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And I've never been part of a problem that I did not ignore or start
Having watched the first-season finale and just about half of the second season of Torchwood (2006–11), I have put the series on hold until I can track down the rest of the first season, because while I am truly spoiler-indifferent and really enjoying the show, I have realized I don't want to replicate my experience of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun (1993–96), where I short-circuited at least one major character's arc by reading the second half first.
There are four volumes of The Book of the Long Sun: Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Lake of the Long Sun (1994), Caldé of the Long Sun (1994), and Exodus from the Long Sun (1996). The plot concerns a revolution on a generation starship whose gods are literally ghosts in the machine, except perhaps for the minor god whose revelation to a young augur in the first novel kicks off a quest that starts like the Blues Brothers and ends like Les Mis; unlike Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980–83) with its experimental play of memory and time, The Book of the Long Sun is notable for its dead-ahead structure which does not even incorporate flashbacks, although occasionally its characters dream. In other words, all information not encountered in order in the text must be explicitly filled in or deduced in hindsight, and Wolfe uses this technique to keep the reader reevaluating interactions and motivations in light of later events. It was therefore utterly disastrous for me to read the last two volumes first, which of course I had no way of knowing one late autumn night in my junior year of college when the second-half omnibus was lying around a friend's dorm room and I wanted something to read while five people I liked very much were carrying on a conversation that bored me completely.
The Book of the Long Sun is one of the narratives where I have a favorite character; his name is Patera Remora and he is the coadjutor of the city-state of Viron, which in the classically inflected religion of the Whorl means more or less what it does in the Catholic or the Anglican Church, only with a lot more haruspicy. When encountered for the first time in Caldé of the Long Sun and even more so in Exodus from the Long Sun, he is an excruciatingly sympathetic character. In the midst of spies and factions, barricades and negotiations and casualties on all sides, Remora is a paper-pusher out of his depth and he knows it. Sometimes it makes him funny, but he's frightened all the time. A fence-sitter by nature and an establishment figure by profession, now that he's thrown in with Patera Silk and the revolutionaries against the Ayuntamiento of Viron and even a schism of his own Chapter, he's trying desperately to do the right thing and mostly floundering toward it, but to say that he's not graceful about the process is several orders of understatement. Conversationally, he's one of those formal, diffident people who are always correcting themselves like an unsolicited apparatus criticus; physically, he's the kind of tall and thin that looks like a deck chair folding up when he takes a seat and he can be trusted to trip over his own feet at moments of action almost as reliably as over his own tongue at moments of truth. One of his characteristic gestures is nervously pushing his hair out of his eyes, another worrying his religion's equivalent of a rosary. Emotionally, he's a mess. Undergoing a classic katabasis in the tunnels beneath Viron with the sibyl-turned-revolutionary-general Maytera Mint and an agent of the Ayuntamiento, Remora is scalding in his self-honesty and oblivious when it comes to reading the room—he has a knack for choosing exactly the wrong moment to unburden his conscience, share his feelings, or suggest a stratagem for which there is invariably a simpler solution. And yet he does come out of it stronger, with a truer sense of himself and what matters to him than when he started, even if you could still give yourself an ulcer waiting for him to finish a complete sentence; it's not silly at all that by the end of the series he's become one of the central figures of the exodus to the planet the ship-born characters call the Short Sun Whorl, eventually the Prolocutor of the Vironese Faith on Blue. He'll do it well now—he wouldn't have before. And the ghost of his mother in Mainframe is proud of him.
