Reviews Torchwood: Drive by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s lost in Cardiff. 

You can rely on writer David Llewellyn for a lot of things. Creating characters you want to spend time with? Check. Giving great story twists to ideas that would in other hands be fairly flat chunks of storytelling? Check. Delivering realistic, character-driven laughs? Double check and mate. 

One of his particular side niches in audio Torchwood though is drawing convincing Cardiff landscapes and characters, bringing the city into the drama in a way that on-screen Torchwood regularly tried to do. 

In Drive, he takes a badly injured Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori) on a tour of some of the less salubrious parts of Cardiff in a cab driven by a woman named Fawzia (Suzanne Packer), in search of a thief with an alien bit of gubbinry – a kind of teleporter which exacts a price every time you use it (not unlike a cab itself). 

There’s a level on which the plot becomes secondary to the chase in this story, but given that the chase foregrounds the talents of Naoko Mori and Suzanne Packer, you really don’t mind that at all. Because ultimately, that’s the heart and soul of the story – Tosh is very much an outsider in lots of areas of her life, not least in her work, but very much in Cardiff. She has, at this point in her life, yet to unbend to her environment. If she’s not overtly keeping Cardiff at bay, she certainly has yet to let it get under her skin, or to understand it.

That will have changed at least a little by the end of the very long night that makes up Drive, and mostly it will have changed by her being forced into communion and talk with Fawzia, a garrulous, pro-people cabbie who’s going gradually blind. 

There are plenty of movie precedents for the relationship they forge while Tosh hunts for the alien artefact and the thief who’s using it. But there’s something uniquely Torchwood about this version of the trope, because – without getting too sentimental about it – Cardiff has a very particular soul. It’s warm, and chatty, and nosy, with a touch of fatalism about its eagerness to find the funny in any situation. 

That’s not really something that gels with Tosh particularly well at first. Her history is such that the bubbly warmth of a full-on Cardiff personality like Fawzia’s can feel grating and intrusive. But over the course of a night which involves schlepping from one dodgy location to another in search of the gadget-grabber, both Fawzia and the fundamental nature of Cardiff’s personality gets under the skin of Torchwood’s most particular fish out of water.

Weirdly, there’s not a huge amount more to tell you without starting to compromise story threads and plot details. 

Certainly, there’s the intrigue of how a common-or-garden Cardiff thief gets hold of a gizmo that threatens not only himself, but the whole city and possibly much else besides. Certainly too, there’s the fact that it’s not just Tosh and Fawzia who are on his tail – and there’s a pleasing no-honour-among-thieves vibe in that sub-strand which pushes the drama along at a good but never over-frantic pace. 

It would be genuinely spoilerific to tell how the whole thing ultimately pans out, and you could argue, were you a cynical old bugger even compared to me, that the ending of the crisis with Chris the thief (Robert Wilfort) is a touch on the soppy side. But then, Cardiff is a touch on the soppy side, for all its sometimes hard-as-nails vibe, so for anyone who knows the city, the ending will feel more like a vindication, an act of natural justice, than something which deflates the drama of the preceding hour of not-exactly-cops and robbers chasing each other around the city. 

It probably helps, too, to understand something about South Wales vernacular and habits. In the Valleys (and in Cardiff), any driver of public transport, be it a bus or a cab, assumes the title of ‘Drive.’ If you thank them when they’ve dropped you off where you want to be – and you’d better, or every local will judge you – you acknowledge their skills and their position with a “Thanks, Drive” or even a “Cheers, Drive.” This is the unwritten law of South Welsh society. 

So while there’s the sense of an imperative about the title, “Drive” is not only a kind of shortened version of “Follow that car!” here. It’s almost a hat-tip of acknowledgement of taxi drivers everywhere. People who, as Tosh remarks, put themselves in positions of absolute uncertainty fifty times a day, not knowing who they’re picking up, or what dramas might come with them. 

When Fawzia picks up Tosh, there is blood, pain, drama, thievery, criminal danger, violence and a combination of alien technology and human skulduggery. But through it all, Fawzia and Tosh find themselves warming to one another. 

Will they hang out, go to each other’s birthday parties and the like after this? The obvious answer is no, but here’s the thing. 

Between David Llewellyn’s writing, a gooooorgeously likeable performance from Suzanne Packer, and a brisk but never breathless direction from Lisa Bowerman, you get the feeling that maybe – just maybe – they might. Certainly, Tosh has made more of a friend in Fawzia than she’s made in most other people in the city, and been taught to embrace its opportunities for interaction more. 

So, yes, just possibly. We can almost smell the spin-off from here: Fawzia – Time Drive. Certainly, if there were circumstances where everyone else had naffed off in the Torchwoodmobile and left Tosh behind, a reunion with Fawzia in audio would be entirely welcome, because the chemistry here is chef’s-kiss perfect. 

In Drive, David Llewellyn gives us another great slice of Torchwood, with a story that could be ordinary, but which is elevated by the central character-interplay between Tosh and Fawzia into something you’ll listen to again and again. 

You’ll listen not so much for the revelations of the plot, but simply for the joy of hearing these two people interact and warm towards each other, and the realism of Cardiff’s character and nature bubbling to the surface. As such, Drive hits harder on the re-listen front than its plot and premise seem to promise. More Tosh and Fawzia, any time you like, Big Finish. That’d be tidy.

Reviews Torchwood: Coffee by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s brewing up.

 

There’s a phenomenon. We call it hindsight. 

That phenomenon where we look back on the way things played out, and it all seems inevitable. If we remember people who are dead and gone from our perspective, we tend to view their lives, or our interactions with their lives, as being tinged with a sadness of inevitable death. 

That’s a thing we bring from our perspective in the here and now because they’re not here or now right with us. It’s likely that their lives didn’t have that sense of impending ending while they and we were living them together. But afterwards, it’s hindsight that shows us how little time we were ‘destined’ to have together. 

Usually, hindsight is a bittersweet gift of the old, because they have longer to look back on.

In the age of Covid, sadly and appallingly, you don’t need to be that old to regret the lives no longer lived among us. 

