Torchwood One: Machines

Torchwood One: Machines

On the one hand, I was rather excited to do this set, as it's more Torchwood One, and listening to it was good - but I still ended up feeling like it wasn't what I wanted from the range. I adore Torchwood One Before The Fall as a story. It's a three episode miniseries that doesn't overstay it's welcome, has a terrific cast and a very specific and very lovely story it wants to tell on it's own terms - there's not really a single draw to the set minus Yvonne and Ianto, it's just a story about Torchwood One, and it's done on a stylish, massive scale. I think it may be one of the best multi-part boxsets that's clearly telling one story. The parts don't have much of their own identity, but as a whole piece, it's rather striking. Torchwood One Machines does the opposite of Before The Fall - it's just three episodes with a very loose arc tied together by fucking WOTAN. I loved how Before The Fall was it's own IP, it's own story that really didn't depend on much else of Torchwood, not Doctor Who, not anything, it was a series that could hypothetically air on BBC One. Machines scratches that and angrily yells at you about WOTAN. Okay, so first off, why did they think Yvonne vs WOTAN was a “irresistible idea?” Like, it doesn't make sense to me - out of all the Doctor Who villains you could hypothetically do, if you even have to do a Doctor Who villain - THEY PICKED WOTAN?? ? ?! ? The other thing is this isn't like the first set in that it's three individual stories - And that would be fine too, if 1. The Law Machines wasn't clearly a entire boxset condensed into an hour or 2. if they just didn't have WOTAN or an arc at all and let the stories exist independent of eachother, as the arc tying them together is exceedingly fucking slipshod. The Final Issue I have with the set as a whole that applies to all the episodes is the cast - I applauded Before The Fall for having this huge ensemble cast that really worked to it's benefit. They had an actual office block of Torchwood workers, and it made the series feel drastically different from the other series. Machines deals with a small team that's exclusively Yvonne and Ianto, and sometimes Tommy from the first set. Good on them for keeping Tommy, but some of the stories would be stronger if Yvonne's supporting team was a more recurring element. It stretches the imagination that Torchwood One is this massive organization and they send Yvonne, the boss and Ianto, the tea boy all the time and no one else. This entire segment of the review has just essentially been me yelling into the void because they did something different this time, but it does feel like a specific effort to target the different aspects the original set did that made it new and fresh and somewhat remove them. Nonetheless, 2/3s of this set is exceptional, I just can't help but feel that it would have been better if it did quite a few things different. This is a set that is incredible Torchwood - but I'm not sure how it is as a Torchwood One set. 

The Law Machines by Matt Fitton

The Law Machines, while not devoid of the very rare good thing, is one of the lesser Torchwood tales I’ve done so far - it’s mostly it’s own incredibly self-contained tale about Torchwood fighting WOTAN of all things. Indeed - this is pretty lame, I can’t lie. It’s exactly the runaround you’d think - But the opening is incredibly stellar and does make me think that this story had the opportunity to do a lot more. The opening is essentially the establishing of a terrifyingly realistic police state being overseen by robot police. From the way the episode opens, you’d think that it’s going to be a dark realistic police state story, which honestly might have been great. The Empty Hand had already done great stuff with corruption in police, what if they mixed that with Hostile Environment and 1984?? Come the intro, I was hooked, excited to see where it was going, which makes it all the more infuriating the interesting parts of this idea are completely gone two seconds later when the robots go cRaZYyYy and start killing people indiscriminately. I can’t help but feel this isn’t the way to go with this story - there’s enough potential here for a boxset on it’s own - we could have a full episode focusing on how these law machines affect peoples’ lives and the moral quandary behind that before they even went mad in the first place. All of the interesting stuff involving Yvonne’s corrupt Torchwood institution and their 1984 shenanigans is completely glossed over in favor of a battle with WOTAN. Who incidentally, speaks so slowly he individually pronounces every single syllable. Yvonne Hartman is a great character as usual, but this isn’t the three dimensional Yvonne I’m used to, she felt sort of flat, even if she got the best material in this tanker of an episode. There was a great scene where she tells off the mayor - and the ending where despite everything Torchwood continues to work on the police state project is fucking chilling and brilliant - but this is pretty lame stuff, especially the scene where Yvonne tries to seduce Clyde Langer’s voice actor who is playing a weird hacker guy. This range knows better than this - by the end of the first episode of the first set we’d set up a tremendously good arc with many ways the tale could progress in the future and by the end of this one everything seems perfectly wrapped up in a frustratingly perfect bow. Every character is simply lesser - from Ianto and Tommy to even Yvonne. Although Uprising was rather good, this is pretty much what I expected from Fitton as it's much closer to his sort of run on the Eighth Doctor and Main Range and it just doesn't fit as a style for him or Torchwood. I hate being this negative, but The Law Machines was one of those rare episodes that make me wonder why I do this. 4/10