When encountered for the first time in Lake of the Long Sun, Remora is not sympathetic at all. He is an ecclesiastical snot. For all his easy invocation of the gods, he's far more office politician than priest, as polished as he is insincere, more concerned with keeping a lid on an inconvenient theophany than with actually helping the manteion on Sun Street out of its financial difficulties as Silk has been appealing for weeks, even though leaving the younger augur to his own devices just accelerates the combination of divine and secular intrigues that drives the unraveling of the Whorl; he's a second-order antagonist but a tellingly blinkered one, so enamored of his own delicacy in disposing of a sensitive affair that it doesn't occur to him to investigate further, except where he imagines that he already knows what he'll find. He intercepts letters, he offers bribes. He may not be as destructive, but he's as good a representative as any councillor of the Ayuntamiento of the structures of power and complacency that Silk will end up shaking to their roots. Of course his fastidious self-assurance will crack to pieces the minute the world begins to shift its shape, his petty ambitions and illusions rendered profoundly and embarrassingly irrelevant by the events spiraling around the man he once blessed and brushed off in the same patronizing farewell. Serves him right, the would-be Richelieu. He was always behind the eight-ball of this game and it wasn't even billiards in the first place.
Coming in at the point where this character started to break down into sympathy, I missed all of that. I missed that he had ever been so supercilious and comfortable instead of shocky and gauche, that he had casually talked down to and ordered around characters before whom he would be shown as indecisive and incompetent when faced with soldiers and spy-catchers instead of circular letters and cups of beef tea; I missed that he had ever thought he was on top of this situation and not just scrambling to survive it. I missed that he had done harm. I missed how much he grows as a person. There's no reason to expect from Remora's introduction that the glossily dismissive emissary from the Prolocutor's Palace would ever put himself in danger for the sake of a truce or offer himself for torture in a comrade's place or get himself demoted to regular augur and nonetheless walk around beaming at everyone because he finally lived up to his mother's dreams for him. Seriously, it's a good arc, all the more so because it belongs to a person who never stops looking or sounding like an emotionally disorganized deck chair that teethed on a thesaurus, and it's not like I can't still appreciate it for the id-blast that it is. But I got it back to front and while that is sort of apropos for the character, I really suspect it would have been even more effective in the right order.
Anyway, since I have seen character development already in the seven episodes of Torchwood I've watched so far, I figure I should go back for all of it from the start, even knowing that the writing of the first season has some hiccups, to say the least. I hope Gene Wolfe of blessed memory appreciates that I have taken the lesson. Not everyone can make me care, even slightly, about linear narrative.
There are four volumes of The Book of the Long Sun: Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Lake of the Long Sun (1994), Caldé of the Long Sun (1994), and Exodus from the Long Sun (1996). The plot concerns a revolution on a generation starship whose gods are literally ghosts in the machine, except perhaps for the minor god whose revelation to a young augur in the first novel kicks off a quest that starts like the Blues Brothers and ends like Les Mis; unlike Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980–83) with its experimental play of memory and time, The Book of the Long Sun is notable for its dead-ahead structure which does not even incorporate flashbacks, although occasionally its characters dream. In other words, all information not encountered in order in the text must be explicitly filled in or deduced in hindsight, and Wolfe uses this technique to keep the reader reevaluating interactions and motivations in light of later events. It was therefore utterly disastrous for me to read the last two volumes first, which of course I had no way of knowing one late autumn night in my junior year of college when the second-half omnibus was lying around a friend's dorm room and I wanted something to read while five people I liked very much were carrying on a conversation that bored me completely.