Wow – heavy opening, right? Yes, but it feels appropriate for this particular story of Ianto Jones, by James Goss. The sense of knowing the ending ahead of time is threaded all the way through Coffee, which is told as a kind of flip-side to Ianto’s life with Torchwood 3, from his early attempts to get in, to his encounters with Cardiff’s pterodactyl, through the revelation of Lisa in Cyberwoman, to the various apocalypses (apocalypti?) of the on-screen show and his growing relationship with Jack, all the way to the 456 and slightly beyond it.

It’s a snapshot of the Ianto that was always implied on-screen, but never shown because there was always something madder going on in Torchwood. Ianto in between the ends of the world. 

Ianto… and a coffee shop named Baps. 

Baps when we first encounter it is Cardiff Bay’s only real café. Originally run by the mother of the owner David (Shaun Chambers), it’s been in David’s hands since his mother…disappeared. Kathy (Sarah Griffin) is a well-meaning backpacker from Indiana, who fell for a guy in Cardiff while raising money for the next stage of her adventures, and who has found herself not leaving, but working at Baps, worrying and laughing with David when Ianto Jones first walks through their door. 

The tale that unfolds is a kind of bas relief, a story of life in Cardiff as it’s affected by the existence and the actions of Torchwood, a story of the ‘ordinary people’ Torchwood exists to serve, and how the sledgehammer methods the organisation sometimes employs leave imprints on the world around them. 

When Ianto arrives, he’s relatively fresh from Torchwood 1 and the cataclysm of Canary Wharf. And having found Baps as an old-fashioned greasy spoon café, he teaches David and Kathy the meaning of really good, “posh” coffee, rather than the instant-with-a-glug-of-milk they’ve been serving since David’s mother’s time. 

It’s a providential lesson, because Cardiff Bay is about to change – the yuppies are coming, and Baps, preceding all the Starbucks and Costas and more artisan independents, is able to rake it in when they come by following Ianto’s Canary Wharf coffee voodoo. 

The drama only rarely intertwines Ianto’s Torchwood work with the life of Baps directly, but in a sense, the cafe gives Ianto a little of the grounding that Rhys gives Gwen’s Torchwood life. There are, sprinkled along the way like coffee beans of fan-joy, references that fans will love, laugh at, punch the air over, or go “Ohhhh” about – not least the answer to an early but enduring Ianto mystery. 

And there are hints of the potential importance of Baps and its people to Ianto too. While his relationship with David is often spiky, Ianto and Kathy are friendly from the beginning. Kathy even drops hints that she might be interested in seeing more of Ianto outside the café, but at the time, he has a relationship for which “It’s complicated” baaaarely scratches the surface of adequate description. Although it is easier to fit on a profile than “My girlfriend’s a half-upgraded Cyberman in deep freeze till someone can turn her human again. Plus I need to walk the pterodactyl.” 

Nevertheless as time goes on, the impact Torchwood makes on David and Kathy is interesting and questionable. Yes, sure, saving the world, protecting humanity. But humanity in the abstract is a whole other thing to people in the particular, and that’s a difference underlined here. To be fair, it’s a difference that’s underlined in Torchwood generally and Ianto’s eventual fate specifically, but once you’ve listened to Coffee, it’s a difference that makes a more balanced sense of that fate. 

That’s a big statement, but it’s one to which James Goss’ script and the performances in this tight three-hander rise with both aplomb and vigour. David and Kathy have initially differing views on a lot of things represented by Ianto, the sharp-suited wannabe with the coffee voodoo. 

Those opinions and how they change in light of various Torchwood-related catastrophes across the running time of Coffee make for a kind of snapshot-reel of the Cardiff rarely shown on-screen. The Cardiff that pays a price for standing too close to Torchwood.

That the price is one it never asked to pay is almost obvious. That there’s little it can do but pay it is a kind of commentary on the unwilling geographical companion of greatness.

The…the what-now? 

The people who are impacted simply by standing where they are and not being able to get out of the way. The collateral damage. 

We’re trained in Doctor Who and Torchwood to cheer the goodies, because they’re better than the baddies. But sometimes, it’s worth being reminded that the places they choose for their battles never get a say. 

As in Human Nature, when Joan Redfern asks the Doctor whether, if he had not chosen to come to her time and place, would people not have died, so in Coffee, the innocent bystanders of a space-time rift, and a less-than-delicate organisation to deal with its fallout, are given a voice that’s rarely heard in the on-screen show. 

We know that Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd) will eventually pay the ultimate price to save the world, but what Coffee makes clear is the difference between him, who chose, and even strove, to be part of that effort, and those innocent civilians who are sometimes guilty of nothing but living in a place that becomes a battlefield. 

Coffee is a beautifully written story of not-Torchwood, a story of the innocent bystanders, and a fabulous snapshot gallery of Ianto’s whole life with Torchwood 3. 

As such, while Shaun Chambers and Sarah Griffin do vital work exceptionally well in getting us to care for David and Kathy and what happens to them, the greatest performance plaudits here have to go to Gareth David-Lloyd for pitching his evolving Ianto with the right accent and nuance as he goes through his life, from Torchwood 1 refugee to Torchwood 3’s coffee butler, to valued member of the team, to front-line operative who pays the price for his involvement. 

It’s a subtle, natural performance that lends truth to the notion of Coffee taking place in snapshots over time. 

One to get and listen to? 

Sorry, was that not a given when you walked in? It’s James Goss and Gareth David-Lloyd, of course it’s one to get and listen to. But the joy is that it’s more than the sum of its parts – it’s both fan-service and realistic look at the impossible situations in which we sometimes find ourselves, and the things we can do to get through them. 

And above all, it’s a reminder that the courses of our lives are always going to look inevitable eventually, so while we have them, and while we’re in control over what we do, it’s worth living in a way that makes our eventual absence a sadness, rather than a relief. 

It’s worth taking time to feel pleasure, and connection, and friendship where we can. 

It’s worth drinking the good coffee.

Reviews Torchwood: Lease of Life Review by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s coming down with a mould. 

A writer’s world will frequently make its way into their work. When Robert Holmes had what he decided was an unreasonable tax demand, for instance, he gave Doctor Who the immortal story of The Sunmakers.

There’s a sense in which you have to assume that Aaron Lamont, writer of Lease Of Life, had quite the experience of student accommodation.

