Torchwood: Empire of Shadows

The only real connection to the rest of the series here is the one-line reference to the “Torchwood Archive” in the Doctor Whostory The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. This features Zachary, one of the survivors of that story, here summoned by the newly installed ruler of the Earth Empire to attend a ceremony on an inhospitable planet. This switching of the setting to somewhere else has had mixed success in previous instalments and, on this occasion, it doesn't really work.

The world-building behind it isn't bad. There's a sense of an Empire in decline, and most significantly, a follow-up to events of Planet of the Ood and to the society coped with the emancipation of its slave race - by, as it turns out, enslaving sentient robots instead. Unfortunately, this means that the robot character is the only sympathetic one here; I just couldn't care what happened to Zachary, and even less about what happened to the Emperor. Despite a story that involves them being pursued by hostile forces under the threat of a ticking time bomb, the whole thing manages to feel slow and pedestrian, and it's that lack of empathy for the characters that's the primary reason for it.

Is it terrible? Perhaps not, because the robot is well done, sorely put upon despite doing her best to help the humans. Indeed, maybe it would have worked better in a line other than Torchwood, where, despite a certain bleakness, its distance from the usual themes stands out, but as it is, it feels like an unsuccessful experiment.