SPOILERS

It’s the 43rd Century and a ship from 1,000 years upstream has just crashed and is calling for help. Danny Bartok is part of the retrieval team. But what use is ethics in the face of ambition?

Writer Ash Darby and director Lisa Bowerman excel at tight ensembles like this and what starts as a Base Under Siege style story quickly becomes something infinitely more complicated and human.

They cleverly set you up with a group of Christie-esque characters including cheery tech specialist Aletta (Teresa Banham), gluttonous engineer Achmet (Farshid Rokey), dour career soldier Sergeant Belki Collins (James Barriscale) and Professor Felicity Martov (Georgina Beedle), proof that in space, everyone can hear you tory. Danny is the ethics nerd at the back of the class. He doesn’t want to be there, they don’t want him to be there and Darby and Bowerman cleverly play the ensemble as akin to Ripley and the fire team from Aliens.

What soon becomes apparent though is they’re closer to the cast of Knives Out. Aletta is running flat out to avoid something terrible, Collins is nursing a wound that won’t heal, Martov is facing an inquiry that will find her guilty of gross negligence and Achmet’s fierce competence and hunger are born from inconceivable trauma. And in the middle of them? Ronny Jhutti’s intensely likable Danny, whose deeply normal terror at what he’s facing is mistaken for cowardice by everyone around him.

Danny’s always been a fun character but here Jhutti, Darby and Bowerman find something even deeper in him. Like everyone else he’s got hidden depths but unlike everyone else, Danny’s comfortable with his perspective. His status as an ethicist may mean he gets sneered at but it also gives him the space, and distance, to see what’s really going on. Jhutti has great scenes with everyone, but his work with Silas Carson as the Ood is that will stay with you.

Danny, of all the survivors of the Impossible Planet, is the one most like the Doctor. Determined, curious, unable to put down a problem and quietly, relentlessly principled. The final line here is a hell of a sting, one that somehow ties the story off, sets up future Danny adventures and changes him by focusing in on just who he is. It’s great work and along with the ensemble it gives this story a scope that feels like it exceeds the running time while still being tight and focused. An atmosphere accentuated still further by the always smart audio production of Toby Hyrcek-Robinson.

Speaking of the ensemble, this is one of the strongest Torchwood casts in a long time. Jhutti and Carson as a subtly different Ood both impress but Beedle’s cheerful tech and Rokey’s wonderfully clenched engineer are also tremendous fun. Barriscale’s pragmatic, dogged soldier impresses too, and would get on well with Danny Webb’s Mr Jefferson from The Impossible Planet. Two old soldiers, seeking the good fight and finding it, for their sins.

But Banham’s Professor Martov haunts me a little. I’m writing this on the day the former Prime Minister is speaking to the COVID enquiry and Darby’s remarkable script means Martov has a very familiar tone. Chummy, plausible, unable to accept they’ve done wrong, performative, ruthless. It’s a great performance and a great character, one that speaks to the core of the story: our frantic need to be told, as Madness put it, it must get better in the long run. An odd, and fitting, meta-fictional note for a story so concerned with personal history and just part of yet another fantastic entry in this series. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart

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