In a 3-bedroom house near to the centre of Cardiff live Ellie (Rosalie Craig), Seren (Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo), and Nye (Angus Yellowlees).

They…have a mould problem.

Fortunately, Cardiff Council’s leading mould specialist, Dr Owen Harper, is on hand to investigate.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. That sound in your head is the story stretching out in front of you.

Mould is of course a famous and well-used wordless ‘villain’ in science fiction and horror. Like fog, it’s natural, spreading – and you can’t reason with it. It just eats.

It eats a lot in Lease of Life.

It seems hardly spoilerific to say that the mould in Seren’s house is not from round here. In fact, Owen’s seen it before, but usually, Torchwood gets on the case a lot faster than it does this time.

So from almost the word go in this story, Owen’s on a race against time. Time, and a mould from outer space.

Just as a heads-up, when you listen to Lease Of Life…maybe make sure you do it in the daytime.

 

Like most similar stories, the progression here is through stages of decay, and the stakes elevate as the story goes along. When it starts, it’s just mould. A patch of mould.

Sure, who cares, right? Spot a student house without mould, you’re on to a good thing.

But more or less from the moment Owen arrives, the mould shows its true…well, not colours, obviously, but its true potential, certainly. Ellie, Seren and Nye are not students, but they could well be – they’re each in a kind of stasis when Owen arrives. Seren in particular is putting up with the grimness of the house so she can save up the money to go travelling and see the world. Ellie doesn’t especially like either of our housemates, and Nye is out a lot, and playing loud music to isolate himself from the reality of the house and his housemates when he’s in.

It’s the very definition of dysfunction, and the mould, for all it’s an alien life-form intent on eating everything with which it comes into contact, is also a handy metaphor for the toxic isolation of modern life, where conversation and potential friendship is eaten alive by self-revolution and our own concerns.

If Ellie, Nye, Seren and Owen work together, there’s a chance they can get rid of the mould.

So… that’s simple, then.

Except before you know what’s happening, Ellie’s gone out on a run, potentially spreading mould spores over a 6km radius, the kitchen floor’s collapsed and a meeting with the landlord does nothing to resolve the situation.

When Owen finds the source of the mould, it becomes appallingly apparent that Dr Owen Harper, one of Torchwood’s finest, is way out of his league against a houseful of unthinking infection.

In fact, the worse the situation becomes, the less likely a solution seems to be.

It would spoil the building of the drama to tell you exactly what happens, but perhaps it’s fair to say that in stories where Owen Harper takes centre stage, things are rarely less than grim, and there’s usually a body-count.

Mould versus humans. Just saying. You’re going to need more than a damp cloth.

When a solution is eventually found, it’s very much last-ditch, do-this-or-destroy-the-world in its nature, and it demands at least one sacrifice to implement. The escalation takes a patch of mould into a full-on horror story, and as in most horror stories, the odds of everyone getting out alive are slim.

In Torchwood horror stories of course, the odds of anyone getting out alive are pretty slim. This is no exception, but what it delivers is a solidly human fear, developing beyond the scope in which we usually experience it. It also gives you a reasonable allegory of isolation and how it leads to disaster, some engaging characterisation, and a story in which Owen is able to shine.

Lease Of Life will have you checking your ceilings, looking behind your bookcases and scrubbing extra hard. Kill the mould. Kill it all…

Just sayin’…

 

 

Reviews Red Base by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony takes on the machine. 

Sergeant Andyyyyyyy Innnnnnn Spaaaaaaaaace. 

Really though? What are the odds that Sergeant Andy Davidson would end up on a Mars base? 

Especially, as it happens, a Mars base going seriously 2001: A Space Odyssey? 

Welcome to the mind of James Goss. You may never make it home again. 

When Andy arrives on the Starr Base – yes, really, two ‘r’s - there have already been deaths among the crew. There’s a blandly-voiced computer in charge of all the life support systems (beeecause what’s gonna be wrong with that?) And everybody still alive is doing their best shiny happy people act, so as not to upset the computer. 

If you’ve seen 2001, it adds a cuteness factor to the whole death-trap in space storyline that the computer’s called Dave. But this is not the story of a super-sleek space station going progressively wrong. It’s more Alien than Star Trek, more grubby than scrubbed, and things have been going wrong more or less since the beginning, because the Starr Base was built by budget contractors as a proof of concept. It was also meant to be the set for a reality TV show, examining the actions and lives of humans on a Mars mission. 

The show was canned after its second episode. So, the crew of the Starr Base have been almost entirely forgotten. 

And then they started dying. 

There’s a reason why Torchwood sends Andy Davidson to investigate, rather than any of the others. And to his inestimable credit, Andy gets properly stuck into the drama of the base – challenging the authority of Dave, trying desperately to save at least some of the crew, and coming smack bang up against an idea popular in science fiction: the notion that robotic systems will become a danger to human life not because they go wrong, but because they do exactly as we tell them to. 

It’s an interesting role for Andy, because it stretches him into newish territory. While he’s often been the Torchwooder who’s dragged into situations by the scruff of his neck, here he’s front and centre, highly pro-active, and the only thing between the remaining crew of the Starr Base and a grisly death. While we’ve previously heard Ianto Jones indulging his secret agent fantasies, this is Andy Davidson as Bond in Moonraker ­– turning up, taking names, trying really hard not to die, while solving the mystery behind the deaths. Whether things are as simple as they seem – computer has a nervous breakdown, kills everyone – is not certain until gratifyingly close to the end, and when you discover what’s truly going on, it hits with an unexpectedly muted note, because there’s a black-or-whiteness to the situation. Still, the fact that Andy Davidson not only works out the truth, but also follows the line of logic to a specific ‘J’accuse’ moment, rather than a vague and general solution, shows the truth of the character. He’s actually always been capable of dealing with people and situations, it’s just that in early Torchwood, and sometimes even now, the nature of situations takes him a little while to get used to. In Red Base, he comes in ready to investigate murders, and he steps up into the gravity of the situation. In that ‘J’accuse’ moment, he switches from Bond to Poirot, giving a summation that cuts through all the whirling distraction, the action, the murder, and delivering the truth behind all the mayhem. 

