Torchwood: Visiting Hours


*World Enough and Time Cybermen walks in* PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN

Visiting Hours by David Llewellyn

Visiting Hours is good, certainly, but it does feel like it has quite a few missed opportunities, and it feels definitively unresolved. Visiting Hours delves into the area of medical horror, which seems like something Torchwood would love doing, but Visiting Hours almost goes out of it's way to ignore it, compared to a story like Dissected, which does the exact opposite. No, most of Visiting Hours is Rhys and nobody's guess for the next Torchwood character to appear in audio, his mum, Brenda, running away from two people who have been ordered to kill them. Brenda is remarkably fun, though, she is sassy and Evelyn-esque.
Throughout the story we get tantalysing bits of a larger narrative, but it makes the astonishingly weird choice of having all of the villains be Doctors from the past in the 1950s? Perhaps this ties into the Committee arc, I mean, maybe after Ghost Mission had Norton Folgate doing somthing similar, but if so, it's rather lazily integrated. The whole story would have been much improved if it had gone down the Countrycide route and truly attempted to traumatize it's audience, that anyone could disappear from a hospital in the middle of the night and be unnoticed, but somehow having killer robots from the future as well as dudes from the 1950s running about decreases the real scary edge a piece like this needs to have. Also another choice is for absolutely nothing to be revealed about the Cleaners, which would work if we had nothing but a small piece of knowledge that they clean up dead bodies in the night and are killer robots. It's trying to go for the less is more aspect of horror, but for that to work, you need a tantalysing bit for the audience to hold onto, especially since it's audio, the Cleaners are a complete non-presence compared to the actually quite terrifying two random 50s guys. It almost seems like a last minute addition the baffling fact that THEY'RE FROM THE NINTEEN FIFTIES however in their dialogue. I can't believe what I'm saying, but remove the sci-fi angle, and you have utter magic in this script. As it is, it's weird. 
The highlight of the story is Rhys stumbling onto the operating table, but it never reaches that high again. It's not bad, may be worth a listen from time to time, but compared to the overwhelming quality of this range in general, it feels to me like yet another story I may forget about. 5/10

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cobwebs

Image
  Cobwebs by Jonathan Morris Now stop me if you've heard this one before...  The Doctor and Companions arrive in Location X where they discover evidence that something bad is going to happen in the future (i.e. their deaths, the TARDIS not working, etc) and have to fudge the rules of time so they live. It's a Doctor Who stalwart, I should think, I can't count how many stories I've done with it, but the Fires of Vulcan and the entirety of Matt Smith series 6 come readily to mind - and quite frankly, Cobwebs is no exception. It's a complicated time puzzle of a story that will never really surprise you (I figured out the twist a solid hour before it happened.) The story's chief selling point is that for the first time ever since like Mawdwyn Undead and Terminus for two seconds, Tegan, Nyssa, and Turlough are in the TARDIS together. It's other chief selling point is Tegan is in it - this was her second Big Finish audio ever, and she had previously said she would
Read more

Torchwood: Aliens Among Us 2

Image
  Love Rat by Christopher Cooper Trust Big Finish to remake Day One, and not only make it good, but also make it somewhat heartbreaking. Of course, Day One is a terrible and horny bit of TV, and Love Rat is also sort of that way, but it makes up for it (in my book) by dealing with the aftereffects of what this kind of story would actually do to the team. Jack's actions in this episode, although prompted by the parasite, aren't even out of character, and the way he seduces Tyler and Ng and the fallout of that is dealt with in a surprisingly mature and emotional manner. Unlike Day One, which strives to be mature, Love Rat is actually mature, and the Gwen and Ng arc is actually a gutpunch to hear, especially the final few scenes with Rhys, as throughout this series, Ng has taken over Gwen's life and utterly ruined it. It's amazing what Eve Myles can do with just a few words, the emotion she can convey that this isn't what she wants, how horrified she is at not being in
Read more

NCJDDAS: Dark Page

Image
NCJDDAS: Dark Page Cover by Arbrax  This episode of the NOW CANON Judi Dench Doctor adventures was Inspired by Robert Shearman listing a brilliant idea for a short story that wouldn’t work in Doctor Who. I say utter Rubbish. I’m taking that story and writing it in Who. Fight me. It also helps that I haven’t read the story he wrote that I’m utilizing, making this even more of a simple writing prompt thing. Featuring The Twenty Second Doctor, Elizabeth Olsen, as created by Arbrax Chapter One In the town of Broughstershire, at 5:27 AM, the postman came by every house in the neighborhood and gave every single person a letter.  The letter was different for each person. For instance, Mr. Layton got a letter that said May 5, 2027, and below that, in slightly aggressive font, Gangrene. Mrs Curbishley got a letter that said June 18, 2053, Car Crash, and Little Timmy got a letter that said October 9th, 2081, Natural Causes. Of course, these are merely examples, those people don't exist, But
Read more

(MAIN RANGE): Dinnertime Part One

Image
MAIN RANGE: Dinnertime Part One This Story Stars Judi Dench as The Twenty Sixth Doctor and David Tennant as The Tenth Featuring Danny Devito as Danny Devito and John Simm as The Master This Story Takes Place Between A Storm Is A Comin and The Countryfile Conundrum Chapter One "It is said that in the final days of planet earth, everyone had bad dreams. To the west...of the...north... of this world...everyone did...gather? What even is that sentence- um, Sorry, Ah, here we are. IN THE CELEBRATION, of a Pagan rite to banish the cold and the Dark. Each and everyone of those people had nightmares of the pretty mild (for the human race) terror to come (I mean, I think the Dalek invasion was way worse). Everyone except Fred. There's nothing special about Fred, he's not really important to the story, but all the same, he had a dream about shopping, and it was rather average. Okay, so, to sum up. Everyone had bad dreams on Earth, except Fred. They all forgot...Except for one."
Read more

Ninth Doctor Adventures: Ravagers

Image
  The Ninth Doctor Adventures: Ravagers Ravagers is such a weird choice to start the Ninth Doctor Adventures with because in terms of plot, this really feels like an Eleventh Doctor story. It’s convoluted and “timey wimey” and quite possibly disorienting for newcomers. In fact, no, it seems definitely disorienting for newcomers. You think a River Song flow chart was required? Nahh, A Ninth Doctor Ravagers flowchart is required, man. As an audio fanatic, it was quite confusing, and well, perhaps indicative of NuWho Three-Parters, because like most of them, it borders on the shit. And one would expect, me, as not really the worlds hugest Ninth Doctor fan, that I’d hate it, right? Nope! I love it. Really do, I mean, it’s not perfect (first releases for Doctors never are: Sirens of Time, Destination: Nerva and Only the Monstrous are all trash, and Technophobia is just okay) But on the whole, I felt it was a consistent set and the quality never really went up or down much in either directio
Read more