Who Reviews The Scent of Blood by Tony J Fyler

What’s that smell, asks Tony.

Dan ‘The Strax-Man’ Starkey!

Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor!

Properly gothic villainy!

Class warfare!

Downton Abbey with demonic forces at play!

In Victorian Edinburgh!

Buckle up, kiddies, the BBC has a stonking new audio story for you from writer Andrew Lane. It’s got everything you could possibly want, and a twist in the tail besides.

Victorian Edinburgh of course has lots to recommend it as the setting for a Doctor Who story – architecture, authoritarianism, a rising working class and potential strife between the old guard and the new. That gives the place and time all the essence of gothic horror it needs to thrill us, and Andrew Lane builds his story on that basis – there appears to be a monster stalking the streets of Edinburgh, and journalist James MacFarlane intends to get to the bottom of it, come what may. When he runs into a flamboyant man known only as the Doctor, and in the morgue at that, he gains a companion on his quest to find out exactly what’s going on.

It’s rather more complicated than even he suspects.

In The Scent of Blood, Andrew Lane delivers on both the initial gothic premise of Victorian horror, drenches the listener in Doctor Who history – this is very much a sequel story in some respects, so you’ll need your Doctor Who Reference-Spotter’s Guide - and takes us into a new way of thinking about a classic villain, and the classic response to them, all while on a darkly-tinged romp round the streets of a Victorian city with an increasingly febrile atmosphere of class warfare boiling away. There are lords and ladies in Edinburgh, to be sure, and there are frightened urban peasants – but that’s not the whole story either.

Everything we know about the particular villain features here suggests a symbiotic relationship between at least two creatures, but if that relationship is broken, can either survive alone, and if so, how would that be possible? Lane tackles what we think we know and adds new dimensions to it, which makes The Scent of Blood rather more satisfying than it would have been had he been determined to simply re-tread familiar ground in a different time and place. Here, he also takes aim at rigid notions of good, evil, and what people will be prepared to do to save their own from dark and dangerous fates. It’s like a Scottish Downton Abbey, but with secrets, important portraits, and a raving mob in the town square.

Dan Starkey, TV and audio Sontaran Supreme, has lent his voice to a solid handful of different Doctors now, and his Eighth Doctor is pretty convincing – it’s by no means an impersonation, but it has enough of a tinge of Paul McGann’s tone and manner to be an active help in convincing you you’re listening to an Eighth Doctor story, while Lane’s writing conjures a bouncier, earlier Eighth Doctor than his later, Time War-troubled version. This is a Doctor looking for interesting things and answers to mysteries, and finding them – and then having to decide where his lines are drawn. After all, there are rules about what he should do in the circumstances in which he finds himself in The Scent Of Blood.

But then, the Doctor and rules have rarely gone together with any particular comfort. When he uncovers the truth about what’s happening on the streets of Victorian Edinburgh, the lines he has to draw are rather less clear-cut than they were when he met this villain before, because the lines of harm, of damage are more blurred now too.

The Scent of Blood is a vivid replaying of a particular scenario, with more complication, more complexity and more of a sense of moral ambiguity than before. In its tone and location, it channels traditional gothic horror very effectively – but as the Doctor and MacFarlane discover here, sometimes you have to look beyond the tone of a thing to find out what’s really going on.

What’s really going on in The Scent Of Blood will surprise you, make you give a little cheer at its references to Classic Who mythos, and sweep you briskly through its newer elements to a satisfied smile at the end.

It’s an audio story that feels fundamental to the Eighth Doctor, to what he’s learned and how he approaches the universe. Give it a listen and revel in Lane and Starkey channelling the McGann Doctor’s enthusiasm, open-heartedness and sudden seriousness as he deals with a most unusual problem.

Who Reviews The Flight of the Sun God by Tony J Fyler

Here comes the sun, sings Tony.

The new Sixth Doctor and Peri audio story from the BBC, read by Nicola Bryant, is a bit of a bumper, Christmas-movie selection box of Doctor Who. It’s a disaster movie, a whodunnit, a mistaken identity comedy, a body horror creepshow – and a comment on the wisdom of letting unstable rich people run your lives.

Which in 2019, can’t be any kind of bad thing.

