Widdershins is…weird.

In fairness, you knew that. This is audio Torchwood from Big Finish. Weird is often stamped on the roadmap to wherever we’re heading. But Widdershins is weird in an unusual way for audio Torchwood from Big Finish, in that the impact of the piece as a whole feels relatively soft and spongy.

That’s all the more surprising, because it’s written by Guy Adams, who’s been responsible for some of the hardest-hitting, most punchy audio Torchwood in the range. Widdershins is more of an audio shrug than anything that’s likely to stay with you for a long while after you’ve listened to it.

The setup should work well – a middle-of-nowhere three-street town in Pembrokeshire with a history of communing with the Devil and undescribed horrific things happening to the populace whenever it does. A potential alien invasion, stealing days of the town’s life – go to bed on Monday, wake up on Friday, and in between, nobody coming in from outside has been able to access the town. And Iain, a young man who has always had a fascination with the occult, firmly believing he’s responsible for bringing the Devil, or the aliens, or whatever it was, to the town.

Iain (Cerith Flinn), having seen a therapist, gets his supportive mam and his fairly standard “waste of bloody time” dad to help him through his fractured, fragmented memories of the experience, meaning Catrin Powell and Charles Dale as the parents have to act out scenes with him, of the events leading upto, during, and after the event, including an investigation by Torchwood. In a sense, that’s the most successful part of the audio, the faltering voices and impersonations of Torchwood personnel, making this a Torchwood story without technically any of the Torchwood regulars appearing in it.

But where the whole thing comes apart is that the revelation of what actually happened, when it comes, is delivered small, and quiet, and almost with a shrug, the explanation having a touch of the Children of Earth vibe about it – there are horrible choices to be made, but who has the moral certainty to make them? Who can condemn people to [Insert unnamed alien horrors here]? How do you make those choices, and if you had to make them again knowing the consequences they’ve had, would you do it a second time?

There’s potential for thunderous sturm and drang there, for big drama tearing apart a previously ordinary town, and for the choices made to have long-lasting impacts. Here though, the reveal and its consequences are almost thrown away. There’s an audio in another dimension where that works well, and where the low-key reveal makes the whole thing worse and more powerful and forces it to stay with you long after the audio ends. 

This…doesn’t feel like that dimension. Which, as we say, is weird, because everything about the story should work. Big Finish has a long history of making Torchwood work in ways that stick with you after the story ends. Guy Adams, as we’ve said, is one of the writers most adept at doing that. And the cast here are all deeply talented. While Cerith Flinn gives good screwed-up everyman, delivering the ranting certainty of the alien invasion of his tiny town into the wind of everybody’s rational explanations, Catrin Powell and Charles Dale are worth their weight in emotional gold, and some of the best scenes in the drama are between the two of them when Mam and Dad are not pretending to be anyone else in the story, and the simple emotions of a long-married couple, parents of a child who is clearly troubled are allowed to come through – including their different viewpoints and certainties on the invasion and on their son.

So why in the name of all the audio gods doesn’t it work as well as all this suggests it should?

Honestly, because there’s very little identifiable progression of peril, leading to a muted, downbeat reveal. The whole premise of the story is ordinary people replaying extraordinary events, but as a listen, that ends up making it feel like a workshop script played by good actors, playing amateur actors, playing characters. Again, there’s insanity baked in to that element of it not working, because it’s directed by the usually pin-sharp Lisa Bowerman, so why there’s lots of running around and arm-flailing without any genuine tension or terror-build is a mystery. 

Everybody involved in Widdershins is top class, top-of-their-game, and they deliver a story that could and should work brilliantly – the concept of a re-enacted Torchwood story-as-therapy is unusual enough to make it a standout in the range.

Somewhere along the line though, Widdershins loses any sense of sparkle, or pace, or peril, leading to that leaden non-building of tension and the super low-key reveal that doesn’t feel like it explains much, pays off less and leaves the listener shrugging, and ultimately feeling simply mystified, rather than satisfied. Tony Fyler

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