Torchwood: Believe

What is it with Torchwood? It’s the spin-off that just won’t die. After two niche stylistically and tonally awkward seasons on BBC3 and then 2 respectively, we had a blistering 5-part season “stripped” across weeknights on BBC One, followed by a fairly silly, often tedious 10-part American epic. The iterations of the programme on TV were massively inconsistent, even across seasons. Episode lengths varied, we had 1,2,5 and 10 parters. This was a programme that was never quite comfortable with what it wanted to be. It could only be identified by its very Welsh bent, Eve Myles and John Barrowman beautifully overacting, immature adult content and a fairly loose grip on reality.

Big Finish have adopted a similarly sporadic approach to their Torchwood tales: there are monthly one parters, two handers, 12-part full-cast epics, 3-part pre-Torchwood boxsets, an anniversary special set thousands of years in the future, and two 3-part full-cast “stripped” stories. The only difference between the adventures produced by the BBC and those produced by Big Finish are that, by and large, the Big Finish stories are absolutely phenomenal. Apart from perhaps, Children of Earth, the Big Finish output eclipses its mother-programme in terms of immature adult content, vivid imagination and ambitious horizons. Also, you almost don’t notice John Barrowman and Eve Myles doing their beautiful over-acting thing. Almost don’t notice.

Believe is a 3-part full-cast drama with a difference: all the original cast are back. Well, actually, that’s how it’s been marketed but the group don’t actually spend a large amount of time together and the actors were clearly scheduled around each other. It must have been a nightmare: The Five Doctors of the Torchwood world. Having said that, it is a bit of a giddy thrill to have them all back together and the early scenes in the hub really feel like stepping back in time.

Surprisingly though, the story doesn’t really feel much like one from 2006/7. For a start, it’s a 3-parter and it’s also far less melodramatic, on-the-nose and rough-around-the-edges than early Torchwood. It’s as if the original Torchwood viewers have grown up, become writers and written new episodes as their younger minds imagined it used to be. Guy Adams’s scripts are excellent. The threat here is one posed by the human race and feels far more dangerous and insidious than any alien threat, especially given that the aggressors target the weak and the lonely. This is Torchwood at perhaps its most mature.

Burn Gorman and Naoko Mori stand out specifically amongst the cast and are given the best scenes. There is a bitterness between Owen and Tosh, given the genuinely uncomfortable events of Episode One, which culminates in a terrifically – and characteristically – clumsy conversation in the final instalment which is completely riveting. This is as real and vivid and painful as their relationship has ever been. There’s a star turn from Arthur Darvill here too which is definitely worthy of note, playing against type and leaving a stark and loathsome impression.

Episode Two focuses on Ianto and again, he is given some terrifically uncomfortable scenes. We fear that he is not a million miles away from the victims of the church with whom he is trying to infiltrate and so there is a more tangible sense of threat posed towards him than perhaps our other leads. 

The final episode ends quietly, in a series of stages, which is indicative of the way Guy Adams goes not for spectacle but for heart in the telling of Believe. It doesn’t need to flex its muscles as much as other Torchwood episodes (and feels comparatively straight judged alongside them) because Believe’s greatest strength is its confidence: it knows it doesn’t have to be showy to be tremendous. For once, this Torchwood episode could happily call itself brilliantly subtle. All told, Believe is a triumph.

9/10

JH