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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