If there’s a weakness in the story, it’s a weakness that more or less applies to most classic crime and mystery stories, from Holmes to Christie – once the truth of who’s killed whom and why is revealed, it’s taken for granted that that’s where the story ends. When challenged, they have little option but to confess, Cluedo-style, and the game is up when Andy names the killer. Resistance to the power of Andy may be futile, as it may with Holmes, Marple, Poirot and others, but in Andy’s case there’s little to underline that futility, no trusty police inspector to enforce the law. But then of course, there is a super Sergeant standing ready. 

Torchwood: Red Base is a rip-roaring space crime story, with some fantastic laughs – you’re going to love the pre-credits sequence, it’s physically impossible not to – and within the main drama, an increasing sense of locked-down vulnerability to systems and people and personalities. The cast – from Jeremy Ang Jones as Dave, through Rakie Ayola as Emma and Kae Alexander as Mina – nail the level of grubby, budget space exploration that will probably translate into our reality in the near future. In particular, Jeremy Ang Jones delivers a creepy, bland, non-judgmental computer tone (the secret to both HAL’s shudder-making delivery on 2001 and the Robots Of Death in Doctor Who) that really intensifies the skin-prickling danger of having reasoning AI minds in charge of all the things you need to keep you alive in a hostile environment. 

But most of all, this is Tom Price’s hour. Andy Davidson has had a long journey in Torchwood, from the might-have-been alternative to Gwen Cooper at the very start, through liaison work between Torchwood and the regular police, to his recent out-and-out Torchwood work at Big Finish, checking up on an Eighth Doctor who has no idea Torchwood exists in Stranded. This is one of Price’s finest hours as Andy though. Here, he’s allowed to step out from behind the incredulity and vulnerable humanity of his traditional role and take on baddies without backup, work through a deeply dangerous problem and come out not only alive and well, but having solved the case that destroyed a handful of would-be astronauts’ lives. It’s an hour that will give you a slightly harder, more methodical Andy than you might be used to if you’ve missed his evolution in the last few years. All he needs now to achieve full-on Torchwood status is to have either some blistering, life-changingly good, or some deeply, cringe-makingly awkward sexual chemistry with Jack Harkness, and he’s good to go.   

Catch up with Sergeant Andy Davidson in Red Base – he’s a space-base mystery-solving, murder-stopping badass. Yes, really – and you’re going to love him all over again.

Reviews Rhys & Ianto's Excellent Barbeque by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony’s heating up the barbie. 

Rhys Williams – lorry driver. Lad’s lad. Valleys Boy, Mammy’s Boy, grown up to be the man who gives Gwen Cooper’s bonkers Torchwood life its anchor. Its grounding. It’s “yes, you saved the world again, love, but where’s the chips?” reality check. 

Ianto Jones. Welsh-born, but fled to “better” things in London. Torchwood operative in Canary Wharf. Brought down to Earth by its destruction. Coffee boy to Torchwood 3, struggling to feel like part of the team. 

Together. Alone. At a backyard barbecue. 

What could possibly go wrong? 

Ohhh, a fair amount, in Tim Foley’s story of not only an odd couple forced to interact against the will of either party, but of men and the way they deal with – or don’t deal with – stress, grief, friendship, loss, hard decisions and barbecuing. 

This is a story of a barbecue that doesn’t so much go wrong as never really get started.

There are Torchwood threads, absolutely, but really, it’s an intervention story. A revelation story. A tale of bottling up, bubbling, and various versions of masculinity at play. 

Rhys and Ianto rarely had any proper one-on-one time in TV Torchwood, and with the best will in the world, it’s easy to understand what. While their technical backgrounds are similar, their ways through the world are very different. Rhys is a bloke, a lad – one who appreciates what he has, understands the strength of traditional male bonding rituals (like barbecue, and nights in pubs that end with somebody wearing a traffic cone), who works hard and is fiercely loyal to his friends, his family, and his community. 

Ianto’s not a lad. He’s a Welsh metrosexual – it’s like a regular metrosexual, only with more eyebrow-raising and use of the word “Really?” 

The thing is, they’re both very likeable people – you just wouldn’t necessarily put them in a room together and say “Go play.” 

Tim Foley’s trapped them in a backyard together, and told them to go play. 

Here’s the thing you need to know about Rhys And Ianto’s Excellent Barbecue. It’s much more subtle than that title makes it sound. 

In fact, it’s more or less a sociological masterpiece in full lad-camouflage. 

Rhys is having a barbecue. He’s having the lads round for a good old-fashioned beerfest with probably poorly cooked meat, raucous laughter, shared memories and…there was another thing…oh, yes - more beer. 

Except, oddly enough…he isn’t. Nobody’s turned up. None of the lads are coming. They’ve all got other things to be doing. Even Badger, who was absolutely vital to the success of the night, cries off, citing an anxious child and a hamster emergency at home. 

Then Ianto turns up. 

Ianto, who, because with his wine rather than beer, his suit rather than casual gear, his highfalutin’ London ways and the fact that he works for a top-secret agency dealing with alien problems…wasn’t invited. 

And then, almost as though Ianto’s a bad penny of alien, space-time gittery, the bubble arrives. 

The bubble? Think of a Coronavirus bubble, a group of people who live in and around each other and so theoretically shouldn’t be a threat to one another. 

Then expunge that thought immediately – this is Torchwood, dammit, not a public information film. These are space-time bubbles, blown up out of nowhere to separate whoever’s inside them from the rest of the space-time continuum, just as though they’ve been taken out of time, separated by a dimensional veil and locked away from the rest of the universe. Like death – or at least, like a very effective pause button. 

When they get a phone call from Badger, things have almost reached peak weird. 

When Badger turns out not to be Badger – it’s Torchwood time. 

You don’t need us to tell you this is a particularly appropriate story for the time of Covid – the tale of small, isolated groups of people, perhaps not the people we’d ideally like to be with, separated from everyone else and with just a handful of survival protocols to deal with the reality of the situation, seem more or less written to reach out and touch audiences right now.

That there’s more to it than that surface resonance is probably a given too, but we’re not about to spoil the deeper levels of connection for you. 

