Glynn Lewis is just putting up a spice rack when there’s a knock at the door. A knock that will bring a brutal end to his perfect family.
PC Andy is very excited. It’s Corpse Day – the day when the local constabulary get help on dead cases from Torchwood. This year, he’s volunteered to act as liaison, and he knows he’s going to have a brilliant time.
For Dr Owen Harper, today’s just like any other. There’ll be bloodshed, screaming and murder. At the end of it all, he doesn’t care. After all, life’s just for the living, and he’s long dead.
TORCHWOOD: CORPSE DAY
The fifteenth Torchwood release (to say nothing of the box sets) marks a big moment for Big Finish: it features the return of the final regular cast member, Burn Gorman, to the role of Dr. Owen Harper. Set during the period of his living death in season 2, James Goss’ “Corpse Day” pairs Owen up with PC Andy in an investigation of a maniac that feels very similar to “Countrycide” – but also feels gratuitous and morally problematic.
It’s “Corpse Day,” an annual event in which Torchwood helps the local police solve their cold cases. Owen is sent to aid the Cardiff police, and Andy is his liaison. In short, their investigations lead them to a crazy person who is abducting young women from local clubs, keeping them prisoner as his “daughters,” and either feeding them to a captive Weevil or letting the Weevil mate with them. Goss doesn’t shy away from the details of this – it’s a rather sick, disturbing story, with lots of screaming and crying from the captive women and insane declarations from their captor. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, of course – I liked “Countrycide” and its nihilistic message about human nature – but it needs to be in service of some greater message, and “Corpse Day” does not succeed in that goal.
The biggest problem with “Corpse Day” is Owen himself. The story takes pains at the start to illustrate how Owen has lost most of his emotions since his death and how he now tries to live vicariously through others, such as the way he makes Andy eat a massive breakfast in front of him. But this goes seriously awry when he tries to appreciate life and emotion wherever he finds it and does so in a maniac’s basement. One of the revelations in the story is that the Weevil is just as much a victim of Glynn’s abuse as the three women, and that’s entirely fair, but Owen’s reaction at the end of the story is to leave well enough alone and not notify the authorities, because the women and the Weevil have formed a family of sorts. This is lunacy: these women are all severely damaged victims of years of rape and abuse, and while we don’t know much about the Weevils or their thought processes, one can easily imagine the Weevil isn’t healthy either. Leaving them to their new life is a baseless act of cruelty. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the story clearly underlined this as an example of Owen’s skewed morality, but virtually nothing is done to question Owen’s position. It made me feel sick to my stomach, and absolutely not in a good or appreciable way.
Then there’s the abortion debate. We learn that the Weevil has impregnated one of the captive women, and she is due to give birth within hours. Andy is absolutely horrified by this development and insists the child cannot be allowed to live. Owen argues that all life is precious, no matter its origin. Fortunately, both men agree that the choice isn’t theirs to make, and Owen is ethically obligated to deliver the baby if the mother desires – but this still veers dangerously close to a strict pro-life message, as crucially the mother is likely in no fit mental state to be making decisions about her health or consenting to the decisions of others. I see what the story is going for: the world is a dark, horrible place, and we should nurture any form of happiness, no matter how it might appear from the outside – but it’s very crudely and problematically delivered.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the production, though. Burn Gorman sounds like he never left the role, Tom Price is reliable as ever, and the guest cast is uniformly excellent. The sound design from Rob Harvey is appropriately disgusting and Blair Mowat’s music continues to capture the Torchwood atmosphere. So my complaints lay entirely with the story – and as I said above, the story left me deeply uncomfortable.
5/10