Blind Summit by Gareth David Lloyd

It feels fake to say there’s no one who understands Ianto quite like Gareth David Lloyd - but it may just be true. He’s consistently given Ianto the best material out of any writer that’s taken to him on Big Finish, and Blind Summit may be his magnum opus. This is by far the best Ianto script we’ve ever gotten on audio, and with episodes like Broken and The Last Beacon that can be hotly contested - but I don’t think there’s a single episode that gets him more. It’s technically Ianto’s origin story, the first time he went to Torchwood at all, and it doesn’t feature WOTAN at all. It does however feature some very unique characterization from Yvonne, who in this set especially is acting quite deplorable, even more so than usual. Gareth David Lloyd is a smart enough writer to contrast this and also show Yvonne at her most emotionally vulnerable. The best material though goes to Ianto, to no one's surprise, whose initiation into Torchwood is a lot more somber than you might expect - his home life and his scenes with his father (who does not say a single word throughout the audio - it's a VERY bold choice) are absolutely astonishing. It’s one of those stories you don’t want to describe too much for fear of ruining it, but it’s got some beautifully Horrific ideas, it’s very existential and of the most Torchwood Torchwood’s you could ask for. Blind Summit just serves: 10/10

9 to 5 by Tim Foley

Tim Foley wraps up the set in a story that really didn’t need to have much to do with anything else in the set - in all honesty, you could have cut all of the references to Blind Summit and WOTAN without much issue. Despite this, it’s just an incredible episode of Torchwood, and it’s sort of like if Human Resources from the 8DAs met Random Shoes. Essentially it’s about a girl named Stacey who works as a temp in a London office being gradually revealed that her whole life is a lie and she’s actually working for an alien conspiracy that is building temporary humans as a slave force. It’s very bitter about capitalism especially- with the analogy for the temporary people applying to much of the work force and how we need money to survive so we sort of just slave away sometimes. It’s quite harsh and it’s perfectly suited for Torchwood One - especially since the primary universe Yvonne and not the Pete’s World one from God Among Us can be quite a bit of a tyrant. She’s been portrayed increasingly unsympathetically in this set and I’m hoping this means there’s a plan for her future with Ianto, who really doesn’t seem to be taking it well. If it’s done, it’s great stuff to build up on in the future. There’s a lot to analyze and it’s blisteringly good conclusion just made me feel wonderfully angry, even if I saw it coming - yeah, this one is rather brilliant, but it's also quite predictable. I related to this one a little too hard though, as office horror stuff works very well for me, as it may sound dumb, but a stifling environment like that, is the sort of thing a creative spirit like me is scared of. And it parallels with the office environment of Torchwood One in a brilliant way. This story would have been even stronger if Ianto wasn't the only character we knew from Torchwood One who works in an office - and here we are bringing me back to the start of the review. This is excellent Torchwood, but it still suffers from the problems every other story in the set suffers from. Look, I don't know what to critique and what not to at this point. Plus, quite franly - I'm just rambling - this is excellent. I just hope Latter Days and Nightmares have a more coherent message to say. 9/10