More than the Covid connection though, this is a story for the Lads. The bros. My dudes. The guys. My mates. The compadres. The posse. The crew. All those weird collective names we use to somehow soften or de-intensify the relationships that let men love and care for their circle of male friends. It’s both an interesting tribute to those circles of friends, and an exploration of why they regularly fail. 

Most men have groups of other men who know their stories so well they don’t mind when we tell them for the thousandth time. Friends who were probably there for the making of our legends, and who, by being in them, own a part of our lives, our collective memory. Even, to some extent, our soul. 

This is a story about those groups. And it’s a story about what happens when part of such a circle isn’t there anymore. When it should be. When we know something’s happened, but have no way of processing its mystery. When the network of companionship doesn’t work, doesn’t allow for truth beyond our legendary bluster, and we can’t find the words to move on.

Heavy stuff? 

It might sound like it, and there’s absolutely a dwarf star-heavy core at the heart of Rhys And Ianto’s Excellent Barbecue. There’s an important question in that heart, and the playing out of answers. But there’s also Rhys, for instance, “going to twat an invisible wall with a croquet mallet.” There’s the odd couple comedy of Rhys and Ianto, embodying two ways of being a man, trying to find common ground through the guy-ritual of roasted meat. There’s quite enough creepy Torchwood to go around, with the space-time bubbles popping up all over Cardiff and then (and if you wanted a ticking clock to your Torchwood story, this is as good as they come) shrinking, trapping those inside them until they wink out of existence. There’s a mystery in the Badger Who Isn’t Badger, and a powerful, heartbreaking quest to do the right thing by that character, even when Rhys and Ianto are in no position to even help themselves. 

There are breakthroughs, and character dynamics never fully explored before as Rhys and Ianto work together to solve problems, both in space-time and in the possibly toxic established patterns of group masculinity. There are reasons no-one turns up at Rhys’ barbecue apart from the uninvited Torchwood coffee boy, and they need to be addressed if Rhys’s personality is to reset itself from his recent grumpy form into the lad that everybody likes, or loves, or wants to be with. He needs some hard schooling, and he needs a space to speak about why the barbecue is so important to him. 

What Rhys And Ianto’s Excellent Barbecue ultimately does is talk about an important social point, without at any time bashing you over the head with it. It gives you great odd couple chemistry, and a solidly what-the-hell Torchwood story of bubbles and isolation. And in working together not only to sort out their own predicament but that of the Badger Who Isn’t Badger, it gives Rhys and Ianto time to each appreciate the other’s strengths, rather than maintaining their surface understanding of each other’s stereotypes. 

You’ll absolutely laugh yourself to hooting and tears as Kai Owen as Rhys and Gareth David-Lloyd as Ianto pitch their performances at jusssst the right level of social awkwardness to let the comedy bristle. That’s no real surprise – we’ve seen and heard each of them separately deliver glorious comedy in their Torchwood careers. Bringing them together could have gone so badly wrong, it’s a mark of courage that the pitch was ever made. But together, they pull off what is mostly a two-hander (with occasional unnerving interruptions from Youssef Kerkour as both Badger and “Badger”) that just sings its comedic potential up to a whole new level. 

But while the keynote is comedy, you’ll also feel the feels. Oh man, the feels. Tim Foley’s written a script that makes you laugh until you manly-don’t-cry, and then takes you beyond that point. Kai Owen in particular nails that journey to the front of your consciousness, and makes you want to hear more Rhys-centred stories in the future. 

Isolation is a big problem in our real world right now. It’s a problem made worse and more serious between men who can’t share the truth of what they feel. Traditional lads, who are used to their connections being occasion-based. Legend-based. Story-based, rather than truth or confession-based. 

Check in with your lads when you get a chance. Be real with them. Break through the legend to the people underneath. Otherwise, we might have to send Rhys and Ianto round to burn meat in your back garden. 

2020 has been a pretty phenomenal year for audio Torchwood at Big Finish. 

Well, quite, which year isn’t a pretty phenomenal year for Torchwood at Big Finish? But just towards the end there, the company may well have sneaked in a story which takes the crown of the year. If you do little else in December lockdown, or while waiting for the world to change in January, give yourself a treat. Invite yourself to Rhys and Ianto’s Excellent Barbecue, and prepare for a spot of much-needed catharsis.

Reviews Iceberg by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s getting chilly.

Owen Harper has had a troubled life. The acerbic medic of Torchwood in Cardiff Bay might – and arguably should – be forgiven his seemingly cold, shallow, hostile nature when you look at what has happened to him. His life and happiness having been originally bound up in a love and a career, he’s an object lesson in playing society’s game… until the game plays far too harshly with him, his love is taken from him, and his skills remain, his open-heartedness replaced with a burning need to understand, to make sense of the senseless, and to do some sort of good in an ultimately meaningless cosmos.

Writers in the audio world have not for the most part been kind to Own Harper.

They’ve been good to him, yes, giving him some meaty scripts, having him tackle a suburban charnel house, a mass murderer’s burial grounds, and the career-minded enthusiasm of Ianto Jones. But kind, no. Owen’s generally had a godawful time in his audio career at Big Finish. See also the suburban charnel house, the mass murderer’s killing grounds and…you get the picture.

In Grace Knight’s Iceberg, there is at least initially less blatant horror in store for Owen, but still there’s challenging territory for the man who can’t allow himself to look backwards because it hurts too much.

A phone call at 1 in the morning. The voice of an old friend.

An old friend who Owen, under the guise of having too much new demanding stuff to do after the death of his fiancée Katie and the new job he mysteriously took up, had gently ghosted, unable to deal with human connections to his old life that left him raw.

But it’s 1 in the morning. He answers before he can think.

And it’s Amira.

Amira, the friend of both Katie and that younger, more hopeful Owen. A voice from the past.

More to the point, when he answers her call, she has a mystery for him. A doctor herself, she has a patient who’s in at least most of a coma. The patient, Lucy, wakes for brief periods, has a totally lucid conversation with the ghost of her dead sister, who she insists is standing in the room, and then goes back to dreamland.

