On the Downside of the LHC
The article below contains spoilers for the new Torchwood radio play ‘Lost Souls’. Though frankly, the episode itself is more likely to spoil your listening experience than reading this review of it.
What do you get when you cross a “gritty” post-watershed BBC Two sci-fi series set in Wales with a particularly bad BBC Schools programme? That’s the question that ‘Torchwood: Lost Souls’ sets out to answer over the course of its 43 minute running time (Though it seemed like longer). Yes, it seems that someone at the BBC thought it’d be a really neat idea to produce and broadcast an episode of Torchwood based around the launch of the Large Hadron Collider.
Someone at the BBC should be fired. Into space. And then handed a letter of dismissal in the moments before his head explodes. Along with a photo of his wife and his dad having sex.
Have I gone too far? Probably. One of the main problems with ‘Lost Souls’ is that the educational remit demands that the characters call a halt to the action every five minutes or so to divulge some handy facts about CERN and the Large Hadron Collider OF DOOM. There’s a noticeable shift in tone every time this happens, as Jack, Gwen and Ianto turn to the microphone and adopt their most patronising Blue Peter presenter voices and lifelessly deliver information about the project.
Given the importance of the day, as well as the novelty nature of the episode, this could almost be forgiven (Though the episode was sat in the middle of an entire day’s programming themed around the LFHC, so one could argue that the target audience wasn’t going to learn anything they hadn’t already been informed about by wonky-eyed gonk Evan Davies earlier that morning), if it weren’t for the fact that the rest of the science in the episode is monumentally awful. The aliens of the piece (Who we never learn anything about, in a sparkling piece of character development from writer Joe Lidster) are killing humans by- Wait for it- stripping the neutrons from their bodies.
I’ll let you read that last sentence again.
They’re stripping the neutrons from people’s bodies.
I’m not going to go into the many ways in which this is implausible to begin with, but what’s worse is that the process is apparently gradual, causes the victims to start glowing, and makes their skin feel a bit like tissue paper. Milkman-wannabe Ianto Jones undergoes this process, but is miraculously restored when the aliens are vanquished. Now I can’t begin to speculate on what would happen if someone attempted to remove the neutrons from one’s cells BECAUSE IT’S A REALLY STUPID IDEA, but I suspect it might look a little something like this:
It certainly wouldn’t make you glow “like an angel”.
Commenting on the acting abilities of the Torchwood cast at this point would be like kicking a very tired puppy in the face with steel toe-capped boots on, so I’ll simply say that they’re all on their usual top form, in that they’re all made of balsa wood. Not that they’re given anything particularly interesting to say or do, of course; aside from a couple of supposedly witty dialogue exchanges near the beginning, the rest is all whimpering, shouting and generally trying to out-plank one another. This climaxes in an overblown speech at the end which, in the hands of a proper actor, might have been seen as a stirring rumination on the meaning of life, and the reasons for humanity’s existence.
They gave the speech to John Barrowman; ’nuff said, I feel.
The supporting cast are largely undeserving of a mention, but the unremittingly terrible Freema Agyeman (Who stole her acting style from Floella Benjamin of ‘Playschool’ fame) pops up here as Martha Jones, fresh from attempting to shove a piece of meaningless plot contrivance where the sun doesn’t shine in Doctor Who’s recent finale (Though the fans are busy speculating that this probably takes place beforehand. WHO CARES? It’s Torchwood!). I’m not sure why they put Martha in the episode, except to give Barrowman a chance to slur “Marrrtha Jones!” a few dozen times (This never gets old)… Her role seems mostly confined to a bizarre sub-quest in which she sets about asking our trusty gang of regulars how they feel about the fact they’ve just lost two of their only friends. Their responses are all-too predictable; Gwen cries, Ianto whimpers, and Jack is stoic but vulnerable. Yawn.
The only silver lining is that this isn’t the worst episode of Torchwood they’ve ever made; that honour goes to pretty much all of the first season. There’s a clear bond between the three main leads, and there’s potential for good drama in that if they’re given the right scripts. If you don’t know anything about the Large Hadron Collider then it’s a good crash course, and I daresay this will be of huge benefit to some of the children listening. I can’t recommend it based solely on that, though, so I’m going to have to give it a thumbs down. It’s hugely throwaway, the script’s a clunker, and ‘Torchwood’ just doesn’t have a good enough cast to make it work.
Torchwood: Lost Souls is available to download now from the BBC website, though why you’d want to is anyone’s guess.
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