The Sun God of the title is a gigantic spaceship. It’s all a bit Red Dwarf in its initial purpose – it has scoops and such to suck the energy out of suns, sell the energy back to planets at a profit, and massively enrich the already monstrously rich mogul at the head of the company, the oft-mentioned, rarely-seen Spalding Revere.

When the Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive on the Sun God, naturally enough, Something Is Going Wrong. An executive engineer has been missing, apparently yomping among the pipes for several weeks now, and no-one can really be bothered to go looking for him. There are creepy eyes in the darkness of the ducting, and the ship seems to have been dipped in the golden style of one of the gaudier Egyptian emperors. Added to which, the executive board have been waiting for their lord and master to show up to a board meeting for three days, and the ship might, or might not, be where it’s supposed to be.

Oh and Spalding Revere turns out to be a dead ringer for he of the noble brow and the very loud voice – yes, for reasons that may or may not become apparent, this is a Doctor’s doppelganger story, just to add impetus to everything else.

That’s the set of operating conditions with which writer Nev Fountain presents us when we begin our journey on the Sun God. Big sun-sucking ship, looking like an Egyptian sarcophagus, weird goings-on down on the lower decks, missing mogul, Doctor-doppelganger and a ship going less right than would really be ideal.

From this positive cornucopia of elements, he weaves quite the adventure story, the tension mounting as problem follows problem. He manages to separate the Doctor and Peri effectively, each of them gaining an alternative companion for the run-time of the story, as the Doctor hob-nobs with the high-ups (who at least initially think he’s their boss), and Peri – but naturally – gets stuck in the pipes and the venting with all the curious scuttly things and whatever it is that made the engineer go missing.

There are certainly elements that will ring tonal bells here – it’s difficult to escape the feel of Voyage of the Damned, with its big extravagant ship, quest for survival and gittish mogul at the heart of the story, and the initial set-up blends elements of The Sun Makers and 42, with a dash of Pyramids of Mars at least about its décor. But Nev Fountain builds the storytelling up, crisis by crisis, so even though sometimes when a story-element appears, you find yourself thinking ‘Aha! That’ll be useful when the Thing happens!’, when the Thing then eventually does happen, you’re caught up enough in the forward momentum of the storytelling not to mind being right. And far from falling into predictability, there are surprises along the way that you won’t necessarily see coming, but which, when everything is unravelled, make a satisfying sense.

Perhaps best of all is the meeting of the Doctor and the ultimate villain of the piece. You’ll get the feeling of what the plot-behind-the-plot is before you get there, and it will most likely blow your hair back with the sense of the villain’s entitlement and egomania. When they come face to face, not only will you get the full force of that entitlement, some resonances with our own world which will have occurred to you get a wink of confirmation from Fountain which throws the whole situation into a context that will live with you after you finish listening to the story.

Rather joyfully though, while you’ll have worked out a handful of ways in which the ultimate crisis on board the Sun God can be resolved, the actual solution will probably be none of those, but it will make properly plotted sense, underlining that sense you get when watching or listening to one of the better Doctor Who stories that these things have been thought through both as a writer and from the point of view of the potential listener. To some extent, Fountain plots the whole adventure that way, like an Agatha Christie story, giving you clues, allowing you to run a little ahead, then blocking off or opening up pathways to your next big plot point. It all makes for a very satisfying listen.

Nicola Bryant on reading duties here does what she always does when called on to read an audio story – she puts the work in, giving you narration in her more natural voice, and delivering a Peri you remember, but also populating the story with a range of voices which bring the thing to life and let you sink into the drama of it, both in terms of creepy things in the ducting and bigger, less personal, more screaming cliff-hanger style threats.

All in all, The Flight Of The Sun God’s a great listen that build in intensity, and gives you that connection to our own world and what’s happening to it. It’ll make you smile, and shudder, and nod in recognition at the end.

Take a flight on board the Sun God. Things are about to get nuts.

Who Reviews Combat Magicks by Tony J Fyler

Tony engages in mortal combat.

There are sentences which, used as one-line pitches for a story, make the Doctor Who fan’s heart quicken.

The Daleks – on Earth! The Cybermen marching past St Paul’s Cathedral! Giant maggots! Shop window dummies that kill!

You get the idea? OK, try this on for size:

The Doctor meets Attila the Hun.

Yyyyeah, you’re in, aren’t you? Just the idea of those two forces meeting and clashing and maybe even finding ways to work together against an even greater threat – that’s a thing you want to see or read or hear.