The Book of the Long Sun is one of the narratives where I have a favorite character; his name is Patera Remora and he is the coadjutor of the city-state of Viron, which in the classically inflected religion of the Whorl means more or less what it does in the Catholic or the Anglican Church, only with a lot more haruspicy. When encountered for the first time in Caldé of the Long Sun and even more so in Exodus from the Long Sun, he is an excruciatingly sympathetic character. In the midst of spies and factions, barricades and negotiations and casualties on all sides, Remora is a paper-pusher out of his depth and he knows it. Sometimes it makes him funny, but he's frightened all the time. A fence-sitter by nature and an establishment figure by profession, now that he's thrown in with Patera Silk and the revolutionaries against the Ayuntamiento of Viron and even a schism of his own Chapter, he's trying desperately to do the right thing and mostly floundering toward it, but to say that he's not graceful about the process is several orders of understatement. Conversationally, he's one of those formal, diffident people who are always correcting themselves like an unsolicited apparatus criticus; physically, he's the kind of tall and thin that looks like a deck chair folding up when he takes a seat and he can be trusted to trip over his own feet at moments of action almost as reliably as over his own tongue at moments of truth. One of his characteristic gestures is nervously pushing his hair out of his eyes, another worrying his religion's equivalent of a rosary. Emotionally, he's a mess. Undergoing a classic katabasis in the tunnels beneath Viron with the sibyl-turned-revolutionary-general Maytera Mint and an agent of the Ayuntamiento, Remora is scalding in his self-honesty and oblivious when it comes to reading the room—he has a knack for choosing exactly the wrong moment to unburden his conscience, share his feelings, or suggest a stratagem for which there is invariably a simpler solution. And yet he does come out of it stronger, with a truer sense of himself and what matters to him than when he started, even if you could still give yourself an ulcer waiting for him to finish a complete sentence; it's not silly at all that by the end of the series he's become one of the central figures of the exodus to the planet the ship-born characters call the Short Sun Whorl, eventually the Prolocutor of the Vironese Faith on Blue. He'll do it well now—he wouldn't have before. And the ghost of his mother in Mainframe is proud of him.
When encountered for the first time in Lake of the Long Sun, Remora is not sympathetic at all. He is an ecclesiastical snot. For all his easy invocation of the gods, he's far more office politician than priest, as polished as he is insincere, more concerned with keeping a lid on an inconvenient theophany than with actually helping the manteion on Sun Street out of its financial difficulties as Silk has been appealing for weeks, even though leaving the younger augur to his own devices just accelerates the combination of divine and secular intrigues that drives the unraveling of the Whorl; he's a second-order antagonist but a tellingly blinkered one, so enamored of his own delicacy in disposing of a sensitive affair that it doesn't occur to him to investigate further, except where he imagines that he already knows what he'll find. He intercepts letters, he offers bribes. He may not be as destructive, but he's as good a representative as any councillor of the Ayuntamiento of the structures of power and complacency that Silk will end up shaking to their roots. Of course his fastidious self-assurance will crack to pieces the minute the world begins to shift its shape, his petty ambitions and illusions rendered profoundly and embarrassingly irrelevant by the events spiraling around the man he once blessed and brushed off in the same patronizing farewell. Serves him right, the would-be Richelieu. He was always behind the eight-ball of this game and it wasn't even billiards in the first place.
Coming in at the point where this character started to break down into sympathy, I missed all of that. I missed that he had ever been so supercilious and comfortable instead of shocky and gauche, that he had casually talked down to and ordered around characters before whom he would be shown as indecisive and incompetent when faced with soldiers and spy-catchers instead of circular letters and cups of beef tea; I missed that he had ever thought he was on top of this situation and not just scrambling to survive it. I missed that he had done harm. I missed how much he grows as a person. There's no reason to expect from Remora's introduction that the glossily dismissive emissary from the Prolocutor's Palace would ever put himself in danger for the sake of a truce or offer himself for torture in a comrade's place or get himself demoted to regular augur and nonetheless walk around beaming at everyone because he finally lived up to his mother's dreams for him. Seriously, it's a good arc, all the more so because it belongs to a person who never stops looking or sounding like an emotionally disorganized deck chair that teethed on a thesaurus, and it's not like I can't still appreciate it for the id-blast that it is. But I got it back to front and while that is sort of apropos for the character, I really suspect it would have been even more effective in the right order.
Anyway, since I have seen character development already in the seven episodes of Torchwood I've watched so far, I figure I should go back for all of it from the start, even knowing that the writing of the first season has some hiccups, to say the least. I hope Gene Wolfe of blessed memory appreciates that I have taken the lesson. Not everyone can make me care, even slightly, about linear narrative.
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Okay, nine minutes in, the thing about this episode that actually offends me is that the plot of an alien that kills by the extraction of orgasmic energy was done in 1982 in Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky and that film is a genderbending stone feminist masterpiece; if your sex alien is not on that level, just don't even try. (Their sex alien is not on that level.)
