Reviews Torchwood - Aliens Among Us, Part 2 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s getting a classic Torchwood vibe.

Aliens Among Us is the official fifth series of Torchwood, and in many ways it’s delivering a ‘Classic Torchwood’ vibe, albeit with a few new twists – the team are back in the Hub, dealing with an alien incursion-cum-migration into Cardiff and the complexities of giving a welcome to visitors from elsewhere in the galaxy while still maintaining the human world in its (at least perceived) ‘normality.’

The first story in this box set, Love Rat is absolutely classic Torchwood – almost to the point of being a re-tread of the Day One storyline. Buckle up, everybody, it’s alien sex-parasite time again. This time with added rat-glands. So…that’s special. Especially when you have Jack Harkness, Tyler ‘anybody’s for a cute smile’ Steele and Orr on the team. It’s fast-paced, fun and entertaining, without being overly demanding in terms of its social conscience, meaning it gets you into the set quickly, almost before you realise you’re in.

A Kill To A View, by Mac Rogers, is rather meatier fare and a parable of modern shallowness, the will to power, and the fight to be the king of any given swamp – it’s a pitched battle for the best apartment in a block, and death by dinner party, a kind of Come Die With Me, without the arch narration. That said, if it’s arch narration you’re looking for, A Kill To A View brings back Torchwood’s middle-manager of death, Bilis Manger (played as ever by Murray Melvin), organising the ascent of the most brutally bloody-minded ‘winners’ among the apartment block’s tenants. As with the on-screen Bilis Manger story, there’s a logic to why he’s doing what he’s doing, but compared to the action that it motivates, the logic falls away and cowers in the background, leaving A Kill To A View one to enjoy on its own terms. Those terms thankfully include a shining turn by Mr Colchester (Paul Clayton), as his husband (played by increasingly omnipresent member of the Big Finish Repertory Company Ramon Tikaram) is threatened by Manger’s schemes and the tenants from Hell.

Zero hour, by Janine H Jones, is a tale that gets its curiosity-hooks deep into the listener early. It develops a theme that’s been toyed with in Doctor Who and Sherlock – the people who move through our cities and lives without us ever really noticing them, and what they might actually be up to – but delivers on the strength of its core concept with a beautifully dark Torchwood touch as it takes Tyler Steele into a courier firm with several differences. ‘Deliverables’ is a firm with an alien touch, and it plots its workers’ movements down to the ever-productive second, with an app that drives their schedules – but where is it taking them, and why? There’s some deliciously geeky science at the heart of this story, but capped with the nihilistic doctrine that claims individual human lives don’t matter in the picture of the whole. While Love Rat is fun and easily digestible, and A Kill To A View has a touch of the sardonically satirical that makes it irresistible, it’s in Zero Hour that you’ll probably stick with Aliens Among Us Part 2 for the sheer power of the concepts and the storytelling – and it’s the episode of this box set that will stay with you longest and make you think hardest afterwards.

That said, The Empty Hand by Tim Foley punches at a heavyweight level too, especially in the era of ‘fake news,’ the ‘post-truth society’ and the delicate balance between believing victims who have the courage to speak up about abuse and the potential to direct an emotional public into a lynch mob. Sergeant Andy ‘Nice Guy’ Davidson has been accused of a race-hate killing. What’s more, there’s CCTV to prove he did it. But Andy has no memory of the action – with Cardiff balanced on a knife-edge of acceptance and hate between various groups, is it possible that Andy’s gone off the deep end of a nervous breakdown? Or is someone manipulating the public into a frenzy and using Andy as a trigger?

This is Torchwood, don’t forget – nothing’s ever entirely as certain or as straightforward as you might think, and The Empty Hand is a deeply effective and affecting piece of writing and performance, most particularly from Tom Price as Andy. Ultimately, the question remains – whoever’s right or wrong in a complex case, can anyone’s life ever be the same again after incendiary events tear lives apart?

The third box set is destined to round out Torchwood – Aliens Among Us. While the first set kicked us off with a degree or purpose and direction, the second box set is far more loosely connected, like the episodes of Series 1 or 2, rather than part of a bigger overall picture, as with Children of Earth or Miracle Day. There is a thread running through the episodes of the second box set, but it’s much more thinly woven than it was in set 1, leaving each of the episodes here to focus on the issues and situations with which they deal. As such, the second box set is a well-chosen collection of stories, rather than a layered arc that builds episode by episode. It’s new Torchwood, certainly, with a very early feel, updated for the post-Brexit world.

Reviews Torchwood Aliens Among Us, Part 1 by Tony J Fyler

Tony holds up a sign saying ‘Aliens Welcome Here.’

Torchwood on TV arguably hit its peak in its third series, Children of Earth. There, it first really pulled off a series-long arc that worked, combined a massive worldwide threat with the intimacy of personal impact, as human children were sacrificed to alien drug addicts to stop them destroying the world and a personal love story into which every fan bought ended with a tragic death, to which there remains to this day a real-life shrine in Cardiff Bay.

Torchwood Series 4 then had a few jobs to do – most notably, with only two of the original team members left, it had to add new blood to the dynamic, and it chose to do it over an even longer single-arc story, Miracle Day.

