Reviews Fortitude by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s all at sea

Torchwood – Fortitude is Torchwood with a difference, in that its one of the range’s occasional dips into the adventures of Queen Victoria herself, with no other active Torchwood operatives in play. As such, there’s a certain additional weight on Rowena Cooper’s shoulders as Victoria to push the listener through the tale, as Victoria, perhaps, is the character who knows the most about what’s actually going on – at least at first.

In fact, this is very much a Victoria-centred tale, designed more or less to show her in her older years with the concerns of one who feels the complication of her own death on the horizon. Released in the week that Doctor Who on TV was highlighting the importance of individual figures and the way in which they move the needle of the human experience (Nikola Tesla’s Night Of Terror), it’s a poignant counterpoint to the TV version’s ultimate optimism on that question. When Victoria dies, she tells the other characters in this story, there will be riots and murders, uprisings and mob rule as the world tries to shake itself into a different shape in the understanding of her absence. This is a Victoria who has regrets about some of her earlier actions, and who might, just possibly, be in the market for solutions that help her sleep a little easier.

None of which ostensibly explains why she’s swanning about on Victoria’s Most Haunted – a sea fort off the coast of Portsmouth, built to fight a French invasion which never came. Nor, for that matter, why she’s bringing the Maharaja Duleep Singh (Paul Bazely) along with her. The two have a somewhat spiky relationship – as the title Maharaja might suggest, he was born to one of India’s ruling families, but raised at court as a proper English gentleman (official version) or an exotic performing pet (his version, and the version with which we have more sympathy in a post-imperial age with a severe colonial hangover). It’s prrrrrobably true to say though that they never held knives to each other’s throats in the real world. If that’s a detail you’ve been waiting all your life for, look no further – James Goss has got you covered.

There are…imps on the fort, or ghosts, or voices at the very least, seeming to lack bodies to carry them about, and therefore unnerving the very bejesus out of most people who visit. Not so Colonel Crackenthorpe (David Sterne), army man with a dubious history of his own – not to say rather too much of it to be credible – who’s in technical charge of the fort, and who talks to the voices, and the thing which may or may not kill them all.

There’s also a storm which patently isn’t a storm brewing off the fort, kicking the wind-driven daylights out of anyone who tries to get near. Whatever it is that connects them all is less than a fan of Queen Victoria’s – there are amends to make, truths to uncover, sentient raging aliens with which to engage, and pasts for which to atone in this tight, creepy, MR James-ish story that will seldom let you rest between the opening bars of a Torchwood theme tune re-arranged for Victorian instruments and its final resolution.

That, if anything, is the keynote – if you’re a fan of MR James, and his unnerving stories of good people with flaws and those flaws catching up with them in creepy, nerve-jangling ways, you’re going to enjoy Fortitude.

There are three such people on the sea fort (assuming we give Victoria the benefit of the doubt about her goodness by this point in her life). That makes for a lot of uncertainty, plenty of questions, and several dollops of dubious or devious motivation, all lumped together with an alien something, a bunch of arguable ghosts and a mood-storm out at sea. While James is a solid marker for whether you’ll like this story, fans of The Horror of Fang Rock, Ghost Light and even JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls should also swallow this release whole – it has the claustrophobic atmosphere and the sense of incipient disaster of Fang Rock, and the tone of Ghost Light, where no-one’s entirely sure what the hell is going on for the longest time, but everyone’s nerves are jangled by it nevertheless, a sense bolstered by Colonel Crackenthorpe at first bearing an audible resemblance to Ghost Light’s Redvers Fenn-Cooper. The Inspector Calls vibe shudders through the sense of accountability for one’s past which unites the three main characters – Victoria for her rigidity of view in her youth, which led to many errors, Crackenthrope for a possible crime which has blotted his life, and the Maharaja for an entitled indolence which has stopped him ever achieving what he might have done. There’ll be a night of reckoning on the sea fort, and little if anything is likely to be the same come the morning light.

