Felicia Haynes (Linda Armstrong) runs a tight home. It’s not an asylum, we don’t do those anymore. No, it’s a care facility and an efficient one too. Lots of patients, minimal staff and an eye on making sure everything’s profitable. That’s why Shireen Afzal (Emma Kaler) finds herself with a roommate. Toshiko Sato…

Torchwood is a franchise that shines when it seethes and this episode is no exception. Writer Alexander Stewart worked in this particular field of health care and the script has the exhausted, laconic humour and rage of every health care professional I’ve ever known. This is the world as we live in it: where bureaucrats hide racism inside cost benefit analyses and psychic vampire cephalopods are less a problem and more an optimization procedure. It’s vintage Torchwood in that regard, the evil here far more human than alien. The monsters are monsters, to be fair, but they’re also simply doing what they do. It’s Felicia, played with gloriously Tory oleaginousness by Linda Armstrong, who’s the fascist fist inside the passive aggressive glove. It’s not personal, but it is, and Armstrong does an extraordinary job of showing us both who Felicia tells herself she is and who’s under the mask.

Emma Kaler excels too and her Shireen fizzes with a fury far more overt and honest than Felicia could ever express. The racism at the heart of the story is pointed straight at Shireen and she stares it down all the way because there’s nothing else she can do. Never without agency, never  without humanity, Shireen is a hell of a first appearance for Big Finish and one that marks Kaler as a talent to watch.

In the centre of the storm sits Naoko Mori’s Toshiko Sato. This is Tosh at a very specific time in her life, and Mori is a performer of such subtlety and self-knowledge that she can take a character who is almost entirely without agency for much of the story and make her compelling. This is Tosh’s darkest hour and Mori shows us it all, trusting us to trust her. That leads to a barnstorming closing act where Tosh takes control in every way she can that gives Mori a chance to flip from the character’s vulnerability to her core of absolute steel. It’s yet another strong turn from one of the franchise’s best.

Verdict: This is yet another Torchwood release that works in every way. Lisa Bowerman is one of the best directors Big Finish work with and she and Mori always do excellent work together (see also Lou Morgan’s excellent The Vigil). The cast are uniformly great, Stewart’s script embodies the show at its absolute best and the ending lands far harder than you’d expect. Clear eyed, enraged and aware, this is Tosh’s darkest hour, but one of Torchwood’s finest. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

Click here to order from Big Finish