
and going straight to the relationship subtext is a thing of sheer brilliance –
so much so you forget there are actors beneath the performances, and can easily
sink into the notion that this particular couple have somehow had their actual
car journey opened up for you to listen to, entirely voyeuristically.
That’s the simple premise
of this story – after saving the world from alien gruesomeness for probably the
ninth time this month, and doing it together, Gwen and Rhys are simply driving home.
Getting there though is a
matter of re-written and re-run experiences, flash-scares, deep psychological
fears being manifested and ultimately the kind of third-reel psycho-creepiness
that Stephen King’s made his living from.
The combinations here are
so finely judged you probably have to have tried to write an audio play to
really see the elegance of its construction, but if you haven’t, you’ll still
get sweat running down your spine, and an inexplicable urge to look behind you,
while also not entirely wanting to, jusssssst in case you see the things you
don’t ever want to see. Adams creates such an everyday world of alien-defeat –
the Valleys Superheros are heading home to relieve their babysitter, have a
bottle or two of wine and a takeaway, and then sleep in tomorrow.
But what do you do if all
roads lead you backwards? If the place you’re heading to seems, somehow, to no
longer exist? If you start to forget things. Words. Journeys. If you start to
hear voices. If you start to speak the words they tell you to speak…
It’s positively insidious,
this script. It crawls up your spine and squats there, while Gwen and Rhys try
to find their way home, and it has everything you could imagine – rising
resentments bubbling up from the reality of their lives, grand fears of mental
or physical frailty suddenly overcoming them, the philosophical conundrum of
defeating alien life, especially alien life that’s just going through its life
cycle. The question of who has the right to interfere with that, and ultimately
what the difference is between its intentions and the intentions of our heroes,
just trying to get through their life
cycle is uncomfortable and clammy to ponder, but with all of this, some dark
muttering a la Jack Nicholson in The
Shining, and more than a pinch of the hard-to-breath tension-building of
creepy movies like Don’t Look Now,
this is Gwen and Rhys on top form, served by a writer whose only two ambitions
here are to make their script as realistic as possible, and then slowly and
creepily drift that realism into the kind of surrealist nightmare that will
wake you up sweating with a brick on your chest.
Get Torchwood – We Always
Get Out Alive for the top-quality bantering and bickering, and for the
slow-growing, spider-up-the-trouser-leg creepiness of the premise at the heart
of the story, that complacency can kill you, and that maybe, just maybe, you’ve
seen your home, your life, your child, for the very last time. You’ll come back
and re-listen to this story, not really because you want to, but because you’ll have
to, to prove to yourself that you can do it. It’ll reward the bejesus out
of every time you listen, but when the premise is that something is trying to
stop you getting home, the very last thing you should expect is an easy ride.
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