The writing here is tense and twangs like tripwires hidden in mist, without ever looking or sounding like it tries too hard – again, the MR James reference is relevant, because that’s a trick at which he was a master. The point of which in this audio is that you engage with it tentatively, Victoria and Singh arriving on an unlikely sea fort after fighting through an impossible storm, but it winds you in, and in, and in, wraiths of wet mist pulling you into secrets, truths, half-truths, versions of reality as envisioned by each of the characters, and their interaction. Before you’re done, you’ll wonder whether one, two or all three of them are ghosts, you’ll itch to know the nature of the fort’s resident something, and you’ll find at least some of the answers to the character-questions you need answering before you dare to place your narrative trust in anyone.

Fortitude is Torchwood with a difference not just because it doesn’t feature any of the cast we’re used to, and takes us on a trip with the Institute’s founder instead. It’s different because the journey on which it takes you is chilly and clammy and damp, unnerving in a way the world’s allowed to be without a Jack Harkness or a Gwen Cooper to protect it. Unnerving in its shades of grey, its uncertainties and the shudder with which it will leave you, despite a resolution that promises some sunlight. It’s an initially unwilling confrontation of truths and mistakes, and it shows the possibility of change through communication, even when the mistakes have been grave in days gone by. Listen to Torchwood – Fortitude now, and any time you want a shiver down your spine.

Beyond The TARDIS Fortitude - The Story So Far by Tony J Fyler

Fortitude, the new ‘must-see’ drama from Sky Atlantic is a big gamble. It’s staking the biggest budget known to man for a series of its kind – close to £30m - on a combination of beautiful scenery, big name stars and, if the evidence of the first four episodes is anything to go by, a combination of the scattergun-reference strategy from Lost, the ‘close community’ creepiness of Twin Peaks, and the genuinely oppressive miserableness of Nordic noir like The Killing.

Ah, but does it work?

Well…

The answer probably depends on how much time you have in any given week to watch people be both miserable and baffled at the same time. If that sounds flippant, it shouldn’t – one of the standout successes of 2014’s TV schedules was True Detective, which was essentially run on the same format as Fortitude – people being miserable and baffled. Come to that, hugely popular shows on both sides of the Atlantic, from Broadchurch to The Following, are largely based on the same premise: miserable, baffled people, groping towards a conclusion that if you’re lucky gets clearer over time, but if you’re unlucky is being deliberately obfuscated by writers and production teams who know that the money in such a premise is in all the reference-threads, the loose ends, the red herrings and the what-the-hell-does-that-mean watercooler gossip that elevates a TV show to the status of ‘this year’s cultural phenomenon.’

So what’s the score with Fortitude?

Fortitude’s a town on the island of Svalbard, inside the Arctic Circle. That means snow, ice, more contextually believable polar bears than Lost, isolation, and months of oppressive darkness from which the town has just conveniently emerged when the story starts. Immediately then, you have a base-under-siege potential, and the fact that the town has just 7,000 residents, each of whom, if you believe the town’s own hype has a job to do, meaning there’s no crime, gives the place both a gated community feel, and in the same breath, the potential for a mob mentality that brings Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery uncomfortably to mind. You can probably get away with many things in a town like this if you can get enough people to collude with you.

