Torchwood: The Dying Room

For the second time this ‘season', the series explores a past period of Torchwood's history, featuring entirely new characters than the ones we're familiar with. It's presumably an experiment that failed, as it hasn't really been tried again, despite an open ending here that's clearly being set up for more. Having said that, it is better than the previous attempt, which went for entirely the wrong tone.

This time, the story is set in occupied Paris during WWII, where monsters are suddenly stalking the streets to the consternation of locals and Germans alike. The twist is that the story is told partly in flashback as an SS officer from the German equivalent of Torchwood interrogates a witness caught up in the events. This results in an ‘unreliable narrator' situation, where it's not entirely clear how much of the truth the witness is really telling, leaving the true nature of events as a puzzle that isn't revealed until the penultimate scene.

It's not one of the strongest Torchwood stories, not least because of the lack of any familiar characters... although it's not one that would have worked with any of them, even if the setting were switched to something more modern. But it's still pretty good, taken as a standalone story, and does have some of the themes that we expect for the TV series. The torture scenes aren't protracted, although they're certainly not pleasant, and the science fiction elements are often in the background (the monsters are mostly off-screen). So, a change of pace, and one that isn't too ill-judged (unlike The Dollhouse) but nothing special for this audio series.

3.5 stars, rather than the full 4, and it's probably a good thing that, for the next ‘season', BF reverted to doing stories based solely around existing characters from the corpus.