When Rachel watched it, I just suggested that she start with the third episode
Definitely beginning to cohere by the third episode. Owen has emotions beyond perving on people, residual hauntings are a classic of British TV, and I laughed out loud at "Bernie Harris, the Scarlet Pimpernel of Splot."
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I found myself describing the first two episodes to
(There are still elements in the first two episodes that are valuable and interesting. In "Everything Changes," I liked not just the bait-and-switch with Suzie, but the reasons for it, establishing immediately the wear and tear and the stakes of working for Torchwood; the entire sequence with Gwen delivering pizza and the team utterly failing to pretend they didn't clock her, capped by Owen copping to being the twat who orders pizza to a top-secret extra-governmental agency under its own name, is genuinely funny and juvenile without being too mean-spirited and of course it was Owen, no wonder Ianto's got custody of the pizza orders in season two. "Day One" mostly showcased the value of Gwen to the team, but I liked some of its dialogue: "Period military is not the dress code of a straight man." I was interested by the brief catalogue of the different Torchwood locations—London, destroyed in the Battle of Canary Wharf; Glasgow, which Jack makes sound like a one-man operation; Cardiff, on account of the Rift; and the one that went missing, whose location is never specified but given the distribution of the other branches across England, Scotland, and Wales, I promptly assumed Torchwood Four had been in Northern Ireland, in which case it probably just fell through a fairy ring one day and that's all there is to it. That's nice worldbuilding! There's just all the other stuff that feels frustratingly out of true.)
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The third episode felt like it suddenly snapped into focus: I could see how we got there from here. I recognized the Tosh who guides her comrades by CCTV and cheers Gwen for snagging the alien artifact even if she lost the suspect, the Owen who does his doctor's best to save the life of a man against whose face he was holding a knife a moment ago.
Yeah, it feels that way to me too. The third episode is where you can abruptly see them as themselves, and Owen in particular suddenly feels much more like his "real" self - I particularly liked his turnaround from trying to kill the guy, to trying desperately to save his life when it became necessary. That's very, very Owen. And also his instant sympathy for the girl who was killed, and his obsessive search for justice for her, even in the face of his teammates telling him to give up.
Oh, rewatching this episode reminded me what a jerk early-season-one Jack frequently is. Jack is really holding himself back from the team in season one, and then in late season one/season two he just gives up and decides to love these people, or rather, I guess, to admit that he already loves them, but that's one of those areas where knowing where it's headed is helpful in not hating him early on.
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Regarding the alien roofies, I also hate that the jokiness about sexual consent effectively camouflages the fact that Owen is canonically thrilled to go home with a girl he pulled in a bar and her boyfriend.
(I will definitely have recommendations there, by the way, when you're ready for them, if audio-only is a dramatic format you enjoy - it really isn't for me, but they are good enough I've made an exception for them.)
It is not one of my native formats, but
She is terrible, and tragic, and relatable, and even likable at times. I like that we see so much more of her in the audios than we got to see on the show.
That is a very good use of extended canon. I have most recently finished "They Keep Killing Suzie," which supplied some further and intriguing facets. Also I seem to like Indira Varma and I am trying to figure out where I could possibly have seen her before.
And also his instant sympathy for the girl who was killed, and his obsessive search for justice for her, even in the face of his teammates telling him to give up.
Yes. Which not incidentally helps a lot to recenter Owen from being a sexual creep: faced with a rape-murder, he's unequivocally on the girl's side.
Jack is really holding himself back from the team in season one, and then in late season one/season two he just gives up and decides to love these people, or rather, I guess, to admit that he already loves them, but that's one of those areas where knowing where it's headed is helpful in not hating him early on.
I don't know that it would have gone as far as hating him, but he's much more of a hard-ass and it's doing his team cohesion no favors. It doesn't feel accidental that three episodes so far have centered around characters choosing personal attachment (Ianto to Lisa, Tosh to Mary, Gwen to Suzie) over duty to Torchwood. I can see that's building toward "End of Days" when the entire team will open the Rift in joint defiance of Jack, but it also doesn't say much for his management skills at this point in his immortality.