Welcome to Combat Majicks, by Steve Cole, read by Yaz actress Mandip Gill.

Attila the Hun and his hordes of…erm…Huns are facing one of the biggest battles of their lives when a strange blue box materialises in the forest into which they’re running, many of them wounded and fleeing. Perhaps the arrival of these new witches will be the thing that turns the tide towards Attila, against the forces of witchcraft deployed by his enemies.

Oh yeah – did we mention the witches? The enemy have witches, who re-animate the dead and send them surging toward the living.

So, that’s nice…

The Doctor and Yaz are obviously powerful witches themselves, emerging from thin air, and producing a medical gel that seals wounds, saves lives and otherwise beggars about with the would-be causes of death in Attila’s day. And so begins the central battle of Combat Majicks – on the one hand, battle to survive and keep Attila and his soldiers alive so they won’t slit the throats of the Tardis crew, annnnd on the other, work out who the other witches are, what they’re doing on the battlefields of Attila the Hun and just possibly what it will take to make them naff off and leave history alone.

All in a day’s work for the Doctor and her Fam.

There’s something of an issue with this audiobook, in that it begins to feel overly similar to The Witchfinders, the TV episode which had people being brought back to life in the mud through the powers of an alien kind of witchcraft, for the purposes of the alien witches. And it also feels like a loooooong listen as there’s the surface battle between Attila and his enemies, the behind-the-surface battle between the witches and…well, life, essentially, and then a whole extra phase of ‘sorting out what to do about the witches’ which if you’re a fan of the modern show will feel too much and too slow – akin to the last two episodes of The Invasion Of Time, you know there’s a purpose to them, but you guess the ending fifty minutes early, and then you’re just watching the clock, waiting for that ending to unfold. That’s the sense of the final act of Combat Majicks – the villains feel muddy in several senses of the word, and while there’s a clarity to their ambitions, the fact that they take quite so long to get around to achieving them feels a touch contrived.

That said, there’s plenty to love about Combat Majicks – including, incidentally, a kind of Imperial Roman Torchwood, which is a sheer joy to hear Ryan stumble across, and a resolution which comes about almost inadvertently, but as the result of an act of unthinking kindness on the Doctor’s part early in the action. In itself, this innovation from Steve Cole feels like it could be a useful direction for the characterisation of the 13^th Doctor to follow when the show returns to TV – a Doctor torn between not getting involved and her own native compassion, not so much the Time Lord Victorious as the Time Lord Compassionate, leading to complications down the line. It’s a simple thing, but it feels like a stab at defining an arc of characterisation for the 13^th Doctor, which could bear productive fruit.

Mandip Gill, as Yaz, is interesting and vibrant and brings a youthful energy to the show. Mandip Gill as a reader, taking on a host of characters, including a mighty warlord and several of his chiefs and captains, feels a little out of her vocal depth, and if you’re among the fans who have trouble with the Sheffield accents on the show, you’re probably best getting this one as a visual book, rather than an audiobook, because the run-time of this reading is a lot of Sheffield for your buck.

Overall though, Combat Majicks is a solidly atmospheric 13^th Doctor story with alien shenanigans hiding in relatively plain sight alongside Attila the Hun and his armies. And while it devolves into the alien storyline and seems to take a while to do the things you know it has to do, you’ll still come away, as fans used to back in the Hartnell era, feeling like you’ve learned a significant amount about a figure and a battle that you might not have been especially aware of before the Doctor took you to live alongside them for a while.

Who Reviews The Faceless Ones by Tony J Fyler

Released by the BBC.

Written by Terrance Dicks.

Read by Anneke Wills.

Something about airports seems to make for very unusual, somehow disconnected Doctor Who stories. Of the two extant examples, The Faceless Ones is by far the better structured (the other of course being limp-celery end to Peter Davison's first season, Time-Flight). The Faceless Ones transposes the idea of the Midwich Cuckoos or the Invasion of The Bodysnatchers into the busy environment of Gatwick Airport in 1966, with some genuinely creepy-looking – and effectively creepily-described - aliens, the Chameleons or Faceless Ones of the title, stealing the likenesses of airport and airline staff, offering budget flights and particularly, running tours for young people to all the hippest European holiday destinations.

The young people never arrive at their destinations, meaning skulduggery at 30,000 feet.

