Friday, 6 July 2018

Reviews Torchwood: We Always Get Out Alive by Tony J Fyler



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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