[edit] Good news; speaking of "End of Days," it had desensitized considerably by this time around.
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Yeah, that scene is the one and only definitive evidence of Owen's bisexuality in the run of the show (I feel there are additional hints of it in his interactions with the guy they're conning in the cage fighting episode, but not that clear-cut), and unfortunately it's a scene that's so terribly squicky that I wish it didn't exist.
Which not incidentally helps a lot to recenter Owen from being a sexual creep: faced with a rape-murder, he's unequivocally on the girl's side.
Yeah, I think as far as a sympathetic introduction to Owen, this episode works much better than either of the previous ones, which was why it made sense to point Rachel there, since both I and the other person we were watching with (who had also seen it before) really wanted her to like Owen ...
I don't know that it would have gone as far as hating him, but he's much more of a hard-ass and it's doing his team cohesion no favors. It doesn't feel accidental that three episodes so far have centered around characters choosing personal attachment (Ianto to Lisa, Tosh to Mary, Gwen to Suzie) over duty to Torchwood. I can see that's building toward "End of Days" when the entire team will open the Rift in joint defiance of Jack, but it also doesn't say much for his management skills at this point in his immortality.
Yeah - Jack's general darkness and dysfunctionality was one of the big reasons I bounced off season one when I watched the show back in 2008 (the reason why I had only seen season two until this summer). I have a lot more sympathy for him this time around; I think it's much more obvious to me, especially comparing season one Jack to season two Jack, how incredibly messed up and unhappy he is, and how hard he's trying to keep from getting attached to the team, both due to being hurt before, and due to knowing that they're going to die and leave him. But Jack's hot-and-cold, alternately hands-off and overbearing management style directly contributes to the team's general dysfunction in season one.
... also, I have absolutely no idea when Jack and Ianto started sleeping together. It appears to happen somewhere between Countrycide (when Ianto says his most recent kiss was with Lisa) and "They Keep Killing Suzie," when they definitively are sleeping together, but it had to be off camera. Of course it's also possible they were sleeping together before Cyberwoman, stopped for a long while, and then at some point around the time of "They Keep Killing Suzie" they started again. The show makes it very hard to say.
Additional comments to come re: the audiodramas (and the other episodes you've now seen).
[edit] Good news; speaking of "End of Days," it had desensitized considerably by this time around.
Oh good, I'm glad to hear it!
What did you think of Owen's arc? I feel that, now that I've seen the entire series rather than just season two, it actually does add a lot to Owen's arc in season two to have seen how far down he went in season one.
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I thought his edge-of-doomsday proposition to Tosh and Ianto in "Sleeper" was pretty unambiguous, even though it's not canonically followed up on. Without prior bias from the alien roofie scene, it was enough for me to categorize him instantly and affectionately as a disaster bi.
Yeah, I think as far as a sympathetic introduction to Owen, this episode works much better than either of the previous ones
It works much better for the entire team! Neither of the previous episodes seemed to have worked out exactly how damaged or amoral or callous the Torchwood team was supposed to have become in the line of duty and whether the audience should find it intriguingly edgy or warningly offputting or what. There's that scene in "Day One" where Owen, Jack, and Tosh are all watching the CCTV footage of Gwen making out with the sex alien—which they know has the potential to reduce her to a pile of fine orgasmic ash!—and it takes all three of them a long, reluctant moment to agree that they should probably interfere, which I just can't see happening even an episode later. Suzie actually stands out much less from her teammates, emotionally, in the first episode than she does by the time of "They Keep Killing Suzie."
But Jack's hot-and-cold, alternately hands-off and overbearing management style directly contributes to the team's general dysfunction in season one.
It suits the general theme of everyone at Torchwood being an emotional trash fire, but it was a good thing for everyone including the audience that he went off with the Doctor and sorted himself out (the process actually seems to begin with "Captain Jack Harkness" when he finally tells something true about himself to Tosh and goes back to kiss the man whose name he wears, but he backslides rather badly during "End of Days." It was absolutely not inevitable that Owen would shoot him).
