Reviews Torchwood: In The Shadows by Christopher Fain

Torchwood: In the Shadows

by Joseph Lidster

Produced by Heavy Entertainment

BBC Audio release 7 May 2009

read by Eve Myles

'Ring-a-ring-a-roses, a pocket full of posies.  A-tishoo!  A- tishoo!  We all fall down.'

Set between the second series' episodes of 'Meat' and 'Reset', the audio book of 'In the Shadows' sees the Cardiff Hub team once more facing the afterlife question.  Is there nothing beyond death but a black and lonely void or is there something moving in the dark?  Either of these might be preferable to what waits in the shadows.

Narrated by Eve Myles, best known to fans as Gwen Cooper, this audio production is, at two and a half hours long, fast-paced action from the start while still giving small, intimate glimpses into the minds and hearts of its characters.  We are both reassured of what we know about them and then given new perspectives that add to the larger arc of Torchwood's second series.  Myles has a beautiful voice and she gives each character their natural intonations to the best of her vocal abilities.  The incidental music used reflects the intensity and urgency of the mission, while the use of one character to tell the story through the lens of an open letter to her dead team mates gives 'In the Shadows' a reflective tone which elicits both sorrow for the loss and hope for the future.

We are given a glimpse into the Cooper-Williams pre-marriage dynamic from the beginning of the story, as they are shopping for new settee cushions when a call from PC Andy Davidson interrupts their moment of domesticity.  He's got a body, a suspect, and an impossible murder.  It's all a bit Torchwood.

The body is really a skeleton and it was found on Queen Street, Cardiff's main pedestrian shopping area.  This unusual find appears to be that of a seventy-year old man who, according to his dental records, is actually Stephen Ballard, a young professional who went missing two days previously.  The suspect in custody was the last person to see him alive.  Mousy beta-man Darren Sowersby has no memory for what happened but knows that he last saw his friend in the taxi they were sharing on the way home from an evening of post-work drinking. 

Torchwood gets involved. 

When a second body, that of a young woman named Jade Russell, turns up on a Queen Street club's dance floor, the same circumstances are present.  Alive, she was in her twenties but at death she's eighty-something and her body is in a state of decay which suggests she's been dead for a while. 

What's happening here?  What does it have to do with huon particles?  Is there a serial killer on the loose in Cardiff, destroying people with something otherworldly and malignant?  Where did this form of death come from?  Is it Torchwood-created and now in the hands of a mentally-ill human with a desire to rid the world of its sin?  Here we have no rampaging aliens, no Weevils to track and trap; the danger comes from within the dark corners of the human psyche, a place we should all fear.  Who knows what lives in the heart of the person sitting beside us on the bus or the train?  Are we being judged by those around us, stranger and friend alike?  What happens when we're found lacking? 

Just when you think the team has caught up with the unlikely villain, whose invisible presence in life gives him the perfect opportunity to punish those whom he sees as sinners, things go pear-shaped.  Jack is sent to hell.

'Silence.  Darkness.  Alone in a world of shadows, Jack Harkness had no idea where he was.'

The team works to find and retrieve Jack, well aware that hell for someone who can't die is perhaps the most monstrous fate of all.  Jack's longevity gives them time to find a solution, but if they fail to do so, Jack's stay in hell will be eternal and he has so many regrets to re-suffer through.  While Owen and Tosh handle the technical aspect of huon particles and the weapon of choice, Gwen and Ianto pry answers out of their perp, an enigmatic psychopath who believes he's doing God's work by releasing the angels to punish those mundane and unlucky sinners who cross his path.

As seen in second series' episodes, Jack and Ianto's romantic relationship at this point is developing; there is an acknowledgment of bondage play with handcuffs and safety words but it's a tease, leaving you to wonder which of them was holding the keys.  They are physical with one another and the L word is tossed out.  Jack is his flirty and bigger-than-life self, while Lidster's Ianto is sweet, funny, and a bit innocent but deeply intuitive into the workings of the human heart; his darker side, revealed on occasion to great effect, casts him in chiaroscuro which both startles and excites. 

For the sake of brevity, Owen and Tosh are not fully involved here, but not every story can showcase every character.  Even so, their place in the mission is important; each plays a role in both dimensions, as team members who are working to solve the problem and as thorns for Jack's experience in the shadow world of hell, where he is urged to think that he's gotten it all wrong about everything.

Captain John Hart makes a momentary and appropriately slimy appearance to show us how Jack fears the intrusion of his less-than-noble past.  Hart's tiny place in the story comes laced with a mental image of Ianto Jones which is haunting far longer than the fifty seconds it takes within a track full of glimpses into what life might be like for the team if Jack was well and truly dead.  There are also a few cameo appearances for characters from the background of both Torchwood and its parent television show, 'Doctor Who', such as Trinity Wells from AMNN.

Jack's realization that things are not as they seem comes after the listener has started to see that our hero is not behaving like our hero; that, in fact, he's crossed a line into darkness.  Hell, for Jack Harkness, only truly begins when he has lost everything and everyone he cares about and he knows there won't be an end to his lonely penance.

This is a story that, once you have heard it, may keep you awake at night with questions that are raised by its premise and its execution.  Is hell a real place and, if so, is it another dimension where your venial, work-day sins and miseries are exploited and used against your heart?  Even in the end, Gwen Cooper doesn't know and neither do we and maybe it's better that way, for hell is personal and subject to individualization.

When we think about what hell is, we give it many definitions.  Hell is unique for each of us, no matter what we've been taught in faith or school or by our families, and we experience it in small doses every day.  Stephen Ballard's hell is the experience of being totally alone in a silent world while Jade Russell's is a reversal of all the hateful gossip which she indulges in.  Jack's is the unending nightmare of being completely on his own in the Hub, having destroyed and forgotten everyone that he cares for.

We all have little darkly bitter and hateful thoughts about the people around us, the tiny irritations sparked by perceived slights enacted by those who are seemingly unaware of how they get under our skin.  We resent their good luck and their happy endings, as Tosh resents Gwen's and as Owen resents Jack's.

With grin-worthy cultural references like 'murgatroyd', free DVDs that come with the papers, the Rob Dougan song 'Furious Angels', the movie 'Silence of the Lambs', and other titbits, the story is firmly grounded in what we love about Torchwood.  It's 21st century (where everything changes), its immediacy is poignant, and we can identify with the beta personality who feels like they are forever second fiddle, the eternal wingman.  Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.  But, as Ianto Jones and Toshiko Sato prove, sometimes it's the little people who save the day.

Through the eyes of our beta-man Darren Sowersby, the listener is left to wonder if it is technology or the human heart's ability to forgive which saves Jack from what he fears the most.

Joseph Lidster is also the writer of the second series episode 'A Day in the Death', a fan favorite for its glimpse into hope, despair, and freedom of choice from the perspective of a dead man.  To date, he has contributed several pieces to the Torchwood paradigm as well as to other television shows such as 'Wizards vs Aliens', and 'The Sarah Jane Adventures'.  Other audio-based works include scripts and stories for Big Finish Productions' lines such as 'Doctor Who', 'UNIT', and 'Dark Shadows', to name but a few.  Fans of his 'Torchwood' stories should definitely check out other projects and offerings from this author.