Torchwood: Among Us 3

 

Torchwood: Among Us 3

Warning: Torchwood Among Us 3 is a very dark and political boxset, and the some of the things I will be discussing in the reviews below can be viewed as immensely distressing.

And so, we reach an end. This may be the last Big Finish release I get in quite some time. There are plenty of stories that I'd like to re-evaluate, as well as a move to critical analysis of more than just strictly Big Finish Doctor Who - but we'll see where we go from here. Regardless, Among Sus was quite an eventful series, wasn't it - and it might just be something wondrous to bow out on. 

Torchwood Among Us is something that perhaps I will write further about - it maybe - just maybe - deserves an essay about it as thorough as my Time War essay, as it's themes resonate much more closely to me personally than either Aliens or God Among Us - even if those series are both just as phenomenal. 

Torchwood Among Us is more than anything, about the now. It has been since volume one took on mob mentality and FOX News. Volume Two talked about the fricking War in Ukraine and Private Prisons. Torchwood Among Us is about that feeling that it surely couldn't always have been like this. Torchwood Among Us is about how more than ever before, day after day we are exposed to everything that is wrong with the world and how it can be hard to keep track of. I especially admire the sheer dedication to it within this set.

 Among Us 3 tackles topics like Artificial Intelligence, Crypto-Currency, Social Influencers, Deepfakes, and Vaccine Denial. Torchwood Among Us is a little like We Didn't Start The Fire across all 12 of it's episodes - it is about the overwhelming state of today, dramatized into audio. It’s got this brilliant thesis about how we’re all getting angrier and angrier and it actually does the thing sci fi should do, social commentary through a lens of fiction, by speculating that there’s all a reason behind that, there must be, right?? Obviously there isn't an evil MySpace out there trying to kill us (yet) but what if there was?? 

There has to be something going on, we can't just be like this, right?? ...Right?? I always love to look at the world through fiction, and Torchwood: Among Us tends to have more to say about just about any topic from any episode than entire series of television manage. 

How I Conquered The World by Tim Foley, Ash Darby and James Goss

Of course this one is controversial - I knew it would be, and like many pieces of media I enjoy, it is controversial because of pretty much the exact reason I love it, so you really aren't going to be able to debate me much on this. How I Conquered The World is an experimental and surrealist 50 minute monologue followed by 10 minutes of screwing over Among Us 2's cliffhanger. I'll give you credit - that at least sounds like it shouldn't work.

By it's nature, How I Conquered The World has a lot to say about it. Most criticisms surrounding How I Conquered The World are derived from the fact that it is a 50 minute villain monologue. I love that it is a 50 minute villain monologue. It's not just a monologue, it's very experimentally explored, as stated, with the monologue exploring not only the entire internet, but having casual interjections from our lead characters. The internet is physicalized in a very unique and surreal way that makes absolute sense to anyone whose spent any time on it. The text to speech voices are thoughtfully employed as to make you literally as uncomfortable as you possibly can get - they are very explicit, and I was a little shocked the story went that far, but there is purpose to the notion of having the humans played by artificial intelligence and the artificial intelligence being played by a human. It quite effortlessly displays the massive gap of understanding between the two, something that's very important to the development of the plot. 

Despite it's jumping through time, How I Conquered The World is aggressively current, even more than other Among Us stories - to the extent that in years to come, it may be viewed as "dated," in the same vein as, say, 2005's Bad Wolf. Still - I think that it needs to be credited at how well it explores a medium that we primarily see through an entirely audible perspective. How I Conquered The World is funny, blisteringly uncomfortable, and just plain clever. It's certainly one of my favorite Torchwood adventures in quite some time: just when I thought it was over, and couldn't get any better, it concludes in the most ludicrously funny post-credits I've heard in ages. 

Doomscroll by Ash Darby

Doomscroll tackles the world of the Influencer through a surprisingly caring lens. It is very easy to demonize these gorgeous vapid and egotistical people we see on our phones all the time - difficult to relate to or understand, and so Doomscroll decides to draw a comparison between someone else who is gorgeous vapid and egotistical, and who over time, we have learned to understand. Doomscroll is almost the ultimate Tyler showcase: Of course Hostile Environment exists, but while that was a harrowing story of Tyler under extreme duress, Doomscroll for the first time shows the least loved member of Torchwood as happy - a notion we've never really explored. 

Before you jump on me, yes, of course, Hostile Environment makes Doomscroll look like roadkill, and I shouldn't really have begun to compare them. But Doomscroll is still an interesting hour focusing on Tyler from a unique and different perspective, and it has a genuinely quite chilling idea behind it, even if it is a tad Boomer-esque, the story is aware of it. What if your phone is actually trying to kill you?

