Tony’s lost in the
library.
The Torchwood Archive is,
above all else, ambitious. In just over two hours, it takes in a grand span of
Torchwood versions and personnel, from Victoria to the ‘end’ of the Torchwood
archive, on a lonely rock in space. It brings together recollections from all
your Torchwood favourites, as well as a bunch of lesser-known but well-referenced
Torchwood operatives, as well as finally filling in the gaps in our knowledge
of the cold war between Torchwood and the Committee.
Yes, here we get to
understand where the Committee came from, what their plans have been, who
eventually wins, how the Russians were involved, whether Torchwood and the
committee are actually the same thing, what the hell the deal is with the Red
Key, whose side Norton Folgate’s really on and all the other questions you
might have had outstanding about the first two series of Torchwood on audio.
That said, this is
Torchwood that takes what we know and paints it against a very much broader
timespan than we’re used to, stretching from the Institute’s creation and the
arrival and cataloguing of the first artefact in the archive, right through to
a far future when someone comes to return the Red Key, also known, for its
propensity to keep popping up, as the Bad Penny, to Torchwood and then to shut
the archive down. We hear Jack and Ianto, Gwen and Rhys, Tosh (still doing her
‘getting squiffy and talking to strangers about her work’ thing from Greeks
Bearing Gifts), Andy and Norton, as well as Yvonne Hartman, Suzie Costello, and
Alex Hopkins (you’ll remember him as soon as you hear him). It’s a real
Torchwood birthday party, and we access their various lives through both some
hologrammatic representations and some ‘archive footage’ to tell the story of
the Bad Penny and the Committee.
The driving force of the
story is a man named Jeremiah, who, on a diversion from his honeymoon, takes on
the mission of returning the Bad Penny to the Torchwood archive. Having had a traumatic experience with it on
the way to the archive, he demands to know the whole story – much as, to be fair,
listeners are doing by this point, having been teased with detail after detail
and twist after twist about the MacGuffin of Bad Luck and how it might
conceivably relate to Torchwood and the Committee.
How successful the story
is depends really on your ability to maintain an interest in the Bad Penny and
follow it through its adventures with Torchwood and the Committee – unlike the
episodes along the way that have led us here, there’s little else
to take the storytelling burden this time round, so everything in some way ties
back into these central questions. That said, there’s plenty of good solid
logic in the vignettes that we get to see along the way in James Goss’ script –
we hear Torchwood Cardiff’s Suzie Costello find a way to palm the wretched little locket
of misfortune off on Torchwood London, which, as Yvonne Hartman briefly tells
us, was pretty much the beginning of the end as far as Torchwood 1 was
concerned (raising the tantalising possibility that the Doctor’s involvement
with the Dalek-Cybermen stand-off was actually all a product of whatever curse
or probabilistic algorithm powers the hateful artefact). We hear Ianto Jones,
in the wake of the Cyber-attack, desperately searching for his girlfriend Lisa,
and being given the Bad Penny. We even hear Victoria command Jack Harkness to throw
the thing in to the Cardiff Rift. Tosh has perhaps the most sensible idea about
it – if it’s a beacon for misfortune, then if you can reverse engineer it, you
can create a beacon of good luck. One of her ideas for such a thing is a
delicious Easter Egg in the script, that fans won’t fail to spot.
And so it goes on – the
script is deliberately non-linear, and acts more like a lucky dip of snippets
and treats, each of which adds to our understanding of the Bad Penny at the
various points in its history that have helped forge the relationship between
Torchwood and the Committee. The bottom line of which is, as we say, we get to
learn where the Committee came from, how it was related to Torchwood, and how
that relationship progressed beyond the point at which we last left it.
As a way of wrapping up
the first two years of Torchwood audio stories, James Goss gives us this
grab-bag of answers, treats and special moments which is more than the sum of
its parts, coalescing into a coherent picture that glues all the previous Committee-based
stories together (yes, even the one about the android sex-dolls. In fact, especially
the one about the android sex-dolls). As a tenth anniversary special,
it succeeds if anything even further, giving us answers to questions that go
right back to the TV version of the show – Ianto at Torchwood 1, searching for
his Cyberwoman; what the leader of Torchwood 3 actually saw that made him
execute his entire team except Jack; how Victoria went about the business of
setting up the Institute and who the first people were to serve it. In terms of
actually resolving the Torchwood-Committee enmity, this one is equivocal –
going so far into the future shows the conflict continues strongly far beyond
the lifetime of the Torchwood with which we’re familiar, and the way this story
ends allows for a future front to be fought between the two practically defunct
enemies. But for now, The Torchwood Archive draws a notional line under the
Committee storyline, and allows the next Torchwood releases to focus on other
things should they choose to – or indeed to continue to fill in some blanks and
battles against the Committee should that be a way they want to go, though it
would be more difficult to care about past battles with the Committee, having
come so far into the future with them as The Torchwood Archive lets us.
Is The Torchwood Archive
an enjoyable way of spending two hours? Oh hell yes, without any question at
all. Is it worth your money? Unreservedly so. Will you know a lot more at the
end of it than you do right now, and will that make you happy? You betcha. The
loose-seeming structure is pulled together neatly by the end so you feel like
you’ve been part of something instructive, involving and celebratory all at
once, something magnificently larger and grander than you’ve realised as you’ve
been listening. And the story leaves you smiling, both at the wealth of treats
you’ve just enjoyed, and the equivocal ending.
Pop along to The Torchwood
Archive today and get ready to learn something new.
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