The Torchwood team need to uncover the truth about a bizarre and fast-growing religious cult that seeks communion with beings from beyond the stars. Anything that draws attention to the existence of alien life is worrisome, and this group of devotees seem willing to go to extreme ends in the pursuit of their faith. But when Torchwood’s finest split up, the better to infiltrate and undermine this new church, they come up against not just the zealotry of the ‘true believers’ but the fact that Captain Jack Harkness emerges as one of the religion’s most outspoken and high-profile prophets.
This latest full-cast Torchwood audio by writer Guy Adams and director Scott Handcock is rich with the motifs and dynamic of the TV show’s formative – and best – years. Believe works well as an energetic adventure and as a story offering some interesting, if not entirely novel, reflections on the unwelcome consequences of blind faith – of any type – that is impervious to reason or reality. The most devout of the Church of the Outsiders, a cabal of fanatics called The Greys, bring a welcome extra layer of complexity and threat to the story. While there might be more than a hint of “Cyber conversion” in their enthusiasm for extreme body modification, their grotesque experiments add a gruesome twist to proceedings and give cast and sound designer David Nagel some darkly macabre material to work with.
With Owen taking the helm as mission controller, the separate stories of the scattered Torchwood team form the core of the narrative, and provide Believe’s most exciting and affecting moments. Owen is at his morally reprehensible worst, eager to pimp out Tosh in the hope of getting intel, before becoming appalled at his own behaviour and launching a botched rescue. Ianto is far more personally discomforted by his own undercover mission as a newbie convert seeking acceptance in the church; while Gwen finds herself blindsided when she attempts to extricate a now penitent former member from the church’s clutches. After the team converge back at The Hub, the stakes are raised still further as their headquarters enters lockdown and alien visitors are poised to crossover through The Rift. It’s a showdown that director Handcock sets up well, and which plays out to satisfying effect.
Adams structures the plot in a way that affords each member of the Torchwood team with a decent storyline of their own, ensuring that no character is short-changed. The regular cast are on the top of their game throughout, while amidst a strong guest cast Rhian Blundell shines in a fantastic and convincing performance as the guileless yet committed new devotee Erin, while Arthur Darvill excels as the repellent moneyman Frank Layton.
The logic of the extended payoff to the drama of Believe is a little questionable, and it’s arguable that Jack’s extended subterfuge as a ‘prophet with feet of clay’ is for the most part a dramatic device to keep Hartness occupied while his team get on with the job in hand. But that’s a reasonable dramatic conceit that, in the context of this story, gives the rest of the team sufficient space to get tangled up in independent (and suitably life-threatening) adventures of their own.
Believe would slot almost seamlessly into the second series’ TV timeline: it’s big and brash, revels in the team’s morally opaque behaviour and remains defiantly ‘adult’ sci-fi. It makes for great listening to return to that time when the Torchwood team was at the height of their collective powers, and fighting the good fight with a sense of hope and of self-belief. When it comes to premise, tone, characterisation and ambition, Believe ably demonstrates its commitment to that faith.
TORCHWOOD: BELIEVE / DIRECTOR: SCOTT HANDCOCK / WRITER: GUY ADAMS / PUBLISHER: BIG FINISH / STARRING: JOHN BARROWMAN, GARETH DAVID-LLOYD, EVE MYLES, BURN GORMAN, NAOKO MORI, LOIS MELERI JONES, MAC MCDONALD / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 30TH
