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.

Reviews God Among Us, Part 2 by Tony J Fyler

Tony goes looking for God.

Finds…a whole bunch of other stuff.

The ‘new’ Torchwood, from Series 5, Aliens Among Us and now into what presumably must be thought of as Series 6, God Among Us, is probably a fairly challenging proposition in and of itself for anyone weened on the likes of series 1-3. It’s post-Miracle Day, back in Cardiff, having apparently abandoned the implications and connections of Miracle Day and bringing in a whole group of new characters. By the time we get to God Among Us, Part 2, it’s probably fair to say that unless you’ve been following since Aliens Among Us, you might not have much of a clue what the hell is going on. It’s like jumping in to Game of Thrones in Season 4. Many people you’ve heard of might already be dead, and there’s always the possibility of dragons.

Or indeed, gods.

The upshot is that aliens invaded Cardiff, not through the whole showy ‘spaceships in the sky, take us to your leader, let us kill your leader, now you belong to us’ schtick of the B-movie, but through council appointments, cutting-edge businesses and commerce. They settled in Cardiff because they were running away from their god. As you do.

Now, God has found them. Apparently, bad things will happen as a result, although the aliens themselves seem mostly to have either been killed or to have sodded off along the way. So now God’s here, more or less kicking her heels.

Just as well there’s some entirely-other alien chicanery, time travel ghastliness and human duplicity for her to get mixed up in, then, all things considered.

Oh yes, and both Jack Harkness and Yvonne Hartman now run Torchwood. Gwen Cooper’s quit, but someone who looks and sounds almost freakishly like her, but who’s also the herald of God, now works for Torchwood. An alien mood-based shapeshifter…has been working for Torchwood, but appears nowhere in evidence in God Among Us, Part 2. One of the best of the new recruits, Mr Colchester, was apparently dead at the end of God Among Us, Part 1. And then, he wasn’t. His current status and the reason for it is undetermined, but on he goes anyway – much like when Owen Harper died, and then simply kept on going. It’s Torchwood, go with it. There’s Norton Folgate, a gay hologrammatical member of 1950s Torchwood who pops in from time to time to stir the pot, and Tyler Steele, a wannabe-Torchwooder who chose the wrong path and backed the alien mayor, but who still hangs around now and then too, as part of the extended Torchwood family. And there’s Sergeant Andy ‘Normal’ Davidson, still involved with the alien embuggerances of the gang, even though his pal Gwen has put them behind her.

This is where you find us as God Among Us, Part 2 opens. Come play our game.

Flight 405, by Lou Morgan, seems like standard Torchwood fare – there’s a plane that’s been crashing since the 50s, and time-travelling Torchwood hologram Norton Folgate (played with a joyful archness by Samuel Barnett) arrives to tell the team they have to solve its problems and let it land because it has a McGuffin on board that could theoretically end or save the world. It’s a story of time-twisting, cause, effect, causality, re-animating bodies and not a little what-the-helling, as Norton, Andy and Yvonne try and break the plane out of its inevitable time loop, rescue the McGuffin and ideally not die – or indeed perpetually not-die - in the process. But once you’re on board the plane, do you not become an inevitable part of the sequence of events that lead it to be crashing but never to crash, doomed to repeat a short sequence of actions time and time and time again?

Barnett, Tracy-Ann Oberman as Yvonne and Tom Price as Andy give strong performances in a story that – by the very nature of its elements – sometimes makes your brain ache. It’s like Back To The Future, but condensed, with less kissing at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance, more ‘If we don’t get this thing off this plane, we’re all going to die…very, very eventually’ and quite a bit more reanimating pilot-corpses.

So that’s nice.

As an episode, it’s very involving – it easily allows you in to sample the mayhem and the humanity at the heart of its concept, and you end up with a satisfying conclusion. What any of it has to do with the whole ‘God Among Us’ arc is difficult at first to understand. You’re gonna want to hold on though. Keep listening.

Hostile Environment, by Ash Darby, is by quite some considerable margin the hardest hitting of the episodes in this set. It’s homelessness, as experienced by thousands of people in Britain today – just with a Torchwood twist. Hostile Environment imagines homelessness policed by drone, where penalties range from immediate injection with experimental drugs to death, and where those who don’t give immediate practical aid to the homeless are encouraged to ‘tag’ them with a phone app – the idea being that once tagged they get help, when in reality, the drones arrive with their stark choice – drugs of death, putting the hostile into the environment, empowered by hapless, deceived would-be doers of good. It’s fitting that wannabe Torchwooder Tyler Steele takes this journey for us because he’s always been particularly slick and morally complex, but the journey is a harrowing one, while always giving us a new view on situations most people are uncomfortable thinking about. You’ll find it hard to breathe listening to some of Hostile Environment, and it finishes with a denouement that, while sad, is probably truthful, and will make you think long and hard once it’s done.