But something’s all sorts of wrong with her chemistry levels. And Amira, despite having a legitimate concern for her patient and a keenness to haul Owen over the friendliest of coals for his abandonment of her and everyone in the wake of Katie’s death, has moments when she blanks on basic medical procedure.

The more we learn of Lucy’s predicament, the more we understand why this is a Torchwood story. Lucy (played by Lowri Walton) is a young woman already haunted by the memory of her dead sister before that sister comes to pay her visits in the hospital. Amira (played by Maya Saroya strongly enough to stand up to Burn Gorman’s Owen) has secrets of her own, which Owen must unravel if anything about this night call to an otherwise eerily silent hospital is to make sense. And not to put too fine a point on it, he’d better hurry.

Iceberg is an intriguing mixture of things. On the one hand, it gives us more and meatier detail of Owen’s pre-Torchwood past, his life, his love, the way he reacted when Katie died, and, thanks to one blistering outburst, played to the nail by Burn Gorman, the workings of his mind when he forced himself to become the character we first met in TV Torchwood, Series 1. On the other, it’s an example of the ticking-clock mysteries at which audio Torchwood excels – separating one team member from all the rest, dropping them into a seemingly devastating, inescapable conundrum with a countdown of which they may or may not be aware, and challenging them to prove their Torchwood worthiness, their ability to think through the facts, accept a wider universe than the Earth, work the problem and earn their right to survive.

Burn Gorman when he first arrived on our screens in Torchwood might have had what seemed like an easy character to play – the brash, the shallow, the self-revolving but misanthropic doctor with the sharp wit and the impeccable medical skills. But well within his time on-screen he was able to bring out deeper levels to the character. In audio, Owen’s resourcefulness, his compassion for patients and people and aliens alike has been matured into a guiding principle that has survived some of the worst things imaginable in both an ordinary human life and the life of an alien investigator. More than just Owen’s skills have survived from his past life, the life in which he loved Katie and had his future to look forward to. The reasons he got up in the morning to use those skills are still intact too, the need to make people better. Iceberg shows us that very clearly, shows us his take on the Hippocratic Oath, shows us a lot of classic Owen spikiness, and ultimately shows us the steel in his spine which has let Owen survive.

The point about Owen Harper as a character is that he’s determined to survive. Life threw some of the worst imaginable luck at him, made him grieve for the person he loved and who made him better. But Owen after that… will. Not. Break. Will never break, will never become a victim of the grief that could split him apart. He’ll do everything he can for everyone who needs him, and he’ll make the hard decisions of life and death when he needs to, as he needs to here, with the practised, practical application of a doctor. Even when he should by all rights be dead, Owen won’t, and doesn’t, give up. Even when he sees what’s beyond the point of death, and knows it’s nothing, and that everyone he’s ever loved and lost has gone to equal nothing, Owen Harper will survive.

Will he survive Iceberg though? When something alien, something creepy, and something from his past combine in one exhausted 1AM, will Owen have the strength he needs to survive? When the dead seem to walk and the familiar comes unstuck and the hospital is silent in the middle of the night, Will Owen Harper be able to find the truth to explain the evidence in front of him, even when it seems absurd?

As a ticking-clock mystery, Iceberg works well. As a study in the character of Owen Harper, it works even better. The writing’s pin-sharp, for all the situation it creates is impressively mysterious for most of the run-time. The performances from the three cast members are joyously jagged, Owen reacting to the intrusion from his past and the problem in front of him instinctively but never easily. As a whole, if you’ve not heard Iceberg, you’ve missed out on a rich, cold, sharp, sweet, sour and bang to rights slice of Owen Harper’s life. Don’t do that to yourself. Give Iceberg a listen now.

Reviews The Sins of Captain John by Tony J Fyler

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.

Reviews Expectant by Tony J Fyler

Barrowman raises Tony’s expectations

Captain Jack Harkness – immortal, swaggering, saving the world, wearing the coat…pregnant?

Yep – that’s the premise of this story from Xanna Eve Chown. The idea of a pregnant Jack was mentioned back in earlier Torchwood, and here we get to hear how that went – at least one of the times.

It’s not perhaps the most romantic of scenarios – Jack is acting as surrogate to the ruler of the Yalnix Empire. The Yalnix, as a by-product of a seemingly eternal war with the nameless, and now formless Vad, aren’t able to carry their offspring to full-term, and so use surrogates from other species to take the job of reproduction over that final line. Hence Pregnant Jack. The Yalnix are by no means particularly unkind when it comes to this process though – unlike the Nostrovites, who pulled the same trick on Gwen in Something Borrowed but with significantly less by way of consent. The Yalnix provide a personalised midwife to help the surrogate through the process, and keep both the surrogate and the offspring safe, calm, and most notably alive until the next generation are successfully spawned.

We mentioned that this is Captain Jack Harkness, right?

Running, jumping, falling off buildings, explodey, shooty, laughy Jack Harkness. Captain Jack ‘Keeping The World Safe With Guns And Cheekbones’ Harkness.

He’s a midwife’s nightmare.

In particular, he’s Jonty’s nightmare – Jonty (Aaron Anthony) being the one charged with keeping this swaggering disaster area safe as he decides to work late into his pregnancy, doing his thing, keeping Cardiff and the Earth safe from alien encroachment and gittery.

When buildings fall down and things blow up and there’s jumping off roofs involved, Jonty’s like a risk assessor along for the ride, his caution marked out by a particular habit of referring to himself in the third person – ‘Jonty does not like this!’ is heard quiiiite a few times over the course of Expectant.

If it weren’t enough that Jack Harkness has to keep a gestating baby safe inside himself, there is of course the small matter of the Vad, who are really quite keen to get their hands on the next ruler of their mortal enemies the Yalnix. Battlefleets, electric death, you know the drill. Tuesday in Torchwood.

Jack and Jonty’s Pregnant Adventure therefore involves quite a bit of running away, more than an agreeable amount of hiding in sewers (just what you want when you’re in the last stages of a pregnancy), rather more logical hiding out in a health spa, where Jack’s bump is mistaken for a touch of male over-indulgence by Paula, spa-runner and health Nazi, played with a neat ear for snack-abomination and discipline by Catherine Ayers. When things get unexpectedly Day of The Dead in the spa, Jack has no alternative but to call in Ianto to make a rapid getaway, and drive him to the birthing ship, while the next ruler of the Yalnix breaks Jack’s bones from the inside like a turd with a sledgehammer.

