Friday, 5 July 2019

Reviews Sargasso by Tony J Fyler



Tony’s getting twitchy as every rustling noise.

Plastic is everywhere. You know it, I know it – microplastic, and especially all the plastic that ends up dumped in the sea, is the next generation ozone layer, the ecological crisis we built for ourselves, and which might yet kill us all.

It’s absolutely irresistible then to eventually write a Nestene story that tackles the subject – the Nestenes and Autons were always a satire on disposable consumption coming back to bite us, and the idea of an alien that can enliven anything plastic becomes especially horrifying when you think of statistics about our food chain, and how, for instance, every time you eat fish these days, you’re taking in microplastics, because their level of the ecosystem is already swamped with them.

What’s more, something about oceanic plastic lends itself particularly to the octopoidal Nestene creature. Tentacles look, sound and feel extra right when emerging from an ocean, as opposed to twanging across a room on dry land.

So – Torchwood Sargasso then.

Rhys Williams, on a ship in the middle of the ocean, teams up with Kaitlin Russell (Sydney Feder), daughter of a big petrochemical giant, and Captain Anika Banaczik (Chloe Ewart), when things unexpectedly start getting a bit Nestene-tastic. Where’s gonna be the bad in that?

Nowhere, really – Torchwood Sargasso is a story you’re willing to succeed from minute one. Rhys makes a very down-to-earth alien fighter, determined, taking his example from his Gwen, not entirely sure what the hell he’s doing on a ship in the middle of nowhere but doing it anyway because above all, it’s his turn. Kaitlin is a well-written conflicted young woman, and Sydney Feder’s a gift to the script, mixing all the right ‘What the hell?’ intonations with a fantastic amount of youthful realism – one to watch or listen out for, Sydney Feder, as she goes forward in her career.

Christopher Cooper has written a kind of modern horror movie with some classic antecedents in Sargasso, Dat Boot meets It, by Stephen King – an isolated boat, an enemy that can change itself to best achieve its goals, can hide in plain sight, observe everything you do and say, and can bring even the most mundane objects to a life that kills you. Stranded, confused, Rhys, Kaitlin and Captain Anika begin to mistrust everything around them. And then a horrible extra truth is borne in on them – how do they know they are who they say they are? The game of suspicion builds effectively until a hand is played and shown, but even then, just because one person is not who they claim to be, it doesn’t automatically mean that everyone else is. That extends the threat and the tickle of suspicion at the back of your neck right to the very end of Sargasso, and delivers much of what you want from a modern Nestene story on board ship with a sea full of plastic.

Cooper knows how to pace his thrills, his creeps, his Auton reveals, and he makes a few innovations to the Nestene legend along the way – he delivers a Nestene that’s Torchwood-appropriate, but which still has its roots in the Doctor Who world, a deadly threat that’s at least partly satirical, but made real and dangerous and relevant by our world having caught up with the premise of Robert Holmes’ original Nestene stories – disposable consumption having hidden costs that kill – just in time to face an actual existential threat from the results of that disposal.

Check out Torchwood Sargasso for a cracking lead performance by Kai Owen, some solid supporting castwork (including a role for Robert Jezek – always a script-helper), and a story that brings the Nestenes screaming up to date. The horror movie elements are delivered hard, so you don’t laugh at them (at least until the danger has passed and everything’s…probably…alright), but you do get an adrenalin-rush and a rapid heartbeat. When everything around you is a threat and you’re surrounded by an ocean of plastic, Sargasso makes you wonder whether you can even trust yourself.

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