“First they know you, then you love, then you kill…”
A medical trial’s gone terribly wrong, and one of the test subjects is loose on the streets of Cardiff. Within hours a virus is raging out of control and the bodies start piling up.
The Government scrambles to control the outbreak, but isn’t too keen on anyone finding out the dark history of the virus. Captain Jack Harkness has encountered the infection before and knows that something alien is hiding inside it.
With the city sealed off and murderous mobs raging through the streets, Torchwood has to save something even more important than the human race.
TORCHWOOD: OUTBREAK
Following on from “The Torchwood Archive,” Big Finish presents another Torchwood special release in box set format. But unlike its predecessor, “Outbreak,” by Guy Adams, Emma Reeves, and AK Benedict, is not an anniversary tale – it’s a full-on Torchwood story featuring nearly the entire cast that happens to be about three hours long. And like most other Big Finish box sets that tell a single story, it’s far too long and somehow manages to forget to be about anything other than the plot.
“Outbreak,” as the title implies, is about a deadly virus outbreak in Cardiff. As with most stories of this nature – and real life as well – the virus starts out affecting a few people and rapidly spreads through the population. As things get worse, the government quarantines the entire city, and it’s up to Torchwood, trapped inside, to save the day. The story is divided into three episodes – Incubation, Prodromal (misspelled Prodomal in the track names), and Invasion – that track the outbreak through its various stages. Similarly, the infected go through three stages of the disease: first, they suffer a terrible itching sensation as the virus spreads through their bodies; next, they suffer overpowering hallucinations; finally, they are filled with an unquenchable desire to murder those they love. I think they might die after that but the story is rather inconsistent on that score. It’s inconsistent about the virus in general, to be honest – we only see the true progression of the disease when it’s impacting the regular characters. There’s no sense of the progression of the outbreak in Cardiff – we just go from a few people showing symptoms to a chaotic war zone. It’s also unclear how many people are even infected from the crowd behavior – apparently thousands of people can gather and start chanting things like “We want a cure!” at the authorities?
The story is much stronger when it deals with the regular characters. The best set piece features Ianto and Jack locked in the Hub, with an infected Jack chasing Ianto through the base with murderous intent. This deepens the relationship between the characters, as we see Ianto’s devotion to Jack firsthand, and Jack’s desire to kill Ianto underscores how much he actually loves him. (That’s a very Torchwood perspective, and it’s easily the best thing about the virus.) This scene also reintroduces Norton (Samuel Barnett), who is becoming a recurring adversary. Norton appears as a ghost from the past through the use of time travel technology, and inserts himself right in the middle of Jack’s pursuit of Ianto. We also learn that he and Jack were personally involved in stopping the last time this outbreak occurred, and that something happened between them that permanently soured their relationship. As I said above, this is the best part of “Outbreak,” with the best performances and the best writing.
We spend much of the first episode with Andy, which is a plus – he’s the best character of the bunch to serve as the audience’s viewpoint into the outbreak. By the end of the story, his “everyman” perspective has been largely supplanted by Rhys, who takes a more significant role in the third part after spending the first two driving trucks and sitting in traffic. And then there’s Gwen, who spends the first episode doing nothing, gets infected in the second, then… recovers, I guess, and leads the resistance in the final part. There’s an extended sequence in the middle where she plans to kill Rhys, but the resolution is the easiest sort of “I love you anyway” plotting and isn’t worth discussing.
I’d talk about the supporting cast but I don’t have anything to say. The virus itself springs from some generic “evil corporation” plotting – a pharmaceutical company has designed a similar, much more benign virus that will collect personal data about the infected and send it to a central database. And since it’s based on the original virus, it also serves as an effective vaccine for the uninfected. So clearly everyone in the country must be given it immediately! This is supervillain plotting that wouldn’t be out of place in the Pertwee era – a modern conspiracy would be much more surreptitious, even if it was equally cynical.
The production outshines the script – Scott Handcock directs, and impressively the story never drags over its three-hour run time. The sound design from Martin Montague is suitably epic and convincing, while the music from Blair Mowat and Steve Wright is quite appropriate for the material. Overall, though, “Outbreak” is a mixed bag. The performances are generally great, and the time we spend actually fleshing out the characters is very worthwhile. But the plot is nearly incomprehensible in its inconsistencies, and the script spends much more time on the plot than it does on the characters. This is a story that would make a very good two-part episode of a TV series; quite why it needed to be three hours long is beyond me.
Mediocre.
5/10