Torchwood, eh?

Big Finish have announced the second of their “New Series” projects and its... well, probably the most obvious and somehow the oddest of choices: Torchwood.

On the one hand its not hard to see why: the Torchwood TV series has ground to a halt after its fourth season and there have been several Torchwood radio plays in the past.

So why am I surprised? Well, to be honest, because of a rather unpopular opinion of mine: I don't think Torchwood ever really worked. Of its four seasons the only one I'll go to bat for and say was all that good was the second. The first season was all sorts of insecure, working out a bunch of anxieties about being the BBC's first “adult” post-watershed sci-fi by doing the obligatory sex alien episode and having everyone shag everyone else at some point in the show. The second season largely got over those jitters, settled on a tone and got on with things but then the series started haemorrhaging cast members at a rate of knots. Then came the mini-series era with Children Of Earth and Miracle Day, neither of which really came together for me.

Maybe its just me, of course, and I can't claim that Big Finish haven't taken worse ideas and made them work. There was one good season, after all, and John Barrowman is always a delight as Captain Jack.

And maybe we'll finally find out what happened in those three yeas he can't remember from back when he was a Time Agent that was alluded to waaaaaaaay back in The Empty Child. I'm reasonably sure that never got resolved in either TV show. This is the company that made me like Mel Bush and turned Steven Taylor into something other than a plot-convenient cipher.

Time will tell, it usually does.