Asylum - Torchwood

Disclaimer. I do not like Torchwood. Rather, I am immensely fond of Torchwood, while not really thinking it's very good. It has its moments - yet refuses to live up to the program I believe it can (and should) be.

Having said that, one of my favourite all-time bits of Torchwood of all time is previous radio play Lost Souls, so I was pretty excited about Asylum. I'll come to what I thought of it in a minute. But I wonder whether radio is Torchwood's natural home. I would have had no patience for this plot at all on telly, yet found it pretty entertainng. Maybe the calibre of the performances improves without being able to see them.

'Course, it still managed to do many of the things that irritates me about the show. Asylum, we are bashed over the head with, is about Racism and Immigration. Naturally, part of the point of sci-fi has always been to comment on current events through a fantastical medium, but it gets on my mandibles if not very very well done. This wasn't as heavy handed as it could have been, but still sufficient to make me curl an eyebrow.

It also contained a "Gun Pointing Scene", my least favourite TV trope of all time. Torchwood does it with an alarming regularity. Let's call it "If You're Gonna Shoot, Shoot Don't Talk". It requires one or more members of the cast standing around and pointing guns at one another. They're all declaiming HUGELY DRAMATIC MOVING DIALOGUE, usually while crying. It is very unusual anyone will actually get shot, and characters rarely remember their near brushes with death and bring them up afterwards - rendering this trope near useless. A variation is the Hero entering the room and pointing a Gun at the villain as an excuse for angst and drama (again, free of tension, because as soon as you get into this scenario the chance of actual death is 0.2%); another will involve characters who have never exhibited suicidal behavior daring the gun-pointing character "Go on, kill me! You haven't the guts!" e.t.c. and psyching them out of it. It's not just Torchwood - I hate it in Battlestar Galactica, in Doctor Who (with a single exception, but it's a very good one), in cinema (ignoring Reservoir Dogs)

Indeed, Asylum's problem was that it wasn't anything. It was a Normal Episode - a small story, perfectly told, but still small and still very unthreatening. Hard to find much to say about it at all. I really liked the idea of Torchwood setting up proper asylum policies - made them seem more like a responsible organisation. It's something I'd like them to explore properly (visions of the arrival lounge in Men In Black). Here, it was simply the coda - it arrived once the play was almost over.

Everything else? Everybody likes PC Andy, though I wonder why he is doing Gwen's job for the middle 10' of the play. There's no narrative reason she couldn't, and until that point Andy has been a source of nothing but slightly flabbergasted bigotry. I laughed at the Newport quip, having just met someone from Newport. I adored Freya's language - utterly convincing and very atmospheric. And I was kinda hoping the Doctor was the mysterious rescuer, for a moment there, though I was satisfied with the resolution they gave. But that spike by the river. Why is "big enough to let someone through" not big enough for an alarm? Isn't "someone" a pretty bad mistake?

Having lost my favours fairly early on, I'm not willing to give this series the benefit of the doubt I am with Doctor Who. Torchwood now needs to be truly exceptional to get a fair run from me, and this was merely good. This review isn't critical of the finished play, which was atmospheric and perfectly charming, than it's crushing lack of ambition.