Which is all very well as far as it goes – we love a bit of skulduggery at 30,000 feet, and we absolutely adore a creepy-faced alien reveal and a bit of bodysnatching. That’s all good Doctor Whoing, and we’ll have a storyful, any time, anywhere.

The thing about The Faceless Ones though is that for significantly more than half its run-time, it gets you to look in one direction – at the Faceless airline staff and their bodysnatching plans at Gatwick – so that that’s really the story in which you’re invested. When, late in the day it tries to double-down on its peril by waving some thousands of missing teenagers at you, it feels like it’s trying to have its cake…and then eat an entirely different cake with no connection to the original cake, that it’s been holding behind its back all this time. It feels disconnected, and while you get invested in the face-stealing, bodysnatching creepy aliens in the first half, The Faceless Ones could really do with some stronger rubber bands to connect its first plot to its second, because the ‘Missing teens’ plot never really hits home with the same power as the ‘Aaargh! Creepy faceless people!’ plot – which means you rather stumble around for the second half going ‘Wait, what’s happening now?’

The Faceless Ones also rather fizzles out when the Doctor – Spoiler Alert! - pulls off the coup of Being Reasonable About Things. It's perverse, but most of the time, we want the Doctor Being Reasonable About Things to be IN Doctor Who stories, but for it ultimately to fail and for things to blow up. It's almost a narrative requirement, the climax to all the build-up of chicanery and alien palaver. That probably says something about the narrative expectations of human beings, but when Being Reasonable works, it tends to lop some of the excitement and point off the back-end of Doctor Who stories and make you wonder why they deserved to be told in the first place.

Telling the story of The Faceless Ones of course has a very specific point - at the end of it, Ben and Polly, the companions who had guided a potentially confused audience over the very first regeneration, left the Doctor and Jamie, to get on with their lives on the very same day that they first went off with the crotchety white-haired old man with the unusual police box. So the journey they take between landing at Gatwick and leaving the Doctor is as much of a reason to experience The Faceless Ones as the actual alien plot itself. It’s not particularly overwritten in Dicks’ novelisation, their decision to leave, but there’s enough put in to make the decision feel like fate catching up with them, rather than a random thought severing an otherwise strong connection between the Tardis team at the end of a runaround adventure.

The novelisation, by Terrance Dicks feels like a book written to deadline and demand, rather than a labour of particular love – there are Terrance Dicks tropes in here, including descriptions of ‘that mysterious traveller in space and time known only as the Doctor’ which will stoke nostalgia in older fans who read the books as and when they were originally released, but there’s also quite a bit of stuff which works as a visual camera technique, but in novels feels a touch on the desperate side – including several uses of ‘anticipation’ – ‘What the Doctor didn't know was that he was walking into a trap’... ‘Had Polly but known, she had good reason to be frightened,’ and so on. It’s not by any means a deal-breaker in a Doctor Who audio novelisation, where there are necessary short-cuts to be taken, but by the third or fourth time, you might be tempted to fast forward through a narrative that tells you people don’t know the danger they’re in, or the adventure that’s to come.

Anneke Wills, the original Polly actress who continues to add depth to the character at Big Finish, is on reading duties here, and despite a plot which involves much running, hiding, swopping, switching, and hanging about in airports waiting for things to happen, injects a good deal of tension and action into her reading, making it an easier listen at just over three hours than it could be with a less skilled actor in the hot seat. She has a familiar and close-enough take on the whole Tardis crew to let you immerse yourself in the action, and Dicks’ characterisation of several of the airport staff is distinctive enough to give her a solid steer, several decades since she starred in the show, as to how to make each important character immediately recognisable – a skill which is particularly necessary in the second half of the story, when The Faceless Ones stops being one kind of story and starts being something entirely different and rather more complicated.

Overall, the Faceless Ones is a Troughton oddity that starts off by delivering serious science fiction chills and then develops into a kind of refugee crisis story that evens out our sympathies and ends with reasonableness winning the day. Add Anneke Wills, who on any given day is absolutely worth listening to for three hours, and you salvage an arguably overly complex story from its own fizzle factor by a pace and liveliness of reading that makes the most of characterisation and smooths over story’s tonal shift to leave you smiling.

