Tony goes toe to toe with Captain John.
This may not end well…
Imagine you had a sports
car. Top of the line, tricked out and pimped out exactly to your liking.
Would you let Captain John
Hart borrow the keys?
Ah well. It was a nice
cosmos while it lasted. Buckle up, pilgrims, we’re about to go for a spin.
Bottom line, from the
moment he first gun-danced his way into Torchwood and kicked the ever-living
crap (a phrase which has more meaning here than in most places) out of Captain
Jack Harkness, Captain John Hart, late of the time agency, late to most places
where there isn’t a bar, has been the bad boy of the Torchwood world.
Technically responsible for the deaths of about a third of the team, he added
that frisson of real danger that Jack, bless him, had lost a little in his
quest to be more like the Doctor with the bleeding hearts.
John Hart is exactly the
drunk-ass, punk-ass, wildly sexy, madly irresponsible, shoot-it-and-see kind of
maniac you think he is, and that, whether secretly or blatantly, is what you
always want him to be.
Setting that maniac
loose in time and space sounds like a very bad idea, but nevertheless, here we
are in The Restored, with John initially back in Restoration England,
technically looking for the Resurrection Gauntlets. You’ll remember those if
you saw Season 1 of TV Torchwood. They’re…really not where they should be, and
they’re quickly getting John involved in some trouble with Oliver Cromwell’s
spiked but nevertheless altogether rather chatty head. In between his ordinary
adventures, which sound like the slightly more X-rated version of every
historical Carry On film ever made (Carry On Charlie II?), he has to
hunt down the person or persons responsible for bringing a shedload of bodies
to life, retrieve the gauntlets and get out of there with both his life and his
unmentionables intact.
Otherwise…y’know…Restoration
Zombie Apocalypse.
So…no pressure there then.
The big difference you
notice immediately about this set as opposed to any other Torchwood you care to
name is that it’s utterly irreverent to not only the historical period, but also
to the conventions of narrative storytelling and even to some extent to the
listener. It’s the John Hart school of doing things, baby, and that’s got its
own fourth wall-breaking, pop culture-referencing spacepunk vibe to it. Early
on, you’ll know if it’s for you or not, because early on it’s spread quite
thickly (Oh, make up your own jokes, who’s to stop you?), and you’ll know
whether you love it or whether it’s like nails down an eyeball to you.
The Restored starts making more sense the further in you go (seriously,
go nuts (ahem), there’s really no-one to stop you), and the more the story of
the gauntlets is revealed. The joy about it is that everything’s only revealed
in between sex romps, panting aristocratic hussies, closeted lesbians with
telescope fetishes and oh yeah, did I mention? The endless armies of the undead
who seriously won’t shut up.
When you find out what’s
really going on, it’ll still take you aback, and even as people die horribly,
John Hart has difficulty locating his empathy. But then you almost don’t want
him to discover his softer side. That’s more or less what Jack’s for.
If The Restored is
a historical sex romp with zombies, his next stop in Escape From Nebazz
is solid space adventure with a loony twist and quite a lot of drinking and
farting. Imagine, if you will, a wooden space prison. Imagine one of the
prisoners, the gloriously named Dr Magpie (more glorious still if you’ve
followed New Who with a magnifying glass). She made the Resurrection Gauntlets.
Annnd she’s conducting experiments on mental enhancements.
Because what could ever go
wrong with that?
Imagine Jack Hart posing
as a prison guard, fairly desperately trying to get Dr Magpie to fix the
wretched gauntless of zombification, and subsequently getting involved in your
significantly-above-average (it’s David Llewellyn, after all) zombie fungus
life cycle prison break drama, with added giant wooden space shark. Sound fun?
Is fun. Is surprisingly fun, actually, because when the episode starts, it
doesn’t promise anything like the kind of mayhem you’ve just escaped from in The
Restored. Leave it to David Llewellyn is clearly the lesson to take from
this. Something bizarre and what-the-flying-fin-is-that will be along shortly.
Escape From Nebazz has an almost Red Dwarf feel
about it, crossed with 80s episodes of Prisoner Cell Block H and with
maybe just a dash of Shark-freakin’-nado – lots of people trapped in a
human garbage pod, nothing but the crushing monotony of institutionalized life
to look forward to. Then along comes Magpie and her brain-altering experiments,
and along comes John and his gloves of seriously-these-freaking-things, and
before you know it, you’re hurtling to oblivion, being eaten alive by wooden
space-sharks, or absorbed into entirely other life forms on what feels like it
must be a Tuesday.
As if all that’s not bad
enough, John bumps into Captain Perfect-Teeth Harkness towards the end of this
story, and the two of them ride the absolute bejesus out of the next episode
together.
In Peach Blossom
Heights, they find themselves trapped in a kind of Peyton Place for
child-humans. People who’ve never heard of sex (wow, that’s a busy afternoon on
audio). People who have no concept of childbirth. People who, quite frankly,
live in blissful ignorance of everything but their own existence minute to
minute.
You know there’s gonna be
something hideous going on there, right?
Sinister mascots roaming
the suburban streets by night hideous enough for you? No? How about people who
just ‘move away’ or ‘win competitions to go somewhere else’ and are never seen
again, and actually are disturbingly quickly forgotten? Getting a vibe of the
what-the-hellness yet?
This is a story that
starts weird, gets weirder, turns more than a little bit creepy, and yet, for
all its ghastly potential, ends up being at least a little sweet. In among the
horror. It’s not at any point quite what you think it is, which given
the premise is really rather saying something. Smiley suburban neighbours from
hell has already been done in Torchwood audio, with Jack and Ianto foiling an
alien invasion by attending weekly barbecues and being terribly nice to
people. This is something different to that, and while you might get close to
what’s really going on, it will still surprise you when you finally understand
it.
Plus, there really is lots
and lots of grandly experimental sex before the end.
So…that’s nice.
To be fair though, you
need something nice before you head into Darker Purposes. Darker
Purposes is what happens if you smash Kind Hearts And Coronets with
the Space-Borgias, repeatedly, till something bleeds, and gurgles, and dies.
The Resurrection Gauntlets
(Yep, still them, still here, still dragging John through time and space) are
needed to sort out the last will and testament of one of the galaxy’s richest,
nastiest, deadest men. But of course, one of the richest, nastiest men in the
galaxy will have children. Children who’ve inherited at least his nastiness,
and who intend to inherit his riches too. Game on for Last Sibling Standing,
with John in the middle like a sacrificial chew toy thrown to the wolves. When
you play the Game of Gauntlets, you win or you die. Annnnd if you die, you
probably get brought back to life until you say what your killer wants to hear
in any case.
It would be spoiling the
final episode, and to some extent the arc of the set, to explain how – and
indeed, if – John gets out of Darker Purposes, but it certainly
adds a grimmer note than anything we’ve dealt with so far in the set. Which
given that we dealt with a Restoration Zombie Apocalypse in Episode 1 is really
going somewhat.
We’re not as yet sure
whether the Sins of Captain John is intended to become an occasional
series, like the Lives of Captain Jack, or whether it will forever be
just what it is, a mad handful of hours with James Marsters giving of his dandy
time pirate. What’s certainly true after this first set though is that David
Llewellyn’s given it a tone and a pace unlike anything else even at Big Finish,
and that there’s certainly plenty of scope for further sets. Unless you
have the energy of Captain John though…you’re probably gonna need a nice lie
down before you run with him again.
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