There’s something innately dark about drama that restricts its participants to a single spot. Boom! in the latest series of Doctor Who showed that particularly well, but in Torchwood – Bad Connection, there are throwbacks to the movie Phonebooth. There’s a phenomenal amount of danger, into which a hapless human stumbles simply by stepping into a telephone booth and answering a call.

Who-fans know that anything can happen when you go into a particular phone box, but this is Torchwood, so the dangers are gritty, and real, and tragically for Cardiff librarian Emlyn Crook (Jason Watkins), all that’s keeping him alive is Suzie Costello (Indira Varma) on the other end of the line.

Safe from what? Well, quite. There’s A Creature outside, but it’s deliciously invisible to most people, which means it can kill them at will. After picking up the phone and finding Suzie on the line, Emlyn is the only person on the planet that can see it. 

That presents a tightly controlled set of problems in Bad Connection. What would you do? Leave the phonebox – in which, incidentally, the Creature can’t seem, at least initially, to see you either – and try to save people from the invisible killer? Try to persuade total strangers to come and share the cramped space of the urine-stained phonebox with you? Make as much noise as you can? Hunker down and hope the hungry alien continues to ignore you until some kind of help arrives?

All of these strategies are played out across the taut hour or so of Bad Connection. It’s a whole lot of Stuff, strung out across what could, for all either of them know, be both the first and last conversation Suzie and Emlyn ever have.

It’s deliciously sweaty, stinky stuff, Emlyn having lived what some people would regard as a small life, and Suzie, herself not exactly the most outgoing of people, trying to keep him alive for reasons that may be humanitarian, or may be Torchwood, or may be some messy mixture of the two with a particularly Costello twist. 

The joy of the restricted location of the story is that it lets us revel in what is essentially a two-hander between Watkins and Varma. And it also lets us contemplate at length the size of a life, and what it means to both the people who live it, and to organisations that have a famously broader perspective. 

The idea of a rampaging invisible alien is a strong one, and the notion that the only person that can see it is a) an innocent librarian, b) trapped in a very tight and deeply unpleasant space, and c) on the line to one of Torchwood’s most unpredictable operatives adds layers of flavour to the whole premise. 

We can rarely if ever get enough Suzie, because of course in many ways, she’s the Torchwood member who had to die in order to give Gwen Cooper her career of alien investigation, and so we never really got enough of her on screen. 

That means every audio adventure that features her feels like an extra treat, a peak into the development of a character essentially born to die in our established history of Torchwood.

What Aaron Lamont does in Bad Connection is create a location-restricted screen against which we can learn some things about how Suzie “does” her Torchwooding, while allowing for miscommunication gags, a dance through the Dewey decimal system and its outmoded societal prejudices, and particularly, Suzie’s conflicted nature when it comes to balancing the professional need to do what she does and her self-aware personal need to reach out and form some kind of human connection outside the bounds of a top secret organisation. 

We learn that she’s not on good terms with her family, intensifying the loneliness of her work in Torchwood and giving a neat counterpoint to the eventual reality of Gwen Cooper, who had to bring her husband into the secret circle to avoid destroying everything about her life that was “normal”.

Suzie doesn’t have that “normal” connection to keep her grounded (like several of the Torchwood crew we came to know on-screen), and so the poignancy of her conversation with an ageing librarian who might be about to be turned into alien-lunch in a tin can is heightened significantly. 

There are many ways of telling audio Torchwood stories, and Big Finish has, to give the company its due, explored what feels like almost all of them, some several times over. 

But often when we come back to Suzie Costello, it deals with her life and her story by means of the two-hander, as she makes one connection after another that’s ultimately doomed to fail before we met her on-screen, after she’s made the decisions that will end her career.

Here, there’s the sense that while it may be true that she initially connects with Emlyn purely for the Torchwood motive of potentially keeping the alien menace contained in a restricted space, by the end of the story, she really wants to maintain their connection beyond the instance of terror and death that brought them together. 

We won’t spoil the story by telling you whether or not Emlyn accepts that prolonged connection, but by the end, he’s become more than a stereotypical librarian in a phonebox. He learns what she’s doing and largely why she’s doing it, and has to make a choice about whether he especially wants to prolong a connection with anyone who could act in the potentially-callous broader picture way that Torchwood sometimes demands of its operatives. 

It’s a story that poses the question for all of us on a wider canvas. Could we be friends with any of the Torchwood crew? Would we ever trust that they were “just” being our friends? Would their motives ever be entirely clear and clean?

Torchwood – Bad Connection is a weird and wonderful story, because while there’s distinctly little by way of running around involved in it, there’s still enough adrenaline, tension, terror and social drama to leave both it and you feeling breathless by the end. 

Ultimately, when it comes to this release, pick up the phone – Torchwood’s calling. Tony Fyler

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