Who Reviews Warriors' Gate by Tony J Fyler

Warriors' Gate is a real ‘Love it or hate it’ Doctor Who story. It has fans, absolutely, who rave about the concepts of the void, the mirrors between universes, the time winds. It has fans who point out the serious issues it tackles in terms of slavery, torture, and the wheel of fortune, with kings and conquerors becoming powerless against creatures fundamentally lesser than themselves, and their struggle for freedom against men who despise them and other who back them out of of venal greed and lazy self-interest. It has fans even who applaud the magnificent boldness of choice of setting a story in an environment of almost pure nothing.

Then there’s me.

Me, fan, notsomuch.

The Target audiobook novelisation by the original author has been, we’re advised on the cover, extended and ‘restored’ by the author.

Let’s say this immediately – the Target audiobook novelisation is significantly better than the TV version, but not for the reasons you might expect. What really makes Warriors’ Gate on TV such an uninspiring watch is that none of the world from which the slavers and the Tharils have come really makes it to the screen.

In the extended and restored version, will we get the backstory, the depth, the characterisation we’ve always craved?

Erm…no.

With the exception of a relatively inconsequential moment in the prologue, the novelisation delivers all the flaws of the TV version, strips out the characterisation achieved by some quality actors on screen and makes the slavers a crew of nondescript insignificants who seem entirely bored to be there and appear to follow their captain’s orders more readily once it’s clear he’s gone stark raving bonkers than they ever do while he’s trying to sound sane.

So essentially, a version of Warriors’ Gate that comes in at over five hours retains both the feeling of being underwritten in terms of backstory, and underpowered in dwelling on the boring minutiae of some aspects of crew life on a slaving spaceship. Nothing is really done to expand on the pre-void life of the Tharils, no additional scope is given to their slavery by anyone remembering other slave-ships. And the whole of the actual threat in Warriors' Gate is still driven by a captain going suddenly, seemingly inexplicably and suicidally mad, giving the whole thing a sense of 'Hurry up, wait and explode in the middle of literally nowhere.'

One thing’s distinctly better though – the hurried departure of Romana and K9. It’s not by any means much better, but Romana is at least given some moments across the course of the story when we get to hear her thoughts and ponderings on Gallifrey, on her tendency to be a follower rather than a leader or an individual, and at the end, we get the Doctor’s bewilderment, his reading of her being that she’s always criticised him, always scolded him for his lack of purposeful travel. It makes for a much more believable and poignant ending of their time together than the thoroughly Tom Baker but quite cringy ‘Noblest Romana of them all’ line in the televised version, and that at least is something for which to be grateful to this audiobook version.

Overall, while Jon Culshaw’s reading is universally excellent, five hours of Warriors' Gate on audiobook delivers all the issues of the TV version, and uses its double run-time to deliver a couple of extra flaws of crew characterisation, then redeems itself somewhat by the rewriting of the Romana ending. The audiobook version is lifted somewhat both by Culshaw's uncanny Fourth Doctor and his startling impressionist abilities, replicating the vocal tones of the actors who played the slavers and the Tharils. It’s also lifted by his heroic and valiant attempt to give the storytelling some pace – an effort against which the extended and restored version of the story kicks at every possible turn.

Reviews Torchwood: Hidden by DJ Forrest

Written by Steven Savile

Narrated by Naoko Mori

Produced by AudioGo

Running time: 2hrs 30 mins

Number of CDs: 2

Release Date: 04/02/2008

Think like a scientist, it’s like a chain, it’s all sequential!

‘Hidden’ is a full team story, involving Jack, Ianto, Gwen, Owen and Toshiko, so it’s hardly surprising that Naoko/Toshiko is narrating, but given that it means that you know it’s going to be highly technical and a little bit over your head.  So pay attention!

Archaeological digs, helicopter crashes, high speed car chases, shoot outs in underground laboratories, and lots of technical data to analyse and riddles to solve.  If you thought this was going to be solved over a cuppa and a hobnob biscuit, think again! 

There are familiar names within the story, names you’ve heard before, and a few times you’ll think, I know where this story is going, but you’ll be surprised how far off the mark you might be.  I’ve listened to this story several times over and over in certain parts purely because the science bit, the technical wibbly wobbly stuff that should normally be easy for me to understand – isn’t!  But after several runs of the CD it becomes clearer and the final result is mind blowing. But it’s not an easy ride and you will find yourself concentrating a lot on other members of the cast than you do on the technical side, purely because it’s easier to understand a car chase than the science behind archaeological digs and the riddle of a man who isn’t a man!

