Torchwood One: Nightmares
Torchwood One Nightmares
Torchwood One Nightmares is the surprise return of The Torchwood One series from indefinite hiatus, and it's certainly one hell of a message to send to listeners. You can expect nothing. Torchwood One is back, and guess what, bitch?? You have NO clue what you're getting into for each of these stories. None of them are even really horrors either, despite what the title of the set might tell you - although Your Guest Tonight gets the closest, it's too surreal and disconnected to truly feel scary. In each of these stories, you're going to think one thing will happen, and delightfully, something else you'd never have considered will. That's the real power of this boxset, because while it's theme connecting the three stories is nowhere near as thematically resonant as Latter Days, they share this strange basic tissue while also having absolutely NOTHING in common. Sure, there's the Nightmares title. They could all technically be categorized as Nightmares, but that's again, a technical thing when Less Majesty is only a nightmare in the sense that "oh geez, it's a comedy story and things have gone wrong, haha!" There's an immense amount of freedom here. You can tell the writers were all let loose and allowed to do whatever they possibly could have wanted. It's almost like three very good Torchwood Main Ranges. It's one of the strongest Boxsets in Torchwood, and it's also one of the most atypical.
Your Guest Tonight by Tim Foley
Your Guest Tonight is something that's very different from what Torchwood usually does. It's a three hander with a focus on a guest character, slim connection to Torchwood in general, and surreal, trippy atmosphere with twist after twist after twist brings one more in mind of an Inside Number Nine episode. An Inside Number Nine episode on Talk Shows. (How haven't they done that yet?) This of course, is far from a bad thing, as Inside Number Nine is absolutely phenomenal, but it's also a rather unique thing here, and far from the usual for Torchwood - most of the audio taking place with Tracy Ann Oberman playing all of the (many) female characters, in interviews that never really seem to even begin that go on forever. Tim Foley always surprises me with his continually brilliant ways to rework the Torchwood format into some really wonderful pieces. An author like him is very important to the series, because someone who's willing to write more deranged and unusual pieces makes the range all the more delightful. Experimental stories are almost always the best, and this one is a bold and stunning choice to open the set - especially since the following stories are much more normal Torchwood tales in tone. Jon Culshaw delivers one of his best performances on audio, playing a vacuous talk show host with a dark past, and he gets to play with his voice to gorgeous result throughout, as does Tracy Ann Oberman - most of the time not playing Yvonne Hartman. When Yvonne does ebb in and out of the story, it's to all the more creepy and fascinating impact, her final scene being nothing but pure brilliance. Gareth David Lloyd doesn't play himself either, but since his roles are much smaller and his impression of someone completely different sounds so natural, you probably won't notice it's him. It's mostly Culshaw and Yvonne/Not-Yvonne playing off of eachother for an hour, and it may be confusing, but it's a sort of perfect confusing. Your Guest Tonight is subtly twisted, and it keeps using these tiny little lines that you don't think are important for enormous impact later on - it's as close to perfect as I think audio gets, even if it's not really a story about Torchwood, it still holds this ethereal twisted power, and it's gorgeously trippy energy is something that I'd love to see be tried again. 10/10
Lola by Rochana Patel
A deceptively low stakes mystery based around Torchwood's Office Atmosphere that never seems to go where you think it will, Lola was the surprise delight of the set. I didn't think I'd care for it much based on the description, but it's a charming story that sucks you in, and it actually makes use of Torchwood One's larger cast. Kieran's return in this story was delightful - please bring back more characters from the first set, I'd love to see Guleraana or Soren again. The mystery evolves slowly and brilliantly throughout the story, and it lets Ianto and Tommy take focus for once after Yvonne dominated the previous tale. I like being wrong-footed, and Lola does it very well, slowly developing into something quite creepy indeed. It's hard to describe what makes Lola good, because it's sort of just good, really, it does almost everything just, very well. Smart characterization from an author who's clearly looked over the series rather intently. My only real problem is the ending, which sort of made a sudden left turn I wasn't expecting, nor really liked? But the piece as a whole is so smart, and I don't think the ending truly ruins it. I can't help but really like Lola and how it was subtly one of the cleverest one of these stories yet. I'm very interested to see what Rochana Patel does next. 8.5/10
Less Majesty by James Goss
Less Majesty is the funniest audio I have ever heard. Sounds hyperbole, I know, but it's beaten Doctor Who and The Pirates, The One Doctor, Death and The Queen, Goodbye Piccadilly, Another Man's Shoes, and somehow all of the Missy audios to boot. I don't exaggerate around here. It's genuinely hysterical, a gorgeous little farce that initially seems like mindless fluff, but with a deranged sense of escalation. It also all takes place in one room, and you could probably put it on as a theatre production. The closest comparison is probably something like The Goes Wrong Show where the whole sort of point is that everything steadily goes bonkers until the story ends with Yvonne pretend-stabbing Tommy (in drag) repeatedly with a spoon while standing on a disheveled copy of the Bible. And that's not even the end of it, to be fair, that's just somewhat near the end. There's a sort of level of seriousness in what Torchwood and Big Finish do in their stories in general that's sort of completely annihilated in this one. You expect there generally to be a focus on drama, a focus on plot, and in Less Majesty, there's not really any of that. There's a scenario, but there isn't really a plot. Next to every line there's another joke. If you didn't think it was funny, it's gonna give you another in literally every two seconds, constantly for fifty plus minutes, until the absurdity creeps up on you and you're just sort of giggling maniacally. It's really clever, and so it's occasional moments of relevant things buried in the madness will catch you off guard - it's got a Mastery of Misdirection that really works to it's benefit. To be plain - It's just madness. Less Majesty feels like crack fanfiction, but in a genuinely good way, like, it may be crack fanfiction but everyone is very well characterized (except Tommy, but to be fair, he's on drugs for literally the whole thing.) The only criticism I could give it would be that perhaps it's too repetitive, but at the same time, that even works to it's ludicrously ridiculous flavor. I find it so completely wondrous that the same man who wrote The Hope can write Less Majesty. I find Less Majesty, actually, those precise words - completely wondrous. 10/10
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