Margaret Blaine is the Mayor of Cardiff. She’s also an alien who’ll do anything to get off the planet Earth. When a spaceship crashes outside Cardiff, it seems like the answer to her prayers. But she’s not the only person at crash site.
Suzie Costello works for Torchwood, but strictly to her own agenda. When a spaceship crashes outside Cardiff, it seems like the answer to her prayers. But she’s not the only person at the crash site.
Bonded by an alien device, Margaret and Suzie find themselves on the run from Torchwood, the police, and six warp missiles that’ll destroy them, Cardiff, and most of the Western Hemisphere.
TORCHWOOD: SYNC
“Sync” is a bizarre little piece by Lisa McMullin that tells a story I’m surprised we haven’t had yet: Torchwood meets Margaret Blaine. But it’s not “Torchwood” that meets her, it’s Suzie Costello, and the script is functionally a two-hander for almost the entire running time. An alien spaceship crashes outside Cardiff, attracting the attention of two people: Suzie, looking to recover alien technology for personal use, and Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, disguised as Margaret and looking for a way to escape Earth. Each is working to their own agenda, and each needs to keep their activities secret. What follows is an entertaining back-and-forth, as each character probes the other’s weaknesses, searching for an avenue to betray them and escape. Shock bracelets from the crashed ship bind them together, meaning they can never be more than ten feet apart, leading to further difficulty. Suzie is emotionally unstable, and Indira Varma really leans into that side of her character, giving a truly odd performance often punctuated with prolonged, inappropriate giggles. Margaret, on the other hand, is perfectly stable, but her alien moral code still makes her repulsive by our standards, even if she’s oddly sympathetic. It’s a good script, with solid performances. My only complaint is that it feels somewhat unimportant: it doesn’t take us to any new or surprising places with these characters. We know their stories and we know how they end up, so a vignette like this doesn’t really flesh them out. Mind you, it’s still another solid Torchwood release, but it doesn’t have the dramatic weight of the range’s best.
7/10