Copyright piracy is a victimless crime… really?

Someone’s put Max Headroom in charge of the Big Finish Torchwood team for this release which has a great deal of fun in playing with the tools (or should that be toys) at the disposal of director, producer, sound engineer, composer… and of course writer. I’m sure someone’s going to try to review this by putting bits and pieces of sentences in the wrong order, but I suspect that a lot of work went into exactly what bits went where to ensure that this release works on two very different levels, and such “homage” wouldn’t be appropriate.

In its simplest form, this is another bittersweet Torchwood series 2 story, with a great performance from Naoko Mori as Tosh, oblivious to the emotional undercurrents around her emanating from Robbie Jarvis’s Stephen. He’s an ex-Torchwood One operative who calls Tosh in for help when he notices some very strange anomalies and realises his life is in danger. She brings her gifts to bear, encountering a very different life form – one who probably embodies many of the feelings that producers feel when they realise that their hard work isn’t being paid for, but instead is being up- and downloaded illegally.

What Scott Handcock, Rob Harvey and Blair Mowat have done in the presentation of this story is add a very different sort of foreshadowing. As an audience, we know Tosh dies at the end of this season (sorry if that’s a spoiler for a decade old series!) so we understand the importance of the messages that permeate the story in a way that the characters can’t. Sometimes the trickery comes across as simply that (a corrupted file that changes the pitch of the music, repeats words and short scenes), but you come away feeling more unnerved than the story might have produced if it had been presented linearly.

As with all such experiments – Nick Briggs’ Creatures of Beauty comes to mind here – it’s something that you don’t want done all the time, but it’s a good reminder of the potential of the audio medium.

Verdict: A clever telling of a bittersweet tale. 9/10

Paul Simpson