... also, I have absolutely no idea when Jack and Ianto started sleeping together.
I thought it happened for the first time following the end of "They Keep Killing Suzie." Something about the way Ianto says, "If you're interested, I've still got that stopwatch" struck me as both bold for him and a little diffident, as if leaving room for Jack to turn him down, astronomically unlikely as that outcome might have been. I agree that without further references in dialogue or onscreen PDA, it's hard to tell. Delaying their first visible kiss until the season finale was an interesting choice. I wasn't sure what to make of it, except perhaps that it dramatically refutes Owen's sneer of a "part-time shag."
Oh good, I'm glad to hear it!
Thank you! Any demonstration of psychological healing rather than merely accumulating damage in this our year of everything 2020 is actually quite heartening to me!
What did you think of Owen's arc?
I have not yet finished season two! I have caught up on the rest of season one and am contemplating just watching straight through the first half of season two again as opposed to skipping ahead to "Reset" and continuing on. I can offer opinions on season one Owen, which in the second half consist majorly of "ouch." That is not a man who handles the discovery of emotional vulnerability well at all.
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... okay, true. And yeah, I think he is 100% serious about it.
I have not yet finished season two! I have caught up on the rest of season one and am contemplating just watching straight through the first half of season two again as opposed to skipping ahead to "Reset" and continuing on.
Oh right, I forgot you had stopped after "Reset"! Honestly, I recommend watching the first half of season two again - I think you'll get new things out of it now that you've seen season one, and then you'll have that entire emotional roller coaster fully prepared to launch you into everything that comes after "Reset."
This spring, I watched all of season two for the second time (having watched it back in 2008); then I watched season one; then I rewatched the whole thing from the beginning with
(Someday I want to write the fic about Gwen, between seasons, ordering everyone to do team-building exercises, because it seems like exactly the kind of thing she'd do ... and it actually works, possibly only because they are interrupted halfway through by aliens and have to fight for their lives.)
I can offer opinions on season one Owen, which in the second half consist majorly of "ouch." That is not a man who handles the discovery of emotional vulnerability well at all.
"Ouch" is definitely the right reaction to season one Owen.
One of my Torchwood-watching friends described Owen as a man in a hatesex relationship with his emotions, which is tragilariously accurate.
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That's why I stopped where I did and went back. Even in hindsight and just in the first half of the season, a number of elements are quite impressive given the start conditions. (The fact that Owen agrees to go on a date with Tosh. It's not even the fact that it's Tosh, in whom he displayed negative interest in the first season. It's that for most of the first season he demonstrated no capacity for dating rather than sexing and for the rest of the first season he demonstrated no capacity to recover from Diane. I remain fascinated by the reversal of their crush dynamic in "Adam," because while I suppose Adam might have done it to amuse himself, I took it—at the time—to mean that underneath all the cynicism Adam claimed to have scraped away, the attraction to Tosh was already present. That little quirk of a smile he gives her right before he takes the Retcon, when he is his own cynical, scared, standoffish self again but still remembers being the hopeless geek in love with her. His line at the end about not doing flowers or apologies put "I Won't Send Roses" in my head for the next three days.)
I particularly found myself enthralled with watching Owen and Ianto develop a smooth working partnership after they were literally brawling on the floor and shooting at each other at the end of last season.
I still feel the show dropped the ball a little with Ianto in the first season because there were no visible stages between the time they almost all died because he stashed a Cyberwoman in the basement and the time no one thought twice about including him on the camping trip to the murder village, but it does reverberate through the end of the season, as witnessed by the aforementioned brawling. It just struck me now that Ianto, Tosh, and Owen each have similar arcs of trusting or being trusted by their teammates, which may be another reason that I class them more closely than Jack or Gwen.
(Someday I want to write the fic about Gwen, between seasons, ordering everyone to do team-building exercises, because it seems like exactly the kind of thing she'd do ... and it actually works, possibly only because they are interrupted halfway through by aliens and have to fight for their lives.)