Jack has a lot of explaining to do but being detained by the good cop, bad cop it’s down to Toshiko to find the link and solve the case and get him released before he’s sent down for murder!

The story is based between the first and second series as Gwen uses the term ‘Special Ops’ when flashing her ID to people such as Parks, the archaeological man  yet there’s also Owen’s uncomfortable shifting in his shoes at the mention of death.

Who Reviews Enemy Aliens by DJ Forrest

 Doctor Who: Enemy Aliens (Destiny of the Doctor 8)

Audiobook

By DJ Forrest

Written by Alan Barnes

Readers: Michael Maloney, India Fisher

Running Time: 1hrs

Publisher: AudioGo Ltd

Number of CD’s: 1

Release date: 01/08/2013

Its 1935, London, and the 8th Doctor and his companion Charley Pollard have an investigation to uncover.  After a message that was cut short in the Tardis by unknown circumstances, they are made aware that an enemy alien invasion is coming to Earth and are made aware also that William Tell is part of the plot.  They also have to find the Secret Key in the Hidden Lock.

When Charley begins humming the tune to Rossini’s William Tell Overture, strange and disturbing things begin to happen.  And when they visit the Trumps Music Hall and begin to ask one of the acts on stage, a man who can foresee the future the man is killed by an unknown assailant.  But as the crowd scatter in mad panic, and Charley picks up the gun that has landed at her feet a good looking man comes to her aid, posing as a policeman and they leave the music hall together.

Led out of the music hall the man whom she discovers isn’t really a police officer but is unsure who he may be wakes up in his apartment to noises downstairs.  The Doctor had been arrested the day before, his hands covered in blood from the dead man whom he’d tried to save, but to no avail.  But according to the papers of the day, had escaped from the custody of the police and was at large, along with Charley Pollard.

I’ve never read any of the 8th Doctor stories and found this a delightful audiobook narrated by India Fisher who through her narration reminded me of the black and white movies I used to watch as a kid, the St Trinian’s jolly hockey sticks and What-ho accents!  She’s very clear in her pronunciations and although she covers the voice of the Doctor, she is helped along in the story by Michael Maloney who covers the voice of Hilary Hammond.  The good looking man who saves Charley but hides a dark secret!

The story is a very jolly affair, despite the levels of trouble both Charley and the Doctor become embroiled in but what I found most enjoyable about this story was that it featured the Thames Clyde train that took the adventure into Dumfriesshire, which is very close to home.  I did smile at the mention also of the citadel on the English border that was quite amusing.

The 8th Doctor came across an awful lot like the 11th in the way he spoke and reacted, and I wonder if that’s down to the writer who has also written 11th Doctor Stories.

.

The story is well put together and you have to pay a good deal of attention to the plot as it reaches a very dramatic conclusion that I found really ingenious in its description.  I’m not giving any clues on that as this is a new story and it’s something you’re going to have to find out for yourself.

India Fisher is a British actress who has provided the voiceover for MasterChef and also the voices for a series of sci fi audio dramas such as Doctor Who and Big Finish Productions and the Sci Fi Channel UK’s online audio version of Blake’s 7 playing Lora Mezin.

Michael Maloney is an English actor whose first appearance saw him as a teenager in the 1979 drama series ‘Telford’s Change’. He has since gone on to appear in many film and television programmes, radio and stage dramas, including ‘Truly, Madly, Deeply’ and ‘The Thick of It’.

Alan Barnes is a British writer and editor, his notable works are Judge Dredd and Doctor Who.

He worked as editor of Judge Dredd Magazine from 2001 to December 2005 and worked for five years at Doctor Who Magazine progressing from writing strips to becoming joint editor in 1998 to sole editor from 2000 to 2002.

This is a delightful audio, which also includes a few place names I’m familiar with along the route.  Well worth a listen to, and well worth hunting out a few more audio adventures with the 8^th Doctor and his companions.