Another Man’s Shoes, by Tim Foley, takes the premise of many a frothy comedy – body-swapping – and, while giving it its comedy due, also highlights the complexities of individual lives, and how we don’t perhaps ever know quite as much as we think we do about even the people we like, love or work with.  To tell you too much about one particular pair of body-swappers would be spoilerific, but suffice it to say, two Torchwooders swap bodies and then have a knee-trembler in a menswear fitting room, while their personalities are in each other’s bodies. Romantic relationships are explored from new perspectives, working relationships are redefined, retcon is deployed to hilarious effect and secrets are unwittingly revealed, which bring the actual threat in the box set into sharper focus. Could it be that the god of the aliens is not such a baddie after all? At least not compared with the resurgence of another group with whom we’ve had dealings in Torchwood before? Another Man’s Shoes is probably, when you boil it down, mostly still comedy froth, but being able to see things from whole new perspectives as regular cast members do impressions of the idioms and mannerisms of their colleagues gives some sense of the easy flexibility with which honesty is treated in every day-to-day walk of life – and the consequences that brings with it.

Eye of the Storm, by David Llewelyn, is one of those Torchwood stories that turns a run-of-the-mill Torchwood day – alien power stations turning people to stone, sending out waves of energy and stoking a tidal wave…as they do… - into something potentially Biblical and cataclysmic that could wipe the Earth clean unless a handy McGuffin is used that could sort everything out. From that straightforward base though, David Llewelyn gives us a story where lies are uncovered, partnerships dashed, allies revealed as having their own dark agenda, and quite possibly, not everyone makes it out alive. There are hair-breadth escapes and dime-turns and plotlines that turn out to be cyclical and the competition between God and a group of would-be humanity-destroyers is played out over tea and chat, while Torchwood does its best, as ever, to stand between the Earth and the Abyss.

Whatever happens in the next Torchwood box set, the dynamic as it’s been set up over the last few sets is probably set to change – or at least, if it doesn’t, it’ll rely on a great deal of luck and some possible classic cliffhanger sleight of hand to get out of the consequences of the end of this set. In some respects, it feels as though God With Us could end on this note, and wake up to a fresh new day in a fresh new arc when ‘new’ Torchwood comes back to us. But the ultimate point of God being among us has yet to be revealed and dealt with – or at least, that’s how it feels.

Overall, God Among Us, Part 2, by virtue of the epic arc that ‘new’ Torchwood is on, by virtue of being quite deeply embroiled in that arc, and because the listener subsequently needs to know quite a bit about the past that Torchwood’s had in order for the dramatic beats to land as heavily as they should (and do, if you know the history), is potentially quite heavy going. On the other hand, if you know all the history, there’s a sense in which, as with the Eighth Doctor Ravenous sets, you could easily become impatient during the individual stories here, waiting for the arc-advancement to come along. It’s a tricky balancing act and no mistake. Does it pull it off? Yes, but only because each story offers the listener something in and of itself – a classic timey-wimey conundrum, a bleak look at homelessness, comedy body-swapping with consequences, and a big apocalyptic drama – and because the writers give some of the new characters enough to do. Paul Clayton as Mr Colchester and Ramon Tikaram as his husband Colin are worth their weight in emotional gold, Tracy-Ann Oberman and Tom Price as Yvonne and Andy are glorious, Samuel Barnett’s Norton Folgate is both waspish and en pointe, and Johnny Green as Tyler Steele has probably the most scary, close to the bone tale to tell us this time out.

God Among Us, Part 2 could well fall between the stools of long narrative arc and individual ‘drama of the week’ for some listeners, and it’s quite a financial investment, so if you’re new to ‘new’ Torchwood, under no circumstances start here – go back and put the hours in with earlier sets. If you do that, or if you’ve done that, there’s plenty of protein for your money here, plenty to get your teeth into, and some cracking performances to advance what you know, and think you know, about Torchwood’s latest iteration.

Reviews Torchwood: God Among Us #1 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s not a member of the god-squad just yet.

Torchwood ‘Series 5’ – Aliens Among us introduced us to a new, post-Miracle Day Torchwood 3, and then basically blew up any rulebook we thought we knew. New characters joined, old characters left, new characters were old characters. Old characters came back from the dead. Jack had sex with anything that stayed still long enough – it’s nice to know some things about Torchwood at least stay the same with the passing of time.

What we should presumably call ‘Series 6’ – God Among Us, begins at the funeral of a Torchwood regular.

So – that’s a bit of a bugger then.