It would be cruel and spoilerific to tell you exactly what’s going on, but suffice it to say, it’s a touch more complicated than you might think it is – certainly, Jonty’s eventual explanation of what’s going on is enough to melt one side of your brain, and enough to make Jack’s craving for crisps go off the charts. But, while some listeners might think of this as just ‘Pregnant Jack On A Romp,’ and while there’s cause for questioning some of Jack’s mood swing reactions, from snappy to wailingly humble to petulant and on to weeping as somewhat stereotypical of the pregnancy experience, the point of this story is really very firmly in the background, rather than the foreground. Because this is a story set after the end of Series 2 and the events that cause the deaths of Tosh and Owen, and the…complications with Captain John and Jack’s brother Gray. This is a Jack in need of a reset, a Jack who needs to do something good and to believe in it if he’s to go forward with the whole world-saving schtick. Hence, bringing life into the world, albeit in a surrogate capacity. His mission here – the imperative of safely bringing the next ruler of the Yalnix into being – is actually more important to him than he usually lets on, or than the side effects of his pregnancy allow him frequently to express. This is Jack adding to the sum total of life in the universe – an unusual position for an immortal to be in. It also of course draws us darkly on to the events of Children Of Earth. Knowing what’s to come, we as listeners are extra-invested in hearing Jack’s adventures on the way to such a positive outcome. We want him to have this one, to have this memory, this day of productivity and bounty and above all, kindness. Because the darkness will soon be upon Jack Harkness, and the world, and its children.

As a listen, this story’s got plenty of fun for the would-be rompers, with only occasional moments of quiet and reflection. When they hit though, Xanna Eve Chown makes them really hit, so that the episode doesn’t drift away on a tide of its own froth and the funny reactions of a pregnant man. What you get is all the fun of the running around with a rookie spectator on the life of reckless, immortal Jack Harkness, all the almost-obligatory pregnant man stuff as a leavening agent along the way, and also both Jack’s need to put some good back into the universe as a kind of penance for the events that got his friends killed, and Ianto’s difficult, conflicted reaction to such a demented, extreme course of therapy as the delivery of a child – and one, incidentally, that isn’t his! Without any one of those elements, there’s a danger Expectant would topple into either sentimentality or farce, but with them all in place, the result is a romp with consequences, an emotionally balanced script which delivers drama and comedy and forward motion without ever going too far in any of its directions.

Expectant may be based on a comedic initial premise, but it delivers above that pay grade and adds emotional beats to the story of Jack’s development and the relationship he and Ianto are in the process of forging, en route to Children of Earth. The comedic audience is absolutely served, but there’s enough gravitas here too to make Expectant an easy, satisfying, head-nodding listen. Give it a listen today – and start panting.

Reviews God Among Us Volume 3 by Tony J Fyler

Tony meets God. After the Flood.

Torchwood’s post-Miracle Day box sets have frequently fallen into the category of ‘Story arcs that leave you needing a lie down in a dark room with a soothing cup of tea.’ The God Among Us arc has had more coherence than its predecessor, Aliens Among Us though, due in no small part to an increased familiarity with the characters of New Torchwood. If all this comes to you now as a bolt from the blue, stop reading immediately, you’re significantly behind us in time, and there’s no real way to catch up except by going through the preceding box sets, because this is not the Torchwood you think you know.

Go on, shoo! Come back, by all means, when you’re up to speed and have got your head around the hows, the whys and the wherefores.

All up to speed?

Right then.

You rejoin us at the point where, at the risk of still giving listeners some sort of mental breakdown, God (or at least, a God) has been working with the Committee – a bunch of body-snatchers from Way Out Yonder who’ve previously been mostly voiced by David Warner as Old Bloke In the Nursing Home Of the Damned – to at first secure a victory for a bunch of civic-minded aliens, but then, thanks to some fairly sharp thinking and self-sacrifice by the likes of Norton Folgate, just-possibly-hologrammatic Torchwood operative from the 1960s, and alternative-universe Yvonne Hartman (See? Getting up to speed makes all kinds of sense now, doesn’t it?), were at least partially defeated. But Cardiff now is not Cardiff as we’ve known it. Cardiff – modern-day, post-industrial, high-tech Cardiff – has been the victim of a major tsunami. Hundreds of thousands have died. Straggling communities of the homeless camp out in the lobbies of swanky apartment buildings, such as that in which Mr Colchester of Torchwood and his husband Colin live. Colin now works tirelessly to try and keep the flow of supplies coming to these new indigents, alongside would-be Torchwooder and part-time turncoat Tyler Steele. Jack Harkness is about here and there, but Hartman’s Torchwood is still, at least technically, in control. And PC-cum-Sergeant Andy Davidson (last seen in a moderately disturbing relationship with Yvonne), has become director of the committee dealing with the rescue and recovery effort for his shattered city. Meanwhile shapeshifting empath Orr might or might not have formed some sort of understanding with God, Colchester appears to have been brought back from the dead by Steele, without in fact understanding as much, and Ng, the one-time-and-possibly-still herald of God who hid out in the body of, and now has many of the personality traits of, Gwen Cooper, without in any way actually being her, is somewhat unsure of her past and her future but in the meantime is saving the world as best she can.

Annnnd breathe.

This is where we come in to this box set. By the time we reach the end, there’ll have been a fairly epic sweep towards the destruction of the planet, Andy will have shot an innocent teenager, God will have given away her powers, Orr will love everyone, Ng will have discovered the inherent superpower of Welsh women, and at least one podcaster will have been torn to shreds by thin air. Welcome to Torchwood – God Among Us, Part 3.

