Original Transmission
BBC Radio 4: 10 September 2008
Cast Crew
Plot Outline "Somewhere out there in that chaos of darkness and light, of science and protons, of gods and stars and death... somewhere there's an answer." Following the tragic deaths of two of their colleagues, the remaining three – Captain Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper and Ianto Jones – have to protect the human race against an unknown force from the darkness. Martha Jones, ex-time traveller and now working as a doctor for U.N.I.T., has been called to CERN – the world's largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva – where they're about to activate the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is a particle accelerator which has been built deep underground in a 27km tunnel under Switzerland and France. Once activated, the collider will fire beams of protons together, re-creating conditions a billionth of a second after the Big Bang – and potentially allowing the human race a greater insight into what the universe is made of. But so much could go wrong – it could open a gateway to a parallel dimension, or create a black hole – and now voices from the past are calling out to people and scientists have started to disappear... Where have the missing scientists gone? What is the secret of the glowing man? What is lurking in the underground tunnel? And do the dead ever really stay dead?
I didn’t GET what was going on with the CERN project. I had watched all of the programmes about it and barely stayed awake. I didn’t really get physics even when I was at school. It’s why I decided not to be a scientist like The Doctor and be a journalist like Sarah Jane instead. But when Captain Jack Harkness explained all about clouds and their molecules and what would happen in the Large Hadron Collider, I actually got it. There was a lot of other information, like the depth of the tunnel, the number of people working in the facility which were much easier to deal with in a drama than as cold facts. The BBC’s original injunction to Inform, Educate and Entertain was accomplished. But that aside, as a Torchwood story, this wasn’t the worst. But it wasn’t the best, either. Martha Jones was an irritation. Freema’s voice always comes across as breathless and over-excited. On TV it’s not too bad. But on radio it was very annoying. Especially when she was pushing Jack and the others about how they were coping with losing Tosh and Owen. Those scenes were excruciatingly painful. I really wanted to slap her and tell her to leave them alone.
There were some serious plot holes, too. WHY did defeating the creatures in the collider, all those miles below ground, automatically mean that the people up above were cured of their missing electrons and getting better? Surely the point is that the collider is enclosed, sealed, and nothing can get out? That struck me as a very weak part of the whole thing that could really do with a rewrite before the thing went to air. There were quite a few examples of sloppy writing that I would never be allowed to get away with in my online fiction collection. Readers would have pointed them out straight away. And it begs the question – don’t Joseph Lidster and other Torchwood writers have anyone they can try their stories out on first before production starts? Or am I over critical from a writing point of view because I am a writer and know how these things work? As a transition between the second TV series and the
miniseries we all await with bated breath, it served a purpose. As
a celebration of the opening day of the CERN LHC, it served a purpose.
As a stand alone Torchwood story, I’m not absolutely certain.
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