There’s a new dating app sweeping Cardiff. Andy’s using it, his new PC Sunil’s using it… Rhys is using it?!

Tom Price’s first script for Torchwood unfolds like an origami puzzle made of chip papers and push notifications. This is Torchwood from street level, the show’s fondness for the bizarrely mundane elements of life very much front and centre. An awful lot of it works brilliantly. The couple of fat jokes aimed at Rhys don’t. Or at least, at first.

What Price has written here is something that is quietly vastly unsettling in a way the line has barely touched on in the past. The reveal on just what’s going on reminded me of my all-time favourite X-Files episode (‘Bad Blood’) and there’s the same slightly queasy sense of heightened reality. Those fat gags I railed against? The second they’re given context you understand why they’re there and why everyone seems off in a way that, at first, they can’t see. The calls, in this instance, aren’t coming from inside the house. They’re coming from everywhere, all the time.

Andy Davidson and Rhys Williams have always been Torchwood’s emergency adults and Kai Owen and Price play off each other like a Cardiff Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. They’re funny and kind and bloody exhausted and doing it anyway and Price captures that energy in the sparkling third act in particular. Plus, for those of you worried, Rhys’ reasons for using the app are really well realized and do that thing the show does best: grounds a science fiction concept in the real world.

The rest of the cast help immensely with that and Sunjay Midda, Natalia Hinds and Rebecca Trehearn all do great work here, especially in the third act. Andy gets a confrontation with the villain of the piece that may be the most Andy Price moment the show has ever done and he ends the story very much the same man but… in sharper focus. The denouement here is sweet and earned and I’d very much like to hear Rebecca Trehearn’s deeply laconic, hyper competent Anna show up again. Also she gets to deliver the line ‘We need to put everyone in horny jail’ and if that doesn’t sell you on the story then stick around for the dystopian UK science politics, Blair Mowat’s gleefully frantic romantic score and Andy and Rhys. Like Batman and Robin if one of them knew a lot about Paratha.

Verdict: Adjacent to the government, very much not beyond the police, the heroes Cardiff both needs and deserves. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

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