Fall To Earth

The first Torchwood story was a highly enjoyable story and I was slightly worried about the second release because it featured Ianto Jones and he isn’t my favourite member of the Torchwood team. I don’t have anything against him but when he died in Children of Earth, I wasn’t one of those upset that he wasn’t a part of the Welsh Scooby Gang. After listening to this story I have to say that I like Ianto a bit more than I did before. The story sees Ianto on a spaceship that is as the title suggests falling to earth and just when things couldn’t get any worse he gets a phone call from a cold caller. That is pretty much the entire plot yet from start to finish, I found myself totally enthralled with the adventure.

One of the things that I liked about this story was despite being two very different characters, they interacted well together. There is a nice frostiness between them at first because Ianto is panicking and is trying to survive whilst being offered insurance. I think that most people have at one point had a conversation where we would do anything to end a call from one of these people but Ianto tries everything he can think of to keep the woman on the phone. Over the course of the story the relationship between the two becomes quite lovely and I think that Gareth David-Lloyd and Lisa Zahra are very good. I must admit that during the brief moment that we were led to believe that Zeynep had died that I was quite sad about this and then relieved when it turns out she was alive.

James Goss has written a superb script that cranks up the tension perfectly. As time was progressing I found myself getting more and more tense waiting for things to end happily. Goss is one of the strongest writers for Big Finish and he might have pulled off his biggest success because he has made me like a character that I wasn’t totally wild about. He wrote the Tomstardis Award winning story The Last Post and also wrote the entertaining The Scorchies and its sequel for the Jago and Litefoot range in Encore of the Scorchies. Fall to Earth is a very worthwhile release and that isn’t something I thought I would have expected. Two releases in and I think that this version of Torchwood is something wonderful and I am even looking forward to the next release which features Rhys who is something that I liked even less than Ianto but maybe things will change.