From the outset, there’s a sense that several someones are getting away with several somethings in Fortitude. The local mine is mined out, meaning there’s a pressing need for the town’s Governor Odegard (played by Sofie Gråbøl – yes, her from The Killing) to get the go-ahead for a new tourist hotel to keep the town alive. There’s a Professor in town, doing a survey to ensure that the development can go ahead with no ecological consequences to the local glacier (That would be your actual Christopher Eccleston, giving, perhaps bizarrely, one of the rare smiles in the whole first episode, and then really not smiling again. Ever). There are miners making epoch-making scientific discoveries and then attempting to charge for them, pushing Eccleston’s Professor Stoddart to investigate the potential of getting them arrested so he can essentially nick their find. If what they’ve found is what they think they’ve found, that also puts Stoddart in opposition to Odegard – which given that she’s the governor and has, it seems, her own tame alcoholic police chief with a nasty habit of turning up at crime scenes either before or immediately after they become crime scenes (played with the only notable glee in the piece by Richard ‘Game of Thrones’ Dorner), is probably not a terribly tenable place to be. There’s ex-army search and rescue guy Frank Sutter having a seemingly joyless grunting affair with Elena, a woman with a stock in trade of oblique one-liners, who works in a local hotel. Frank is married to Jules (Call The Midwife’s Jessica Raine), and their son may have just had mumps…or, just conceivably, polio. Because…well, why not? The lad also ends up with frostbite in the opening episode and has to be carted off to a research centre conveniently located on the island, where potentially weird things are happening (weird research centre…island…seriously, someone get JJ Abrams on the phone). There’s an old man named Henry Tyson (played by Michael Gambon here, very much more in Singing Detective mode than anything akin to Dumbledore), whose function in Fortitude (everyone has one, remember?) appears to be mainly to die of liver cancer and not be able to shoot polar bears. Plus, flying in to make life more complicated for everyone, there’s DCI Morton, an American detective from London, who, it’s rather heavy-handedly pointed out just in case you missed it, would have to have got on a plane to help investigate the goings on in episode one, before any of the goings on had actually gone on (but he’s played by Stanley Tucci, so who cares, eh?), and Professor Stoddart’s wife, played by Chippo ‘Chantho’ Chung.

As a game of geek bingo, Fortitude episode one is simply superb – you get double bonus points if you spot Lucy Saxon in the mix – but as drama, it’s all a rather pretty, but moodily dismal affair.

As we’ve said, this is absolutely no barrier to barnstorming worldwide success, and Fortitude may well become the next great must-discuss drama. Certainly there are plenty of questions to ponder: Is the miners’ discovery of what it takes three episodes to determine is definitely a mammoth of any significance at all, or is it the key to the whole thing?; What had Stoddart discovered before the miners went tripping over invaluable scientific finds? What’s going on with the weirdness at the research centre? Is DCI Morton even who he claims to be, and if so, how did he know he’d be needed before he was needed? Is the town suffering from the beginnings of some toxic episode? Why is Henry Tyson here at all, let alone having rancorous disagreements with Andersson, the tame alcoholic police chief – and many, many more. As the episodes advance, so the questions of potential significance get more and more oblique – what is causing so many cases of hermaphroditism in reindeer foetuses? Who exactly is sleeping with whom, and does any of it make a material difference? What in the name of Jeffrey Dahmer is going on with the whale-eating, ice-cream gorging couple? What’s the deal with the psychotic running away with his daughter?

Whether Fortitude deserves to be the next great must-discuss drama is an entirely different question. There’s a sense of somewhat stale button-pushing here from writer Simon Donald, a sense of taking the greatest ingredients of off-beat TV drama over the last couple of decades – a pinch of Twin Peaks’ claustrophobia here, a bushel of random pseudo-clues and phrases a la Lost there, marinade in the miserablism of The Killing for a long eleven episodes - and serving them over a heck of a lot of ice to refresh them as much as possible. Whether the mainstream audience the show is aiming for (and which, given its budget, it has no option but to aim for) will still swallow it actually depends very little on the quality of the work. It depends more on whether Sky Atlantic has judged its moment well – riding the crest of shows like The Killing, Broadchurch, True Detective and The Following – or whether in fact Fortitude has arrived one or two shows too late to the party. As we said at the start, whether it works or not rather depends on how much time you have spare to watch people be baffled and miserable all at once; on whether there’s room in the mainstream audience’s attention span and Sky Plus box for one more dark, gritty excoriation of the human soul before the trend simply snaps in two and dissolves.