Seriously, the opening to Future Pain by James Goss will kick you right in the teeth. Much of the action of this first episode takes place at that funeral, and much like Gwen’s wedding in on-screen Torchwood, there’s also a big alien-hunt/battle to attend to. God – not any god we’ve invented here on this silly little blue marble of a planet, but the god of the Sorvix (from which they fled to Earth and ended up more or less running 21^st century Cardiff), has arrived, looking for its chosen people. Or…well, really any people. It’s a mark of the make-up of new Torchwood that it has people on board these days who can if not exactly deal with its presence here, then at least tackle the impact of that presence in a whole different way to that in which ‘old’ Torchwood would have been forced to do. Future Pain explores some of that, while, did I mention, repeatedly punching you in the face with the death of a much-beloved Torchwood member. Particular fans of that character might well not want to push on through the rest of the set. Do, because without getting appallingly miraculous about the whole thing, the situation’s more complicated than you can possibly imagine at this stage.

The Man Who Destroyed Torchwood, by Guy Adams, is both a bit cool, and a touch ragged round the edges. It brings us into contact with Brent Hayden, right-wing incel-adjacent tin-foil hat-boy conspiracy junkie and Youtube self-realising entity, who wants to get to the bottom of Torchwood (insert, if nothing else, your own jokes here), the takeover of Cardiff by aliens, the Deep State, the Fake News and the Libtardocracy of disinformation and media manipulation.

On the one hand, this is all vaguely pathetic and actively funny, though we never actually discover enough about Brent’s background to understand what has set him on his path of mum’s-basement net-riocrity. On the other hand of course, it doesn’t work so well in a world where the basic premise of our drama is a secret organisation that works above and beyond the government and traditional law enforcement agencies, that deals with alien incursion, and which frequently wipes or messes with the memories of innocent civilians to keep itself the most open secret on the streets of Cardiff.

With Tyler Steele acting as an information-feed for Brent’s online rants, actor Jonny Green gets the chance, as he puts it in the Behind The Scenes interviews on this release, to ‘do the right thing, while still being a bit of a dick about it.’ The rationale for his involvement in the first place feels flimsy though, and so The Man Who Destroyed Torchwood, while an interesting study in how people feel the need to matter, to be the heroes of their own stories, and so to edit their own experiences in a way that puts them forward positively, feels a bit disconnected from any passing storylines – it’s a time out take on Torchwood from a completely right-field angle, enjoyable in and of itself, but only vaaaaaguely to do with the ongoing storyline of God Among Us.

See No Evil, by John Dorney, could be said to be tangential too, inasmuch as there’s not a whoooole lot of God-action, but there is most certainly an entertaining premise – Cardiff has gone suddenly blind. Except it hasn’t really, it’s gone dark. And somewhere in the dark, something is hunting.

It’s a creepy premise, well delivered by breaking the cast up into groups and giving them each a mini-mission, with Jack of all people on humanitarian duties, while other Torchwood and non-Torchwood members go to hunt the hunter. It’s an episode long on character development and interaction, without sacrificing the need for Stuff to be happening to terrify the bejesus out of listeners and act as a spur to all the interaction. We learn interesting things about one leading Torchwood member who’s perplexingly back from the grave, as they get closer to someone else and are called on some self-defence mechanisms they regularly employ. Meanwhile, Jack gets closer to someone entirely else – and reveals a shocking new development in his Torchwood story. Seriously – franchise-alteringly shocking new development, at least potentially.

But that’s by no means the end of the shocks in Dorney’s script, and it ends on an entirely different bombshell, which leads us directly into Night Watch, by Tim Foley. As stories go, that’s creepy in a whole different direction, as a vampiric space-nonce arrives to feed on the dreams of humanity while they sleep – a process which is potentially dangerous to those who are hurting, those who are broken. Torchwood to the rescue – the usually active members get usually active, while one of the newer recruits to the hub is sent on a gentler, more nursemaiding duty to keep the dreamers of Cardiff safe until the break of day. Foley’s script allows for anger to flare between Torchwood members – understandably so given the end of Aliens Among Us – and yet while the threat and the solution are both firmly within Torchwood’s remit, there’s something rather fairytale and magical about the scope of Night Watch. In particular, it allows us as listeners to come full circle from the first episode of this box set, to soften the kick in the teeth dealt us by the funeral and to hope for positive developments in the next box set.

God Among us, Part 1, is a set of four episodes which are loosely connected but which conjur an atmosphere of something immense, something powerful, no longer on the horizon, but not yet entirely ready to manifest whatever destiny it has planned for us. Torchwood always prophesied that the 21^st century would be when everything changed, and that it was ready. On the evidence here, there’s lots of division and dissension in the ranks, but this is a Torchwood that does individually or in small teams all that it can to keep the world turning for one more day. When God is more fully among us, it remains to be heard whether this new Torchwood can cut it.