Miracle Day was bloated, overlong, with a genius central idea that ultimately was poorly paid off, and the new members of Torchwood failed to charm, as the original team – despite being as inherently charmless a bunch of characters as you could wish to meet – had done.

For the last few years, Torchwood has been in the hands of Big Finish, delivering audio adventures from up and down the arc of Torchwood history, from its Victorian beginnings to the spacefaring far future.

But it’s never dared to do this before.

Torchwood – Aliens Among Us is an official Series 5. It takes us beyond the events of Miracle Day, which of course means it faces many of the same problems Miracle Day did – it’s going to be a long arc, and as Miracle Day did, it retains only two central Torchwooders from the early series – the immortal Captain Jack Harkness, played by John Barrowman, and the heart of Torchwood Cardiff, Gwen Cooper, played by Eve Myles. There are other elements of consistency, most particularly Gwen’s husband Rhys, but in essence Aliens Among Us faces the Miracle Day challenge – can it build a new central Torchwood team that makes us want to take the long journey of the series arc.

Part 1 is made up of four one-hour episodes, and hopes are raised early, as Changes Everything (Series Five, Part 1, Episode 1 – keep up!) explodes across your mind, with journo and hacker Tyler ‘such a porn name’ Steele being courted to join the team, alongside our two stalwarts and already in-situ newbie Mr Colchester – to all intents and purposes an ex-army bean counter who gets things done. Changes Everything is written by experienced hand James Goss, and wears its post-Brexit social realism proudly, unfolding as a story about refugees coming to Cardiff from other countries – and beyond – and the tensions that such integration brings to the surface. Colchester, played by Paul Clayton, is actually the most successful new addition to the team, as he’s possessed of the acerbic judgment that stops Torchwood ever being too smug, too pleased with itself. He’s a great new anchorweight in the team, and Clayton delivers him with a weary sarcastic realism that makes you instantly want to spend more time in his presence. Steele, less so – he’s young and cocky, and the role he’s aiming to take is perhaps too near the bone, but there’s more to him, and certainly more to his journey, than at first appears on a surface listen. Be warned when you listen – the notion that there’s more going on than there seems to be is absolutely valid, and if one central character sounds unlike themself…well, keep listening.

Episode 2, Aliens and Sex and Chips and Gravy, also by Goss, is a little less successful, mostly because the villain of the piece is so successfully geared to annoy the living daylights out of you. Imagine the hen night from alien hell, for the Bridezilla From Beyond The Stars…and then imagine you’re her chauffeur-cum-bodyguard. There’s a lot of driving around with a spoiled rotten teenage hellion in the back in Episode 2, and while there’s at least some solid story here, and we learn more about the main alien threat in this episode, sometimes the screechy foot-stamping tantrum routine delivered by Sophie Coquohon as ‘Madrigal’ is a little too real to make for enjoyable listening.

But it’s really in the second half of this first box set where things start getting a little pedestrian. Episode 3, Orr, by Juno Dawson, has some great inventive strokes – particularly in terms of a specific threat the aliens bring with them in terms of what they’re actually looking for, and the screamingly obvious parallels with the modern world, where dialogue seems impossible with a group of zealots with a higher purpose, but the addition of Orr as a new Torchwood team member feels a little old hat, inasmuch as listeners who are across the TV sci-fi waterfront will recognise an idea from (among others) an old episode of Red Dwarf, though this is Torchwood, so the idea of Orr is given a modern gritty twist, with overtones of sex trafficking, victim conditioning and the challenge for an established understanding of the world that’s brought by trans-equality and pronouns. To tell you much more than that would spoil the episode’s surprises, which are impressive, but the episode does end on something of a literal damp squib, rather than the big bang it goes out of its way to convince you is coming.

And Episode 4, Superiority Complex by AK Benedict, similarly recycles some fairly old sci-fi ideas, but gives them a suitably Torchwood wash and brush-up. The aliens are properly getting their feet under the table in Cardiff Bay, and open up a sentient hotel that’s ‘aliens-only’ in terms of the guests. There are some highly guessable elements of this episode, but it does rather uncomfortably pose a question of relevance to the Brexiting world in which we find ourselves – if aliens don’t come in ray-guns blazing, but work, and establish their community, and then start establishing exclusionary areas, at what point do you draw the line between immigration and invasion?

Torchwood Aliens Among Us, Part 1 has a lot of potential – there’s much, much more going on already than we see on the surface – the middle episodes bring that screamingly into focus, and perhaps, just perhaps, it’s significant that new cast member Alexandria Riley as Ng is credited, but never explicitly heard to be named in this first box set. There’s a sense of credible continuation from the events of Miracle Day (and the John and Carol Barrowman novel, Exodus Code), there are new characters who appeal immediately, and new characters who feel instinctively like they’re going to have a journey and an arc throughout Aliens Among us. Big Finish, more than Miracle Day ever did, gets our teeth firmly sunk into those characters and their potential journeys, and drags us along for the ride. Yes, there are some recycled ideas along the way – Bridezilla, Orr, Sentient Hotels – but this feels like Torchwood brought bang up to date in the post-Brexit-vote world, with Torchwood rebuilding from more or less scratch. Sure, if you’ve been a fan from (ahem) Day One, you’ll get a lot more from this new version, but it’s also a highly effective jumping-on point for a whole new generation of Torchwood fans.