I agree strongly with the second half of this sentence. Minus the aliens, I suspect a complete washout. Can you imagine trying to get Ianto to do a trust fall?
"Ouch" is definitely the right reaction to season one Owen.
So much of it is self-inflicted. Which is entirely in character, but you watch him snap out something unforgivable just because one of his teammates thought about asking if he was okay, and it is just facepalming. And therefore his forgiveness from Jack lands like twenty tons of emotional TNT and I can't believe I forgot it for thirteen years.
One of my Torchwood-watching friends described Owen as a man in a hatesex relationship with his emotions, which is tragilariously accurate.
Please tell them from me that's beautiful.
Audiodrama recommendations
Anyway though, these are my favorites of the ones I've listened to so far; there are quite a few I don't have yet.
The Last Beacon (Owen & Ianto) - This is light, fun, hopeful, and generally adorable; it's one of the few that's unreservedly optimistic and happy. It's written by Gareth David Lloyd (Ianto's actor) who very clearly just wants his character to have a road trip with Owen and become better friends.
Dinner and a Show (Ianto & Tosh) - Another one written by Gareth David Lloyd and demonstrating once again that his dream episode is Ianto hanging out and being friends with his teammates. This one's a bit darker and sadder than the above one, but it also gives better Tosh than 90% of the series does; one thing I notice when I go back to the show after listening to this is how much more resilient, funny, and bold Tosh is written here than she generally gets to be on the show.
Moving Target and Sync (Suzie) - The two Suzie-centric audios, both of which have almost the same plot (Suzie is forced to team up with someone she doesn't like while aliens try to kill her). I liked the first a bit better overall, but I preferred the ending of the second, and enjoyed both of them a lot.
Iceberg (Owen) - This starts off light and fun, and gets increasingly depressing with a horribly dark ending, but you also get to see a lot more of Owen's sympathetic side, and Owen being a doctor.
Cascade (Tosh) - This one does really nice things with the general conceit that you're listening to a corrupted recording that's spliced together out of order and kills people who listen to it.
The Office of Never Was (Ianto) - Another one that starts off funny and takes a downhill slide into absolutely horrifying, including Ianto making a very dark decision at the end. But it has a lot of parts that are really fun, and the mystery of a haunted building that traps Ianto after hours is spooky and fun.
The Hope (Owen & Andy, Gwen's police friend) - I don't know if this one would be to your taste; it's fairly dark, the plot concerns a serial killer and Owen undercover in a prison, but I ended up really loving it, and it has a surprisingly upbeat ending for how dark the rest of it is (also I want to write fanfic for it).
Dissected (Martha & Gwen) - This is funny and poignant, and I really liked it. It's set after Children of Earth, so Torchwood at this point consists almost entirely of Gwen, which added an underlayer of profound sadness that made me realize I don't know how many of the ones set after season two I can handle. But the Martha and Gwen interactions are really lovely.
Re: Audiodrama recommendations
No, understood: I am the same way about small presses and self-publishing. Library wouldn't even be an option for me if the CDs were in our local system, since our local system is closed for COVID-19 and I have no idea when they will reopen.
Anyway though, these are my favorites of the ones I've listened to so far;
Thank you! All of these sound interesting to me, although I am less likely to head straight for the depresso endings right off the bat. Is there a particular reason that you're not sure about recommending The Hope to me or just the serial killer/prison plot, in which case I will point out that film noir is also comfort viewing for me. (Either way, you should write fic for it.)
there are quite a few I don't have yet.
Good Lord, this looks like crackfic. I understand that would not prevent it from going incredibly dark, but still. I am delighted to see a couple with Murray Melvin. I am very fond of him.
Re: Audiodrama recommendations
No, it's basically just that, and you're right, you're about the least likely person to bounce off it because of that. Unlike the general trajectory of some of the others, this one started out dark and ended up less so.
Good Lord, this looks like crackfic.
If you think that looks like crackfic, check out this one.
Re: Audiodrama recommendations
And he said in the first episode that he was never doing that again!