Suzie Costello would never describe herself as a hero. Not even if she were the last woman on Earth. Turns out, she’s the second last woman on Earth, and that’ll just have to do.
With the Earth frozen in time, Suzie becomes locked in a battle to save the planet and the life of Alex, the last woman alive. Hunted by alien warriors, and, with every hour that doesn’t pass, the stakes are only getting higher.
Suzie Costello would never describe herself as a hero. But she would say she’s someone who always makes the right choices. Wouldn’t she?
TORCHWOOD: MOVING TARGET
The tenth Torchwood release from Big Finish focuses on another minor character: Suzie Costello, the Torchwood member who betrayed the team and died by suicide in the series premiere. In “Moving Target,” by Guy Adams, we go back in time to a day when Earth is frozen in time and only Suzie and local woman Alex (Naomi McDonald) can move around. Alex is the target of an intergalactic hunting expedition, and Suzie must protect her from an endless series of alien hunters. “Moving Target” is a simple, yet effective, morality play. Adams spends the majority of the script setting up his two main characters and letting them interact, enabling the listener to get to know them and the ending to be much more impactful. The central conflict, though, is actually in Suzie’s head, and Adams underlines how Suzie isn’t cut out for Torchwood in the same way as her colleagues. One of the hallmarks of the Doctor Who universe is that heroes, when faced with an impossible choice, find a third way out. Here, it seems that Suzie and Alex have only two choices: keep fighting indefinitely or let Alex die and the world restart. But while Jack or Gwen wouldn’t accept this, and would try to find a way to stop the hunt, Suzie refuses to think outside the box. She keeps fighting to defend Alex because she knows it’s the heroic thing to do, but she can’t come up with any justification beyond that. And so, when she learns from the Referee (Nicholas Burns) that Alex is going to die in misery in a couple of weeks anyway, she takes the easy way out. The ending isn’t shocking at all – it’s the sort of thing that you know is coming, hope it won’t happen, and sigh in resignation as it happens anyway. Great drama, in other words, and made so much more effective by the time Adams spends developing his characters. Definitely a return to form for the range.
9/10