On the run in the aftermath of the events of Children of Earth, Rhys (Kai Owen) takes a job with Maia (Arbel Jones) at a local coffee shop. But when he sees Catherine (Emily Burnett) demanding to know where her child is, Rhys finds himself facing off against something otherworldly.

Lisa Bowerman’s direction and Lauren Mooney & Stewart Pringle’s script mesh here to create a story where tension rises like boiling water. There’s something sickly and awful in Catherine and husband Alex (Scott Arthur)’s life and it’s embodied in the honey-voiced neighbour Mr Collins, played with vast, terrifying aplomb by Sion Tudor Owen. Communication becomes aggression and dominance here, and the story escalates in some chilling ways as Collins comes into focus. The genius of this is filtering the story through Rhys, Torchwood‘s Emergency Normal Dude, and Owen is great as a man who is pressed, lonely, traumatised and unable to leave this situation alone. Rhys is a genuinely good person, but he lacks the training and experience of his wife and her colleagues and pays for that over and over again.

He’s also the centre of a ridiculously good cast. Burnett and Arthur both bring depth and sympathy to their characters and there’s a willingness throughout to embrace the fact people are fundamentally complex. Rhys is one step away from presenting as a dangerous obsessive, Arthur’s Alex is both a victim and a snob. Burnett’s haunted Catherine is put through a wringer from the start and sensibly given a good chunk of the ending and the shattering final line. If Rhys is the embodiment of exhausted, terrified heroism, Catherine is the embodiment of survival at terrible cost.

All of them orbit Tudor Owen’s monstrous Mr Collins, a force of combative ebullience and the cuckoo at the heart of the story. He is terrifying, in a way Bilis Manger always is and a way that Torchwood excels at. Something unknowable and vast brushing against the world, seeing it, and us, and realizing that it is hungry and we are food.

Special praise too to Toby Hrycek-Robinson whose work is typically impressive but excels during a parlour game sequence that is one of the most unsettling beats in the history of the range to date. Jones, as Rhys’ wonderfully blunt boss is a delight too, counterbalancing Collins’ monstrous joy with charmingly grounded, blunt honesty.

Verdict: Poppet is a great Torchwood story, packed with great performances, great direction and wickedly smart writing choices from Mooney and Pringle. A supernatural story of a far darker tone than many in the past, it’s haunting in the best of ways. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

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