With the monsters vanquished and the world made safe again, Gwen Cooper and Rhys Williams are heading home from their latest mission in time to relieve the babysitter looking after their offspring. But a simple enough drive back to Cardiff descends into a fiendish and seemingly endless journey, that has both of them doubting their senses, their memory and eventually their sanity.
We Always Get Out Alive is an intense two-hander, relying entirely on the character dynamic between Gwen and Rhys and the acting talents of Eve Myles and Kai Owen. It’s also effectively a continuous one-act play, which unfolds in a single contained location in something close to real (if disconnected) time.
Regular Torchwood audio scriptwriter Guy Adams is in his element exploring the possibilities that the self-imposed constraints of this latest standalone adventure affords him: his plotting turns the confinement of their predicament to his advantage; his naturalistic dialogue leaps off the page, and his characterisation rings true.
It’s difficult to describe the story in any further detail without revealing too much of the “journey” on which the pair are unexpectedly embarked. But with everything centred on a single premise, and the production involving (almost) no other supporting characters, this is a very intimate, emotionally intelligent drama.
It shines a light on a relationship that has to withstand the strains of entanglement with the Torchwood team and endure the repercussions of the extraordinary (and sometimes disturbing and morally challenging) experiences that that involvement brings.
With no massive explosions, alien hordes or devastating weapons systems to deal with, Myles and Owen are able to focus on Gwen’s and Rhys’ interactions and explore the tensions between the normal family life that they both value so much and the thrill of adventure that Gwen, in particular, is drawn to.
Trying to make sense of everyday life, while being prepared to risk everything in order to save the world, is a recurring theme in the ‘superhero’ genre. But the pull of normality has extra piquancy for this recognizably normal couple who remain determined to risk everything because that’s the price of protecting the very things they hold dear. Their characters’ mantra, that they will always survive the threats that their commitment to Torchwood exposes them to, is the reassurance they both need to cling to, even if this belief might be little more than a shared fiction.
Some effective sound design ensures an unsettling sense of isolation, and the pair’s growing feeling of disassociation, as the action switches between the cramped car interior and the off-kilter world outside. While it’s not really the “horror” story that Big Finish describes it as this is creepy and unnerving stuff that very successfully pulls the listener into the same claustrophobic space in which Rhys and Gwen fear that their grip on reality might well be unravelling.
TORCHWOOD: WE ALWAYS GET OUT ALIVE / BIG FINISH / WRITER: GUY ADAMS / DIRECTOR: SCOTT HANDCOCK / CAST: EVE MYLES, KAI OWEN / RELEASE: AUGUST 1ST
