Review by Cavan Gilbey
It’s been a while since we last saw Toshiko Sato in a Torchwood release, with Naoko Mori last appearing in 2022’s SUV. But we return to one of the more underrepresented members of the classic team with Endgame, which appears like your typical Tosh story on the surface; we’ve got a tech based threat and a cast of characters who spend most of the runtime slightly underestimating her. Now the Tosh audios are a specific strain of stories that I do follow fairly closely, so I’ve usually got relatively high expectations when it comes to stories featuring her. Suckers, Cascade and Instant Karma all show just how interesting she can be when written well, and Endgame makes for a pretty interesting entry in the Tosh line-up.
Firstly I think first time writer for the range Tom Black has a brilliant grasp on the types of threat that feel natural for this series; a simulation of world threatening and extreme situations which goes awry because of mankind’s fatal hubristic flaws. It feels like the perfect story idea for a one hour audio, and Black’s small cast and sense of entrapment really makes the concept come alive. His focus on governmental bickering and inability for arms of state to actually work together for the betterment of innocent civilians feels pretty well chosen given current events, and Tosh fits really nicely in this story as we get to see how her ability to lead and manage a situation are shut down by people who simply believe that their rank gives them rights over others.
However I do think that Tosh is slightly underserved by the story itself, she doesn’t really get to do much until the end when the numbers of participants in the ‘simulation’ have been thinned out a bit. Naoko Mori continues to put in a great performance as the character, oozing professionalism and a strong sense of duty but the story doesn’t quite give her the opportunity to show that off until the final sequence of the episode.
The character that I ended up getting most interested in was Gerard Marsh, as played by Ed White. The supposed creator of the simulation who gets to slowly seem more and more sinister as the plot goes on, with Black writing in some good red herrings surrounding Marsh’s true motivations and morality. White does a good job at playing a dark reflection of Tosh and what she could very easily be had she abandoned her sense of good and justice.
Endgame partially feels like they just needed to get a new Tosh story out but I’m not going to complain about that because it’s generally a good little morality piece. Tom Black sets himself up for being a particularly strong new entrant to the series and I eagerly await to here what he writes next.
8/10
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