Reviews Lost Souls by Steve Taylor-Bryant

Produced and directed by

Kate McAll

First broadcast

BBC Radio Wales, 19 January 2008
Written by Joseph Lidster

Continuing on from the end of season 2, we find a team in mourning. Despite protestations of being fine the team are really struggling to come to terms with the loss of Owen Harper and Toshiko Sato

The Torchwood team and Martha face danger at CERN in this special BBC Radio episode, starring John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Gareth David-Lloyd and Freema Agyeman. Following the tragic deaths of two of their colleagues, only Captain Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper and Ianto Jones remain of Torchwood, protecting humanity against the unknown. Martha Jones, ex-time traveller and now working as a doctor for UNIT, has been called to CERN - the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva. They’re about to activate the Large Hadron Collider, designed to recreate conditions after the Big Bang and thus give an insight into what the Universe is made of. But so much could go wrong: it could open a gateway to a parallel dimension, or even create a black hole. Voices from the past are calling out to people from the LHC, and scientists have started to disappear. Where have they gone? What is lurking in the underground tunnel - and do the dead ever really stay dead?

This was a great story with some deep emotions touched upon. The premise of the tale is very good and Lidster really is becoming a top drawer writer. Should another season of Torchwood become a reality then surely Joe Lidster is nailed on for a contribution.

Martha Jones from Doctor Who makes an appearance helping the team and Freema Agyeman is very good. The only slight disappointment I have is John Barrowman. I am a huge fan of John and his on screen performances but in this radio play he seems a tad flat and uninterested. You seem to miss the excitement from John you get whilst he's running around saving the world on screen, so maybe audio drama just isn't his thing.

This doesn't distract from a great audio play though and really is just me nitpicking.

An excellent drama written by an excellent contributor to the Torchwood family.

Reviews Torchwood: In The Shadows by Christopher Fain

Torchwood: In the Shadows

by Joseph Lidster

Produced by Heavy Entertainment

BBC Audio release 7 May 2009

read by Eve Myles

'Ring-a-ring-a-roses, a pocket full of posies.  A-tishoo!  A- tishoo!  We all fall down.'

Set between the second series' episodes of 'Meat' and 'Reset', the audio book of 'In the Shadows' sees the Cardiff Hub team once more facing the afterlife question.  Is there nothing beyond death but a black and lonely void or is there something moving in the dark?  Either of these might be preferable to what waits in the shadows.

Narrated by Eve Myles, best known to fans as Gwen Cooper, this audio production is, at two and a half hours long, fast-paced action from the start while still giving small, intimate glimpses into the minds and hearts of its characters.  We are both reassured of what we know about them and then given new perspectives that add to the larger arc of Torchwood's second series.  Myles has a beautiful voice and she gives each character their natural intonations to the best of her vocal abilities.  The incidental music used reflects the intensity and urgency of the mission, while the use of one character to tell the story through the lens of an open letter to her dead team mates gives 'In the Shadows' a reflective tone which elicits both sorrow for the loss and hope for the future.

We are given a glimpse into the Cooper-Williams pre-marriage dynamic from the beginning of the story, as they are shopping for new settee cushions when a call from PC Andy Davidson interrupts their moment of domesticity.  He's got a body, a suspect, and an impossible murder.  It's all a bit Torchwood.

The body is really a skeleton and it was found on Queen Street, Cardiff's main pedestrian shopping area.  This unusual find appears to be that of a seventy-year old man who, according to his dental records, is actually Stephen Ballard, a young professional who went missing two days previously.  The suspect in custody was the last person to see him alive.  Mousy beta-man Darren Sowersby has no memory for what happened but knows that he last saw his friend in the taxi they were sharing on the way home from an evening of post-work drinking. 

Torchwood gets involved. 

When a second body, that of a young woman named Jade Russell, turns up on a Queen Street club's dance floor, the same circumstances are present.  Alive, she was in her twenties but at death she's eighty-something and her body is in a state of decay which suggests she's been dead for a while. 

What's happening here?  What does it have to do with huon particles?  Is there a serial killer on the loose in Cardiff, destroying people with something otherworldly and malignant?  Where did this form of death come from?  Is it Torchwood-created and now in the hands of a mentally-ill human with a desire to rid the world of its sin?  Here we have no rampaging aliens, no Weevils to track and trap; the danger comes from within the dark corners of the human psyche, a place we should all fear.  Who knows what lives in the heart of the person sitting beside us on the bus or the train?  Are we being judged by those around us, stranger and friend alike?  What happens when we're found lacking? 

Just when you think the team has caught up with the unlikely villain, whose invisible presence in life gives him the perfect opportunity to punish those whom he sees as sinners, things go pear-shaped.  Jack is sent to hell.