The story doesn't say quite as much about the nature of deepfakes as I think it should, considering they're the primary threat of the story and there is a very unique and real ethical concern there that should make a ripe area for drama. The story nearly engages with it's primary concept several times, but mostly seems much more interested in analyzing it's characters as people, which is great, and totally the Torchwood way, but I'm not sure they unpack how legendary a concept for a story they have here. Doomscroll probably isn't going to win any awards, but once again - the story is indeed aware of that. It's just trying to be another solid and thoroughly likable adventure under this team's belt. A tiny little triumph. 

Heistland by Tim Foley

A much larger triumph, Heistland does what quite a few other audios completely fail at doing - a real high quality Heist story. I'd come to think that the Heist as a genre is uniquely ill-suited for audio stories, at least until this one, which absolutely understands how to do it. Definitely having an established team helps - you can't really do a Heist with just Dr Who and his companion! But beyond that, Heistland is also one of the most uniquely well-devised stories for the characters within it. Focusing on Yvonne, Tyler and Orr, it gives them all some of their all time best material. Heistland is a story about character interactions at it's core, and it railroads you into thinking it's going a certain way and then it doesn't - like all the best Heists do, it makes you forget it's a Heist story. 

All three The Story Continues series have really benefitted from how likable the core team of characters in it are. Heistland is built off of these interactions primarily, and how well fleshed out the characters are. For Yvonne Hartman, this is one of her finest outings, and continues to explore a character who you'd think by now would have almost everything you could say about her said. Yvonne has always been one of Big Finish's pet projects, a thoroughly complex and three dimensional character, and she's been the focus of not only the Story Continues but her own boxsets. Her usual confident schemes seem to be to no effect here - and while we've seen Yvonne desperate from her first appearance in One Rule, it never quite seems to stick the way it seems to in Heistland. 

The pun in the title leads me to another one of the story's best choices, Rhys Williams. It's a little odd that Kai Owen is back in the world of Torchwood, but for once, I can believe it. While Rhys can struggle to maintain Main Range releases on his own, that's usually due to them trying to make television Rhys seem a competent character. The brilliant part of having Rhys become a focal point in the series now is that it's after we've seen him manage to be very very lucky for 15 years, it's no longer a stretch to see him as competent. Rhys is the underdog, which makes him the perfect sort of character you believe Yvonne Hartman would overlook in her plans. He's just the husband, isn't he?? It's long time this character has got his due, and I'm very pleased with how this boxset implements him. 

There's almost too much to say about Heistland - it is a very tight hour, not just in the way that it is nicely scripted, but in the way that so much is packed within it. From the fabulous Kristen who is delightfully jovial and just as scary to the continued character beats of Doomscroll to perhaps some of Orr's finest moments ever, the story is packed fill to the brim with little gems of moments that keep you clinging on. 

The Apocalypse Starts at 6 PM by James Goss

This is perhaps the most Torchwood a series finale can get. It's a unique concept to focus the entire finale on a character we've never heard of before now (though perhaps she's been here all the time) and it's an even bolder move to make it a parody of British stalwart The One Show. Luckily, it fits perfectly. The Apocalypse Starts at 6 PM is all about the worries and woes of Janet, as played by Janet Ellis (a TV presenter I've never heard of, possibly playing herself in the Doctor Who-niverse, it's hard to know) who is harassed by both Torchwood and Friend because of the imminent End of the World.

The Apocalypse Starts at 6 PM works very well as a finale pretty much because it incorporates pretty much every theme we've looked at in this series so far. Not all - that would be a clusterfuck - but most of them are namechecked and explored a little bit more. Like the moment in Parting of the Ways where we understand the purpose of "Bad Wolf," there is a great cathartic feeling that not a moment in the season has been wasted. How the bad guy gets defeated is uniquely and wonderfully Torchwood. 

The only problem with The Apocalypse Starts at 6 PM is that the cliffhanger in it makes none of it matter. All of the work that the hour does to set up the conclusion to the series is suddenly and very out of nowhere ignored in quite an awkward way. I feel it would be best if this particular story arc had ended here: not that it was bad, but this would be such a strong ending, and I'm not sure how much mileage you can get out of it otherwise. A phenomenal story almost manages to shoot itself in the foot. 

I think I shall save a deeper analysis of the series as a whole for another day, but suffice it to say Among Us is certainly up there with it's predecessors, and as valid a series of Torchwood as those shown on television. I can certainly highly recommend it, and this was absolutely stunning, but I also feel like it is very nearly time for The Story Continues to end in a sense. There are only a few more threads that I'd like to see followed up on, and I'm not sure how much longer they can keep up this level of quality. Every good story needs a beginning, a middle and an end, and parts of Among Us very nearly end up feeling quite final indeed.