PLOTLINE

When Yasmin finds a jewelled egg in her grandfather's shed, her first thought is to sell it. Unfortunately, the object is no valuable Faberge antique, but a dangerous weapon from another planet. Worse still, the buyer she finds online is a Russian secret agent working for the Committee for Extraterrestrial Research, who promptly swipes it, kills her brother Sayed and lands her in hospital.

When Sgt Andy Davidson realises that he's not dealing with an ordinary double shooting, he calls Gwen Cooper, who breaks the bad news about the egg and its deadly contents. With no Torchwood to help, and Gwen in America, it's up to Andy and Yasmin to follow the trail of the 'Shiva virus' - all the way from Cardiff to the British Museum...

Released 5 April 2012. Written by David Llewellyn. Read by Tom Price.

COMMENT

This single CD audio reading in the TORCHWOOD series (post-MIRACLE DAY) is thankfully set in Wales (mainly) rather than the US (not an anti-US sentiment; I’ll come back to that in a moment) and its appeal lies in its option to pursue a TORCHWOOD story without any of the key characters (almost; Gwen has a cameo).

Written by David Llewellyn and read by Tom Price (Sgt Andy Davidson from the original series), this thing moves along at a nice pace and Price (he sounds a lot like Robert Webb at times) does a good job; his enunciation is clear and he gives the narrative energy. The writing is generally competent (Llewellyn has written TORCHWOOD -related fiction before) but when it stumbles, you will wince. Examples: when someone passes out, we get “everything went black”; for a confrontation, “we meet at last”; the alien is “more machine than man” (he’s not a man at all, remember); and, when a car engine is disabled, “nothing human could have done that” (you can almost hear Bill Murray saying the line…). If all that seems picky, remember that he was paid to write this. He uses words for a living. If a plumber made elementary gaffes like this, you’d never use him again.

I was not a fan of MIRACLE DAY and could not get passed episode 3. The story felt padded (10 episodes to tell the story? Really??), opting to go to the US (rather than France or Germany, say) felt like a good business move from the point of view of RTD and his production team, rather than a necessary development. No matter: the appeal of this story for me lies in its option to disregard the US move.

The tale is straightforward not least because it’s familiar territory. An alien artefact (here, an egg containing a species-exterminating virus used for alien terraforming) originally found in an allotment shed (nice touch) becomes the MacGuffin that licences the chase that constitutes the bulk of the story. Sgt Andy is the main character and he teams up with a teenager, Yasmin, to solve the mystery. Yasmin tries to sell the egg on eBay (well, as you would) and then things start to unravel pretty quickly for her.

The baddies are a Russian agent (representing the Russian version of Torchwood; another nice touch) who poses as a potential customer for the egg only to snatch it and a shape shifting alien set on triggering the egg and wiping out, yadda-yadda-yadda, you know the drill.

Gwen is briefly introduced (via a laptop video exchange) to lay some pipe (translation: plot exposition; the virus was codenamed Shiva) but otherwise Andy is on his own.

Andy and Yasmin pursue the Russian and the alien (they, too, team up; don’t ask) to London for a final confrontation at the British Museum. One chap explodes and the other seizes up; I’ll leave you to work out which one does what.