How much do you, personally, relate to the historical Queen Victoria? How empathetic would you deem the monarch to be, in her own lifetime? Accounting for her frequent characterisation as resilient and having fortitude, grieving of her long-deceased husband, advocacy for exponential industrial growth and prescience over Britain's grisly colonial empire? The Victorian Age, conveniently, elects to indulge in the former two of her above qualities, propelling a characterisation forward which attempts to make light of Victoria as a snappy, sarcastic and strong-willed one of the people. It is no coincidence that this story follows More Than This, both seeing an authority figure, who must facilitate Torchwood's continued existence, being swept away on a revelatory, life-endangering adventure by one of the organisation's members that changes them irrevocably. This is an appreciated trope - the "Peladon" serials use these recurring scenarios and roles throughout history to great, decidedly sharp affect - except More Than This features the mild-mannered, well-meaning, inherently more levelled councillor Pugh. Here, the figure who assumes that role, designed to be empathetic (and also, in grieving) is Queen Victoria. Said brutal aspects of Victoria's historical reign and authority are left as asterisks or recurring jokes about just how ludicrously long her title is. The story puts immense value on this spirited, witty, stiff upper-lipped characterisation above all else, insofar that the plot suffers to orbit Victoria, the rising action and locations being contingent on how much of a reaction they can elicit out of the monarch, which massively impacts how long we spend there. Side characters are merited purely by their fleeting interactions with her despite their various, far more endearing eccentricities - decisively, this includes an anti-monarchist, rallying support against Victoria only to quieten down, comically, out of fear from her sudden arrival. Its monster is, perhaps, the most opportune and distinctly Torchwood concept, vampirically siphoning the youth of its victims. The story makes a point to use Victoria's desire for youth as a plucky parallel to Jack's immortality, and the weight it bears on his person; later, when Jack is used as bait for the monster, why not have it kill him in its vampiric nature so often, that it becomes young insofar as to undo its own existence? Instead, the strange sentimentality this franchise has for the monarch is put to the fore, at the sacrifice of something worthwhile.