The Torchwood Archive

 


The Torchwood Archive by James Goss

It's difficult to do an anniversary story when half of your cast is so incredibly busy you can only book them in for say, three scenes, and you have to have side characters pick up the slack.
It's also difficult to do an anniversary story and just plain make it good, in general. 
Torchwood Archive almost manages. 
First off - it has to be mentioned, the case is absolutely gorgeous. I know it doesn't look like it online, but you'll want this thing on physical. Anyway - the problem with Torchwood Archive is evident when you start to think about the plot.

What plot?

It's an incredibly intricate one that almost fools you - but there's not much there. Can be summed up fairly quickly for all of the numerous side tangents it goes on (oh boy there are loads) It ties together the first 12 Big Finish audios as well as the television series, but what Torchwood Archive is, is an anthology show in two hours. It has a framing device with a character named Jeremiah Bash Henderson visiting the titular archive, where he meets the holograms of the dead Torchwood members in the far future. It's a brilliant concept, but I don't feel it's well utilized, especially when halfway through, characters like Miss Trent from Uncanny Valley, Ivanov from Zone 10 and Archie from The Victorian Age get long uninterrupted sections of the narrative - just...there. With this concept, a lot more can be done than just flashback scenes. But the whole story is mostly flashback scenes - and most of them it can be hard to care about, when summarizing the plot - Object One bounces about between a bunch of owners related to Torchwood, and you can sort of vaguely see how that connects to the Committee over time. 
Some of these individual scenes are great - oddly, Tosh is the star of this entire set, getting an absolutely stellar monologue to a bartender for her scene that utterly encapsulates her character in a legitimately beautiful way - the sheer fanwank of seeing Suzie and Yvonne trade barbs (OH MY GOD I NEARLY DIED) and Alex Hopkins' brutal massacre of Torchwood Three on New Year's Day. But when it's an anthology show like this - it suffers when it has all of these superfluous bits to pad out the runtime. I can't believe I'm saying this, but 2 hours is too much for a story like this, it could easily be One Hour and Fifteen or One Hour and Thirty. When there are useless bits, and then your ACTUAL CENTRAL PLOT THAT IS SUPPOSED TO CONNECT IT TOGETHER HAS SOME MASSIVE GAPING PLOT HOLES, you have a problem. Priorities. I know Guy Adams wanted his ten minute cameo as Archie, but it definitely needed to be cut so Norton's plot actually made sense. On the whole, Torchwood Archive comes out on the acceptable - when it really could have been geniunely great. This all sounds super harsh when I steal a lot from it for my Parody Among Us series but let's be fair: I'm stealing the good bits. What do I like? I like a lot of it. No audio with Suzie, Yvonne, Queen Victoria, Norton, Tosh, Gwen, Ianto, Andy, and the rest of the amazing characters from this series interacting could be bad - but when you have the actual interacting bits of the holograms in the archive next to the holographic recordings, only some of which are good, you know which ones gained more of my attention. Luckily, if a mixed bag has joy in it, which this one definitely does, I can reccomend it wholeheartedly, as a nice way to tie up a few loose ends from the Torchwood Main Range. It's just like Norton said in Ghost Mission, though..."Nice." A comfy soft word, but not all-too particularly impressive. 7/10 

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