'Silence.  Darkness.  Alone in a world of shadows, Jack Harkness had no idea where he was.'

The team works to find and retrieve Jack, well aware that hell for someone who can't die is perhaps the most monstrous fate of all.  Jack's longevity gives them time to find a solution, but if they fail to do so, Jack's stay in hell will be eternal and he has so many regrets to re-suffer through.  While Owen and Tosh handle the technical aspect of huon particles and the weapon of choice, Gwen and Ianto pry answers out of their perp, an enigmatic psychopath who believes he's doing God's work by releasing the angels to punish those mundane and unlucky sinners who cross his path.

As seen in second series' episodes, Jack and Ianto's romantic relationship at this point is developing; there is an acknowledgment of bondage play with handcuffs and safety words but it's a tease, leaving you to wonder which of them was holding the keys.  They are physical with one another and the L word is tossed out.  Jack is his flirty and bigger-than-life self, while Lidster's Ianto is sweet, funny, and a bit innocent but deeply intuitive into the workings of the human heart; his darker side, revealed on occasion to great effect, casts him in chiaroscuro which both startles and excites. 

For the sake of brevity, Owen and Tosh are not fully involved here, but not every story can showcase every character.  Even so, their place in the mission is important; each plays a role in both dimensions, as team members who are working to solve the problem and as thorns for Jack's experience in the shadow world of hell, where he is urged to think that he's gotten it all wrong about everything.

Captain John Hart makes a momentary and appropriately slimy appearance to show us how Jack fears the intrusion of his less-than-noble past.  Hart's tiny place in the story comes laced with a mental image of Ianto Jones which is haunting far longer than the fifty seconds it takes within a track full of glimpses into what life might be like for the team if Jack was well and truly dead.  There are also a few cameo appearances for characters from the background of both Torchwood and its parent television show, 'Doctor Who', such as Trinity Wells from AMNN.

Jack's realization that things are not as they seem comes after the listener has started to see that our hero is not behaving like our hero; that, in fact, he's crossed a line into darkness.  Hell, for Jack Harkness, only truly begins when he has lost everything and everyone he cares about and he knows there won't be an end to his lonely penance.

This is a story that, once you have heard it, may keep you awake at night with questions that are raised by its premise and its execution.  Is hell a real place and, if so, is it another dimension where your venial, work-day sins and miseries are exploited and used against your heart?  Even in the end, Gwen Cooper doesn't know and neither do we and maybe it's better that way, for hell is personal and subject to individualization.

When we think about what hell is, we give it many definitions.  Hell is unique for each of us, no matter what we've been taught in faith or school or by our families, and we experience it in small doses every day.  Stephen Ballard's hell is the experience of being totally alone in a silent world while Jade Russell's is a reversal of all the hateful gossip which she indulges in.  Jack's is the unending nightmare of being completely on his own in the Hub, having destroyed and forgotten everyone that he cares for.

We all have little darkly bitter and hateful thoughts about the people around us, the tiny irritations sparked by perceived slights enacted by those who are seemingly unaware of how they get under our skin.  We resent their good luck and their happy endings, as Tosh resents Gwen's and as Owen resents Jack's.

With grin-worthy cultural references like 'murgatroyd', free DVDs that come with the papers, the Rob Dougan song 'Furious Angels', the movie 'Silence of the Lambs', and other titbits, the story is firmly grounded in what we love about Torchwood.  It's 21st century (where everything changes), its immediacy is poignant, and we can identify with the beta personality who feels like they are forever second fiddle, the eternal wingman.  Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.  But, as Ianto Jones and Toshiko Sato prove, sometimes it's the little people who save the day.

Through the eyes of our beta-man Darren Sowersby, the listener is left to wonder if it is technology or the human heart's ability to forgive which saves Jack from what he fears the most.

Joseph Lidster is also the writer of the second series episode 'A Day in the Death', a fan favorite for its glimpse into hope, despair, and freedom of choice from the perspective of a dead man.  To date, he has contributed several pieces to the Torchwood paradigm as well as to other television shows such as 'Wizards vs Aliens', and 'The Sarah Jane Adventures'.  Other audio-based works include scripts and stories for Big Finish Productions' lines such as 'Doctor Who', 'UNIT', and 'Dark Shadows', to name but a few.  Fans of his 'Torchwood' stories should definitely check out other projects and offerings from this author.