The Victorian Age

Directly picking up from Tooth and Claw, where Queen Victoria established the concept of Torchwood, The Victorian Age sees Queen Victoria visit the London headquarters to check up on how her brainchild is doing.  It is there she meets the enigmatic and already slightly legendary, Captain Jack Harkness.  But the inspection turns into something quite, quite different when a monster escapes the base and heads off into London, pursued by Jack and his newest Torchwood operative – Victoria herself!

The Victorian Age is, essentially, a two-hander between Jack and Victoria.  The monster plot is fairly by-the-numbers and I’m not sure, as a story, there was much to interest me.  The interplay between Jack and Victoria, though, is fun.  That said, I was far more impressed by Rowena Cooper’s Victoria than John Barrowman’s Jack.  I liked Jack on television, both in his Doctor Who and Torchwood versions; but something about this performance didn’t quite convince.  Barrowman’s delivery throughout much of the story is rather flat.  To be fair to Barrowman, though, some of his dialogue is terrible – a lot of ‘describing what I can see for the benefit of the listener’ which Big Finish is usually very good at avoiding, or at very least disguising more cleverly.  As it is, Barrowman spends a lot of time telling the audience where the monster is and what the monster is doing.  He is better when ‘bantering’ with Victoria but not enough to convince me – I hope is other Torchwood performances have a bit more life.

Cooper has better dialogue to work with as Victoria, although by the end of the story I did feel like I didn’t need to be told – again – how feisty and independent this woman was even though she’s the Queen.  Yes, it ties in rather nicely with the action and steel present in Pauline Collins’s performance in Tooth and Claw, but we’re also talking about a real person who in 1899 was around 80 years old and two years away from death!  When you realise this and look at contemporary pictures of Victoria from the time, it seems to stretch credulity a little that she would be getting up to the sort of stuff this story has her doing.

The rest of the cast is minimal and a very odd decision to have the instantly recognisable Louise Jameson play two separate minor roles is rather distracting.  It’s also a shame that a Victorian Torchwood London story focuses so much on Jack and not on the resident operatives (bearing in mind that Jack is – conveniently –  ‘on secondment’ from Cardiff.  The two we do meet, Josephine and Archie, have very little to do once the initial scenes are over and done with.

I like the idea of Torchwood London being based in the Natural History Museum, but once the story gets out into the London streets is all becomes a little generic.  It gets better when they hit the underground which is something about Victorian London which my marathon has only ventured into in Jago and Litefoot.  The idea of steam trains running through tunnels under London is frankly bizarre and I like the idea of Victoria turning up on a train full of her public.  Her behaviour in the pub is fun in a similar way.

As my first foray into Big Finish Torchwood I’m not quite convinced, but as this is probably not representative of the rest of the range, I’ll withhold judgement until I listened to a few more typical examples.

Torchwood Monthly Range #7 - "The Victorian Age" by AK Benedict

The Torchwood Monthly Range has so far been varying from great to fine. The worst we've gotten is boring and even then, the stories we got weren't atrocious. The Victorian Age has a great idea behind it: exploring Jack's time in Torchwood pre-TV and introducing none other than Queen Victoria as a new, recurring character for the range. And since it's written by AK Benedict, a writer whose work I enjoyed in Aliens Among Us I expected an interesting if unimpressive story. What I got was a lot, lot worse.

It's time for Queen Victoria's annual inspection of Torchwood London, which coincidentally just lost an alien creature in the middle of the city. Paired with Captain Jack Harkness, the Queen finds herself racing across London to stop a destructive creature, and it will change her life forever.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

This is the third of three stories so far that consist of "a run around in a big city", with One Rule and More Than This being the two others. This is, by far, the absolute worst execution of this simple concept mostly because it's ridiculously boring. However, there is some light in the darkness. Surprisingly, my favourite element was the character of Queen Victoria, who was genuinely a really fun lead for this audio and played to perfection by Rowena Cooper; she is shockingly badass. I also found the connection between the solemn and elderly Victoria and the unaging Jack to be actually quite a good little character beat that I think conceptually is really strong. Despite it being pretty ineffectual, our miscellaneous monster - The Lifestealer - is actually quite an interesting design, being able to take life from others to rejuvenate itself; it really adds to the whole theme of age that runs through the audio, shame the story chooses to do some really idiotic things with it.

As I mentioned before, my biggest problem is pacing. The entire story is repeated formula: Jack and Victoria go somewhere, see the creature, talk to a random person, the creature escapes and they follow. They never stay any place long and everywhere they go feels like an underbaked encounter, like a checklist of spots they need to go before the inevitable finale. It moves at a torturous speed and gets incredibly boring after about five minutes. Also, because of this structure, we meet a bunch of fun and quirky side characters that Benedict clearly thought were hilarious but are all just tiny annoyances that slow the already monotonous script. Past that, it manages to become even more like a broken record because it seems Benedict could come up with a single joke for the entire thing. Queen Victoria does something you wouldn't expect the Queen to do, like ride a horse or drink in a pub. It's a non-joke and the entire story is weirdly obsessed with it, this exact situation happens every few scenes. Eventually this all leads into a big, climactic finale that is endlessly infuriating. Firstly, Benedict can't write emotional scenes for the life of her; conceptually, I love the stuff with Victoria and Jack, but the dialogue's never interesting enough for me to care. There's also one particular scene late into the audio where Victoria comforts a mother whose daughter just got aged about 80 years by the Lifestealer and the only thing Victoria says is "be grateful she's alive at all". Yes, she is, she'll also die in a year opposed to decades from now, so this is still incredibly tragic, why does this advice work? And the very end is also incredibly moronic, because they realise the creature is scared of old people for some reason (apparently it can't take vitality from them but why would it be afraid of them) and Victoria gets a gaggle of geriatrics to take life back from the Lifestealer, because I guess you can just do that. Don't want to help any of the victims? Don't want to give a life back to the little girl a few stations away? Or the leader of Torchwood? No, that would be smart, which this isn't. Also, there's this whole through line about Victoria wanting to shut down Torchwood, but we know she doesn't, so what's the point?

The Victorian Age is the first real dud of the Torchwood Monthly Range: logicless, motionless, almost plotless, it trundles through London jumping from scene to scene with nothing in between. A really cool idea squandered by an absolute drag of a script that completely fails at comedy and emotional beats. Skip.

4/10

Pros:

+ Queen Victoria of all people makes for a really fun character, infinitely strengthened by Rowena Cooper's performance

+ The relationship between the aging Victoria and the ageless Jack was quite sweet

+ The Lifestealer was an interesting design for a monster

Cons:

- Glacial pace with no sense of cohesion

- All the comedy is a single joke: "it's the Queen doing something the Queen wouldn't normally do"

- Has a ton of kooky and quirky little incidental characters, none of whom are interesting and who exist for a scene before dying or moving on

- Completely ballses up emotional scenes with shaky morals

- Ridiculous, logicless ending

Top 5 Best Torchwood Monthly Range Stories:
5. #5 - Uncanny Valley by David Llewellyn
4. #3 - Forgotten Lives by Emma Reeves
3. #6 - More Than This by Guy Adams
2. #2 - Fall to Earth by James Goss
1. #4 - One Rule by Joseph Lidster

Top 5 Worst Torchwood Monthly Range Stories:
5. #6 - More Than This by Guy Adams
4. #3 - Forgotten Lives by Emma Reeves
3. #5 - Uncanny Valley by David Llewellyn
2. #1 - The Conspiracy by David Llewellyn
1. #7 - The Victorian Age by AK Benedict