Alexandria Riley (who also plays Ng), takes writing duties to start us off here, and delivers a powerful piece, driven at us as if to-camera for large chunks of time by the wonder that is Mina Anwar. Anwar plays Bethan, mother of a young man who’s still missing after the Cardiff tsunami, and her grief is a powerful motivator to her strength and tenacity in this episode as she tries to find out what’s happened to her son – whether he’s still alive, or if not, what happened to him. She’s our window on the world of some of our Torchwood favourites in the wake of the disaster, and she unveils a cover-up as to who was behind the orders to evacuate parts of Cardiff, who gave the orders for the military to make preparations for the tsunami strike, who did any of it. When the inquiry into the incident demands answers, all that anyone can tell them is that they…don’t recall who gave them the orders. Bethan ultimately figures out the truth – or at least a version of it – and gains at least a little piece of mind, somewhat bolstered by a random encounter with Orr, who is driven by Bethan’s pain and need to ‘become’ her son Anthony for at least a little while.

Here’s the thing – we should be taking Riley’s writing more seriously. Absolutely, Mina Anwar is a powerhouse in this episode, driving it on, giving us glimpses into the characters-under-pressure of a city in crisis. But only once you’ve gone through the box set do you sit and assess the whole thing, and only then does the intricacy, the cleverness and the natural tone of Riley’s script really hit you. It opens up the post-tsunami world to us, providing a perfect first slice of action for this box set and a satisfying whodunnitandwhy, while mostly focusing on the human emotional cost of disasters, and the contrast between human effort to help those affected by such events and the necessary but inherently soulless bureaucracy that has to deal with the world after such catastrophes on a purely logistical basis. It’s affecting, effective writing, and more from Riley in all corners of the written world would be welcome on the basis of this introduction.

Robin Bell’s ScrapeJane delivers a kind of Blade Runner horror story of modern mythology and the power of belief, in which Mr Colchester and Ng have to defeat a bogeywoman admittedly created in the last handful of years – by of all people an ‘urban explorer’ hoping to interest people online in Cardiff’s history. There is of course nothing wrong with creating bogeywomen to encourage an interest in history.

Until your fictional bogeywoman starts slaughtering not only annoying podcasters but nests full of Weevils without a by-your-leave. The quest to find and pacify the invented ScrapeJane  gives Colchester (himself now feeling like he is living on the borrowed time of Colin’s belief in him, as he’s under the impression that it was Colin, rather than Tyler, who brought him back to life) and Ng, the one-time God-herald, now-Welshwoman-impersonator and world-saver and equally uncertain of her future, a chance to go beneath the surface of their day-job and exchange some honest insecurities. It’s the kind of getting-to-really-know-you fare which Torchwood has regularly done with great aplomb, and Robin Bell adds creditably to the series’ store of character-stories, while also investigating truth, fiction, creativity, ownership and belief in a very contemporary way. There’s even a bit of brave humour in here, as Bell writes characters telling invented characters that wanting to meet – and even take revenge on – their creators is unoriginal and has been done before. Imagine the ‘meta’ nature of writing that, and then tinge it with a sad note, as Bell himself is sadly no longer with us. As with Riley, it would have been good to hear more from him at Big Finish.

Day Zero, by Tim Foley, turns up the dial on the threat noise-floor, as Cardiff runs out of drinkable water. Isolated, with no relief able to get through, the city’s hit by a poison in its water supply. If every civilisation is just three meals away from revolution, Foley’s script asks us to imagine what happens to a major modern city if, all of a sudden – thank you news blackouts to ‘reduce panic,’ and yes, you’re entirely free to slide Operation Yellowhammer into your mind at this point if you like – there’s no water. No bathing, no showering, no toilet-flushing, no drinking, surprisingly little by the way of cooking, in a city already stretched to crisis-point.

The tension in this script (ahem) boils over when it turns out there’s one place with a source of clean water, and it becomes a focal point for dissent and battles, with Torchwood on one side, thirsty vigilantes on the other and Andy’s Disaster Recovery Committee in the middle trying to seize the source and allocate the water as it sees fit. The fundamentals of a solid dystopian science-fiction story are right here – remove something crucial from society and write what happens – but this being Torchwood, there’s a handful of unexpected twists, especially as Orr exists to give people what they want. In a city suddenly very thirsty, that has distinct consequences, but it’s also this episode that shows us the character divisions of what was once a united team, and which since the return of alt-Yvonne, has been carrying on as regardless as possible, trying to paper over the colossal cracks in the fabric of the city’s existence. This is a story that feels like it should draw battle lines, but its point is rather more subtle than that. Yes, it takes us into a hell of sudden deprivation (a hell, incidentally, already faced by millions of people on our planet, not all of them that far removed from our wastefulness), but it also shows us what happens when that deprivation ends, when everyone looks away and doesn’t tackle the division of which they were part. Day Zero feels important for that lesson, for the ‘What happens next?’ question of a society divided to the death.

And finally, all these increasing tensions and agonies and strong episodes need to come together at some point and explode. In Thoughts And Prayers by James Goss, the neat conceit is that thoughts and prayers actually work, that they provide an energy for gods (or those to whom gods have delegated their powers), which is then up for the taking and using by any power big enough to effectively threaten a god. The Committee are back, and ooh, they’ve made Torchwood all spick and span again, with a rift manipulator far more advanced than even TV Torchwood ever had. Think Stargate and you’re not far wrong. As the end of the world advances, there are ever more thoughts and prayers to process, and the energy builds to a climax that looks like it’s going to go one way – the phrase ‘I was trying to do my duty’ is mentioned, to the delight of all Hartman-fans – but then doesn’t go quite the way you think it will. The aftermath of Thoughts and Prayers is vaguely familiar territory perhaps, because you can only have a cataclysm if it has consequences, and there are only so many ways you can spin those consequences, but it leaves plenty of room for creativity in terms of where to take Torchwood from here. We’re not by any means necessarily looking at another re-boot after this, but whatever’s next from Torchwood will be filled with post-almost-apocalyptic challenges to overcome.

At the end of a series of box sets that have occasionally been challenging and have occasionally included episodes which mostly focused on character without advancing the plot, Torchwood – God Among Us Part 3 is that rare thing – a roller-coaster ride with plenty of emotional highs and lows, but no drops in quality from start to finish. It’s a belter, from the highly effective, personally-driven first episode to the roaring, screaming, ‘So this is it, we’re going to die!’ conclusion. You absolutely need to have followed the new Torchwood more or less from the beginning to get the most out of this box set. But it’s a conclusion that makes the journey thoroughly worthwhile.