Tony ponders the arc.
Aliens Among Us has been
the fifth official series of Torchwood, carrying on the legacy of Cardiff’s own
Men, Women And Others In Black with a new cast of characters, facing distinctly
21st century alien intentions, invasions, and interventions.
There have been issues
building with the aliens who have taken over the government of Cardiff, and its
police force, but Part 2 ended on a bombshell – the return of Yvonne Hartman
(No really, it’s not a spoiler, she’s on the front cover of this box set!).
Meanwhile, Jack Harkness appears to be undercover in a local anti-alien
terrorist group, sprung from nothing and turning into something under his
guidance. It’s all very world-turned-on-head stuff. The job of Part 3 then is
to bring much of it to a point and pay it off in a way that makes sense.
Hmm.
The first story in this
third and final box set of Aliens Among us, Poker Face by Tim Foley, is a
pretty classy, sweaty, paranoid tale of who really owns the heart of Torchwood
– Jack Harkness or Yvonne Hartman. Suspicion, lies, Jack’s recent
high-handedness as he tries to play both sides against the middle, and Yvonne’s
particularly people-centred management style all come in to play, while the
Torchwooders pootle about in search of potential weapons of mass destruction
that could turn Cardiff into so much dust. There is of course a fairly logical
reason why Yvonne is back from the Cyber-grave, and if you think really hard,
you’ll probably guess it, but you’ll care a little less than you might imagine,
because there’s enough hardcore drama going on to keep you well and truly
occupied. Foley’s tale has the feeling of a LeCarre spy story – everyone’s
trustworthy until they’re not, and you’ll begin to mistrust everyone you think
you know by the end of it. What it doesn’t really do is advance us at all
towards any overall story-arc resolution. That means what you get is a story
that absolutely entertains in its own right, but the beginnings of a suspicion
that the set is not going to pay off with the degree of punch it needs.
Tagged, by Joseph Lidster,
is the creepiest, most inherently Torchwood idea in the set, with seemingly
normal people committing murders in a state of euphoric certainty, and an
indestructible card that appears to influence them, but that no-one can
explain. It brings a powerhouse performance out of Kezrena James as Serena,
ordinary young woman and colleague of Sergeant Andy Davidson. Serena acts as
our window into the world of the mysterious card and its influence, and takes
us on a journey right into the heart of everyday darkness. It also gives Yvonne
and Orr, played by Samantha Beart, something juicy to do, while showing the
nature of people in the age of pure social networking freedom of speech – quick
to judge, quick to spit their views out into the electronic world. As a
standalone episode of Torchwood, Tagged is a thing of gritty, horrifying
beauty, but as with, say, Series 2 of the televised version, giving time and
space for these well-structured standalones on the run-up to the series finale
puts ever more pressure on the remaining episodes to deliver much by way of
resolution, and the further into this box set you go, the less confident you
get that it’s going to be able to pull that off.
Story 3, Escape Room, by
Helen Goldwyn, follows up with a third story that in and of itself is good
Torchwood – especially so in Goldwyn’s case because it uses a standard sci-fi
trope of people, couples trapped together, working unwittingly against one
another, and exposing the faultlines in those relationships, but gives it a
Torchwood twist. In particular, it reminds the listener of Torchwood grandee
and new Who showrunner Chris Chibnall’s The Power of Three, in that while it
presents a mystery, the evil overseer of the escape room from outer space hell
clearly has a purpose, but there’s insufficient time to really develop a good
idea of what it might be, or who the overseers are that run the room. There’s
also something about the ending which appears to defy the logic of the story as
it’s been built up, meaning that all the drama of the Cooper-Williamses and the
Colchester-Prices being trapped in an escape room that wants to kill them is
rather undone by the ease with which the problem is eventually eliminated. And
still, there’s a standalone vibe, three episodes in.
It’s left to James Goss,
in Herald of the Dawn, to try and wrap up all the things that have been
intrinsic to Aliens Among Us. And bless him, he makes a damn good stab at it,
with events that have a distinctly Torchwood feel – a car park full of people
burned to death by a thunderbolt from ‘God’, with a handful of survivors whose
minds appear to be broken. Rachel Atkins as Mayor Ro-Jedda comes back to the
fore, and there are pitched battles, collapsing buildings, chases through the
Hub and Torchwood casualties along the way. But the actual pay-off for twelve
episodes of new Torchwood feels unavoidably slight, given the decision to
mostly go with standalone episodes this time round. There’s been little sense
of escalation leading to disaster, meaning Goss has to fit in and resolve as
much disaster as possible in his episode, and something has to give. What gives
is the impact of the revelations designed to tie the whole thing together and
tie it up for us. We’re not by any means in ‘damp squib’ territory – the
episode itself punches along and gets you invested and involved, particularly
as the chase inside the Hub kicks up a gear. It’s just that it ends about
twenty minutes too soon, and because it has
to end that soon, the revelations at the end feel deflated, not allowed the
space to hit home or find some proper explanation.
Torchwood, Aliens Among Us
has been, overall, very true to TV Torchwood in all but Series 3. Great
individual episodes with only a few clunkers along the way, but in terms of
developing and delivering a coherent sense of escalation, a drive towards a
climactic moment and a resolution of its impact, Children Of Earth remains
unchallenged in its dramatic laurels. More new Torchwood would be great,
absolutely, with at least some of the Series 5 crew carrying the flame forward
– Paul Clayton’s Mr Colchester and Ramon Tikaram’s Colin Colchester-Price in
particular are joyful all the way through the series, and more from them would
be an enormous treat. But if there’s to be more new Torchwood with this crew,
it needs to either solve the problem of escalating story-threads to a
crisis-point, or it needs to do what the TV show could never bring itself to
do, and simply avoid the escalation of a story-arc at all. The chances are,
with their different audiences – Big Finish making stories more for fans than
for general potential viewers – the audio audience would lap up the new
Torchwood stories even without an
apocalyptic arc. And without an arc to resolve, it would feel less
disappointing at the very end than a three box-set collection which needs to
build to something, and then stubbornly refuses to do so.
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