Torchwood: Among Us 1

 

Torchwood: Among Us 1

Warning: Torchwood Among Us 1 is a very consistently dark boxset, and the themes I will be discussing in the reviews below may be triggering to some. 

The main problem that I have when composing the reviews for Torchwood's The Story Continues Series, is that I don't have much to actually review. Well, enough to criticize. There's plenty to analyze, to be sure, but I really rather struggle writing reviews for this series in particular, because Series 5, 6, and now 7 of Torchwood are really, really, really, goddamn great, and taken as a whole, my favorite thing Big Finish/The Whoniverse has ever done. Sure, there are some INDIVIDUAL stories I like more than some of the best episodes, such as The Chimes of Midnight or Friend of the Family, but Torchwood's "Among Us" ranges are so consistent that they knock it out of the park each time. I can count the slightly subpar episodes of these three series on one hand. Not bad episodes - subpar ones. 

As such, you probably already think I sound quite biased. Well, I'm going to at least try to shove my inexorable joy and happiness to the side and give Torchwood: Among Us 1 it's fair dues without inelegant tongue blabbering and incoherent shrieks of joy. So there - I've done my bit as a reviewer in that regard.

Aliens Next Door by Ash Darby

Aliens Next Door opens the series with possibly the best pilot episode of anything. As soon as this set came out, the vast heaps of praise I heard for the stories were lathered onto mainly Misty Eyes, and while that story is indeed fucking gorgeous (we'll get there) Aliens Next Door is pretty much just as good. It's one of those stories that has a really, really simple premise and runs with it, this episode featuring Ng and Orr, Torchwood's resident aliens doing a bit of reconisance on a flat - classic, Hitchcock's Rear Window kinda stuff - before the episode takes a viciously sharp turn into analyzing mob mentality and paranoia. 

A lot of the episode's triumphs work off of Samantha Beart and Alexandria Riley. As with the best audio plays, this story has a lot of talking and character interaction, and seeing these two characters who we haven't seen since 2019 work off eachother is what lends to a lot of the more enjoyable aspects of the story. The story takes influence from a few other Torchwood Monthly Range stories that work with the buddy cop dynamic, and on first glance you may be led to believe that this story is a rehash of some of Andy or Ianto's dynamics with characters like Owen and Yvonne. The story plays on these preconceptions quite well, and eventually turns some of them on their head. We've had Torchwood stories with One Trusting and One Untrusting Torchwood member before, but Aliens Next Door is a story that can only really be told with these two characters. 

I do not know why this episode in particular is not generating more buzz - in terms of quality audio drama, it's hard to top.

Colin Alone by Una McCormack

Colin Alone uses a stalwart Torchwood narrative device to tell a story about someone you weren't expecting. It's tradition, in a sense, since the success of Random Shoes, one of the strongest episodes in Season One of Torchwood, to every once and a while, tell a story about the common man, and not just our protagonists. There were a few other such episodes on television, and the tradition was kept up with audio, with Torchwood getting one story protagonists like Bethan or Brent Hayden. The Bilis and Queen Victoria audios live exclusively off of this trope. Colin Alone, however, is a little more interesting than that, because it's a character we know fairly well, and empathize with, but this is the first time he is recieving the central focus. 

Colin Colchester-Price has been firmly planted in "recurring-character" status, and so making him the star of an episode is a delightfully out of the blue move. While the box-art gives top billing to Paul Clayton, it is absolutely Joplin Sibtain as Colin who is the star of the episode, with Mr. Colchester himself only appearing for less than five minutes. Colin Alone, as a story, is sort of a MUCH, MUCH friendlier version of Hostile Environment, where Colin just inexplicably has a series of absolutely miserable things happen to him over a period of several days, and the whole thing has something to say about placing so much power in beauracracy and organizations. Bad things that could possibly be random coincidences just keep happening to Colin, and the story just slowly wears you down alongside him. The story is sort of tailored really well to Colin. Thanks to the connection gained over the previous stories Colin's been in, you realize what a sweet man he is, and you really do want things to be the best for him. It doesn't have the sheer "shoving your balls in a blender" impact of Hostile Environment, but it also shouldn't - that story is tailored to Tyler, and this one to Colin. It's an easy comparison, it works off of very similar ideas, how some people, through no fault of their own, just happen to go through hell now and then, but they are Apples and Oranges. 

Colin Alone is nicely uncomfortable, but also doesn't go quite far enough in places. The story isn't fun and rainbows, and while having the series of events in the story be deniable as coincidences, but also unlikely, makes sense within the story's narrative but not so much for the audience's emotional perspective. I kept waiting for the story to really bear it's teeth - but thanks to the nature of how Colin is an ordinary person, he can't really be anything but impassive for most of the runtime. There is literally nothing he can do to solve this except beg for help, and therein sort of lies the problem. The story is quite effective, a very solid 8/10 sort of thing if I still gave arbitrary scores, but it could have been much more so. 

Misty Eyes by Tim Foley

I don't have much notes - Eve Myles' return to Torchwood is absolutely pitch perfect. Another Tim Foley classic, Misty Eyes looks the character of Ng dead in the eye and forces the audience to consider the nature of sympathy. Why do we like this character who impersonated another character we also like, trapping her in a voiceless hell for over a year and killing her mother? What the heck is the deal with Ng? God Among Us was quite a busy series indeed, the majority of Ng's characterization within it being relegated to ensemble episodes, as most of the episodes in that series were - but Among Us is far more episodic, and over the course of Aliens Next Door and Misty Eyes, we're examining who Ng is when the world isn't IMMEDIATELY falling apart much more closely. 

