Torchwood: Corpse Day

Owen Harper appears for the first time in a Big Finish audio in this story about life and death. And... well, there's probably a degree of subjective opinion in this, but I'd have to say it's the darkest story of the Torchwood audios so far, and one that absolutely deserves its “adults only” label.

The story pairs Owen with PC Andy, using Torchwood's technology to solve what initially appears to be a mundane cold case about a missing woman. At first, it's quite fun, contrasting Andy's optimism with Owen's nihilism, caused largely by the fact that by the point in the TV series where this is set, he is technically dead. And then, once we find out what's happened to the victim, things get very, very dark indeed.

Much of this has parallels with real-world cases, lending a feel of verisimilitude to the horror that unfolds. Yes, there is a science fiction element, but real women have suffered in the way that the victim does here, and those that survive have been psychologically damaged for life. How uneasy this makes the listener feel compared with, say, a supernatural horror tale, may well be a personal matter - different people find different things scary - but this certainly worked for me.

As I said at the beginning, the key theme here is ‘life and death'. Is Owen right that life is always better than death, or is his view skewed by his own situation and, perhaps, his medical training? The story does not provide any easy answers.