The Torchwood Archive

This special release is a two-hour story that ties together pieces of the plot arc in the main series of Torchwood audios. (As a result, it should be noted that it's very far from standalone, and does require having listened to the previous releases; indeed, I assume it's the conclusion of the arc). To do so, it has to bring together a slew of disparate elements from multiple different stories and the result, unfortunately, is something of a mess.

This isn't quite an anthology, but the bulk of it consists of vignettes from Torchwood's history, mostly featuring the characters in the TV series. These are all at least partly narrated, and, aside from a brief segment at the end, only feature one or two members of the team at a time. In addition to tying together the previous stories, they also tie up a number of minor loose ends from the series itself, including Torchwood's first encounter with the Weevils and, perhaps more significantly, filling in the details about Torchwood Two and its strange caretaker.

The framing device for all this is the Torchwood Archive in the far future, which turns out to be inhabited by holograms of the team from the TV series (why only them, when the organisation is so much older and larger, is unclear, but, obviously, it's helpful to the listener). A visitor to the Archive is trying to piece together the history of the very first alien object to be stored there and, while it does all make sense in the end, it takes a long time getting there, with most of the vignettes appearing to be disparate up to that point.

This leaves the story feeling as it's not really making any progress for most of its length, providing glimpses of Torchwood life tangentially linked by a theme, but with little of an overall plot. Individually, there are some good bits in here, but they're short and often don't add up to much. The whole, at least to me, came across as less than the sum of the parts.