Gwen, Rhys, Mr Colchester and his husband Colin go on a night out… and end up fighting for their lives…

You might expect that the penultimate episode of a major series would go out of its way to be setting things up for the grand finale, but that’s not the route that James Goss and the Torchwood audio production team have taken. This is a much smaller scale story than we’ve had in the Aliens Among Us set, with the focus very firmly on Gwen (or rather, as we were forcibly reminded last episode, Ng) and Mr Colchester. There’s no sign of any of the others bar one significant mention, and this gives Helen Goldwyn (in her strongest script in the Who-niverse to date) an opportunity to really show us both the similarities and differences between the two. We already know that both are prepared to take lives but where do they draw the line?

Big Finish have produced hundreds (if not thousands now) of stories in the Doctor Who universe, and there have been very few times, given the restrictions of the ‘reset’ that’s part and parcel of ‘missing adventures’, that I’ve genuinely wondered if regular characters are going to make it to the end of a story. This time I did – even if, on reflection, Goldwyn played fair and made sure all the clues were there. But will they survive the series finale?

Verdict: An excellent piece of character drama with strong work across the board from the cast. 9/10

Paul Simpson