Ash Darby

Review: Torchwood – Art Decadence

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Cavan Gilbey

Every so often we’ll get a Torchwood release where we get to explore some hitherto unknown department or station. Sometimes this works really damn well, such was the case with Double or the Torchwood Soho range, other times it can turn out fairly lacklustre like Dollhouse (which should work so well given it’s tone and concept) or The Dying Room. So I had no idea what to expect when heading in to Ash Darby’s latest script, especially since I have found them to be a relatively inconsistent writer; however they always have some amazing concepts and I sang the praises of Sigil when I reviewed it a while ago. Art Decadence was not the story that I was expecting, and I mean that as high praise.

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Review: Torchwood – Sigil

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Cavan Gilbey

 

I’ve sort of been holding off doing this review for one central reason; this is the last time we will ever hear Murray Melvin as Billis Manger. I assumed that Cuckoo in the second Among Us set would have been the last time but Big Finish surprised us with the reveal of Sigil by Ash Darby, who has been a really strong recent writer that Big Finish has brought into the Torchwood range. So I went into this knowing it would be a bittersweet story, and I honestly think the ending is as good as you can get in terms of celebrating Melvin as a performer and everything he brought to the character of Billis.  Continue reading →

Review: Torchwood – Among Us 3

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Cavan Gilbey

 

Among Us comes to a close with this third and final volume and it may just be the strongest of the trio. It always had the hard task of wrapping up all the plot threads in a neat bow and it sticks the landing, although that is mostly helped by the concept behind the narrative being small in scope but able to maintain a really high set of stakes. The themes of social corruption, media influence and technological fascism all comes to great conclusion with particular praise for the first story in the set which offers us a glimpse into one of Torchwood’s strongest and most interesting adversaries yet.

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Review: Torchwood – Among Us 2

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Cavan Gilbey

Among Us is back for another set, exploring Torchwood’s battle with the idea of altered perceptions and false knowledge. Much like the previous set we’ve got a story about the modern problem of fake news, but also a look at influencer culture, memory implants and finally a story focusing on racial profiling and targeted hate. I’m a big fan of this more social commentary focused approach to Torchwood but this set is really giving the themes room to breathe and are giving us more conceptually experimental stories for those thematic studies. I sincerely hope that the next, and final, set in this series is as good as these previous two because we are currently dealing with the best Torchwood series yet on audio.

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Review: Torchwood – Among Us 1

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Cavan Gilbey

Torchwood is back with a brand new seventh series, following from the Aliens Among Us and God Among Us series previously released. Now considering that I had not heard either of those two series before this point I thought I would be hopelessly lost but rest assured that this boxset feels like a good enough jumping on point since the writers do a good job at getting you up to speed quickly. The four stories here all have a strong linking theme of prejudice, and the set takes the themes to some interesting places. As a continuation of what we have seen on television, this is a worthy successor to the four series we got on our screens.

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Review: Torchwood – SUV

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Cavan Gilbey

Tosh and Ianto have had two of my favourite Torchwood audios recently, both of which really utilise the characters to tell engaging and personal emotional character studies which have these great darker edges to them; Ianto’s almost fetishistic need to feel loved or Tosh’s treatment at the hands of institutional racism in the medical world. So putting these two members together specifically is a great choice and worked really well in their previous joint adventure Dinner and a Show. SUV doesn’t quite feel as fresh or interesting as that story, in fact much of this story feels too much like a retread of the character work done there but the pairing are still charismatic enough to make the audio overall fun and snappy.

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Review: Torchwood – God Among Us (Part 2)

Posted on by indiemacuser

Review by Doctor Squee (Host of Gallifrey Stands Podcast)

Yvonne Hartman (Tracy-Ann Oberman) leads Torchwood once more with Captain Jack (John Barrowman) still in the mix with the new Torchwood team as the stakes only get higher.

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