Torchwood: Dissected

The basis of this story is that Torchwood discover a human body near an alien crash site and Gwen takes it to UNIT for a post-mortem... but, as so often with these audios, that isn't really what it's about. Instead, the focus is on the interaction between Gwen and Martha, and on what the latter has been up to between Journey's End and The End of Time. The first part, in particular, is a strong character piece that contrasts the two women as well as the organisations that they work for.

This was Freema Agyeman's first appearance for Big Finish (as I write this, she's only done one other since) and it's great to have her back, providing a sane and reasonable counterpoint to Gwen's emotional investment in the mystery. There's some character development, too, filling in some of the blanks of what she's been doing, and doing so with a mix of pathos and humour.

It helps that she and Gwen are the only characters in it (unless you count the corpse) spending almost the entirety of the story inside the confines of the UNIT morgue. Of course, there is the mystery of the body as well, adding the science fiction element, and this is creepy and effective and structured well enough that it's not at all clear to begin with where it's going to go. It's this sort of grounding the weird in the everyday that the audio series does so well, and this would have worked well even without Martha - but with her, it's definitely pulled up a notch.