Since she left the scene in Aliens Among Us's conclusion, Gwen and Rhys have found a home in a lighthouse in Iceland. They're living a simple and rustic life, ordinary domestic bliss, but they're slightly unsatisfied. That's when Ng shows up. Why this story exists isn't hard to explain.

Ng and Gwen have such a visceral connection and a painful history that it makes sense to lock them in a room together and force them to confront that for both characters. They're very similar people, but how much of that is because of what Ng took from Gwen? That question is the focal point for the entirety of Misty Eyes. The story has a small cast of just Gwen, Rhys and Ng, but stripping the story down to it's barebones allows it to be even cleverer than you might have thought it would be. In doing so, you get a story that is a masterpiece of character interaction, with so much said and none of the characters ever dumbed down in the entirety of their conflict. The story operating at such simple terms of just three characters allows it to work all sorts of things into the plot - the story is very good at misdirection and leaving things unsaid until they have to be.

Alexandria Riley is the absolute victor of this boxset, being the standout performer in both this and Aliens Next Door. I've always spoken to Alexandria's brilliance as an actress, in her imitation of Eve Myles, but these two stories really work to expand Ng as much more than that in her own right. The dramatic material that Riley is asked to convey in this story is a massive task for any actor - there is a lot of emotional weight and subtext she is being asked to deliver, and she absolutely nails it. 

The story's main threat is so remarkably clever from both the angle of character and the small-cast, and it helps focus in on the characters rather than distract like it would if the threat of the story was a Weevil with a big gun. The threat is delightfully both the point of the story and it isn't. 

Misty Eyes is fucking incredible. 

Moderation by James Goss

If you think that Among Us has been really really political in terms of it's commentary in the series so far, hold onto your damn hat, because Moderation is gonna hit you with a STEAMROLLER. Moderation is a story about the world of sensationalism that we live in right now - how science doesn't get clicks, hate speech is rising, and oh yeah, Fox News. 

Part of me wants to applaud Moderation for it's sheer lack of restraint. The story is the most political I believe any Whoniverse story ever has been. But it's an especially interesting question to ask: When did everything exactly get so insane? Was it always like this? It surely wasn't, was it? Moderation is interesting, because while Torchwood has been transparent about it's allegories and lack of subtlety with them previously, Moderation is not so much a political allegory of a story as it is - more or less - directly protest literature. 

Starring Petra Malik, a reporter character original to this story and Tyler, Petra and Tyler are working at an unnamed news agency. Tyler grows steadily more concerned that a conspiracy is trying to kill Petra for her reporting on subjects that the news station doesn't want people to hear. In his new job he is assigned to moderate comments on the website, which quickly becomes inundated with homophobia, racism, rape and death threats, all of it building up to a fever pitch. 

This is an excellent story for Tyler, especially post his God Among Us character development. Tyler has matured as a person, or at least tried to. Moderation shows him trying his best, but becoming emotionally overwhelmed and turning to drugs and men as per usual, because let's face it - Tyler is a wreck. Mr. Colchester's brief cameos in the story - make no mistake, it's mostly Tyler and Petra - help to add to this, showing a cool and competent contrast to Tyler Steele, walking disaster. The scene where Tyler breaks down due to all the hate speech he is viewing is a character highlight, and very well portrayed by Jonny Green. It shows vulnerability and growth to Tyler, something I really like from him. At the start of Series 5, he was the sort of character who would be spreading some of this hate himself. While Tyler is improving as a person, he'll never quite be perfect, and that's very interesting.

Moderation is intensely uncomfortable, if you can't tell even from the synopsis I'm writing - the story has several very dark scenes such as a man she is interviewing assaulting Petra, and it's all scary as hell especially given the Trump-esque rhetoric and hatred present throughout. Surely dark is the norm for Tyler stories, Zero Hour, his scenes in Night Watch, and Hostile Environment all aren't happy go lucky tales either, but Moderation finds a different way to be uncomfortable than usual. Notice how I can't really go a few sentences in these reviews without referencing Hostile Environment. Almost like that story sort of defines the Torchwood range at this point. It's like a video game journalist comparing something to Dark Souls. 

Regardless, Moderation is so uncomfortably relatable that it feels strange that Torchwood is able to give the story a resolution. While the tale ends in a cliffhanger, I still take an issue with the notion that, bit of spoilers - that Torchwood's hacking can just stop people going to the hate speech site. Surely the hate speech would just end up at a different news equivalent, and surely even if the site's down, Petra is still a target for nasty fascists out there. 

Among Us 1 is a really really strong boxset, and shows great signs of Torchwood's continual growth and improvement. As Aliens Next Door deftly states at the start of the set - Torchwood is more than Jack Harkness, and Among Us 1 takes a lot of good notes from previous Torchwood successes to create something intensely new, that has a very intriguing arc moving forward. I am filled with anticipation for the following releases, though I suppose that isn't exceedingly surprising. Here's to more from Ng, Colchester, Tyler and Orr - and hopefully more old friends along the way!