Everyone’s Dead on Floor 3, the last outing for Torchwood’s cheekiest non-Harkness operative, Norton Folgate (played by Samuel Barnett), feels like what would happen if you put JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls in a room with the TV finale to Sapphire and Steel and waited for babies.

It opens with the four main staff at nondescript Fifties firm Matthews and Small going about their business as usual, when there’s an explosion on the floor above. Guess which floor that is.

And then… well, everyone’s dead on Floor 3.

What killed them? What does it have to do with anyone from Floor 2? And who the hell is the slick and mouth-forward investigator who comes to talk to the employees of Matthews and Small almost immediately after the explosion?

Enter Norton…

Tiny spoilerette here, poppets, the investigator is our very own Norton Folgate, because the thing that went bang on Floor 3 is altogether more complicated than a leftover bomb from the war, or any Communist plot to target very specific floors in a building full of commerce.

But his investigations are at least as involved with uncovering the simmering tensions and stresses between firm-owner and paterfamilias Mr Matthews (Julian “21st century Davros” Bleach), Tim Small (Cassius Hackforth), the helpful but potential troubled nephew of the firm, pro-revolutionary lothario William Ledbury (Alistair Toovey), and switched-on office manager Angela Carr (Aruhan Galieva) as they are with things that go bang when they shouldn’t.

Not that Norton gives short shrift to actually investigating the bodies on Floor 3, it’s just that it quickly becomes apparent that they died in a very peculiar way, which means that whatever killed them remains an active threat and might well go bang again sometime soon, and take Floor 2 – and potentially elsewhere – with it.

Secrets, Lies and Everyone Dead…

Shaw and Joss give us a classic Torchwood conundrum – advanced technology that shouldn’t be going bang anywhere near Floor 3, lots of fairly grisly deaths, and a ticking clock on a repeat of the disaster, while delivering a fair amount of certainty that someone at Matthews and Small knows more about it that they’re letting on.

That’s the element of the story that’s saturated in the energy of An Inspector Calls. Inspector Folgate, having established that there are highly unlikely deaths to account for, focuses mostly on the interplay between the four members of the firm, their interactions with one another and with the people of Floor 3, to ascertain who knows more than their innocent Fifties façade is letting on.

Naturally, each of the people in the office knows at least a little something that advances his inquiries, but none of them especially want to reveal their hands. Who’s deliberately covering up the crucial point that will lead to the explanation of all the dead bodies on the floor above, and who’s just trying to keep the mundane human secrets of lives lived in some form of perpetual disappointment.

A Thing Of Beauty

The structure of the piece has a polish and an elegance which means it feeds you information and storytelling richness piece by piece and everything you learn shifts your understanding of the truth about Floor 3. We are not, of course, about to spoiler any of those reveals for you, but as with An Inspector Calls, while the story doesn’t exactly change the more you know, your understanding of what has happened gets deeper and more nuanced with every viewpoint you add to the melting pot. 

And as each of the employees at Matthews and Small add their meat to the story, it gets both more complex in its build-up and clearer and more straightforward in terms of what actually happened to the people on the floor above.

Unlike An Inspector Calls but very much more in a traditional Torchwood vein though, not everybody is going to make it out of Norton’s investigations alive.

There’s shame here, and rigid tradition, and pure post-war sadness, and thwarted ambition, and at least some degree of lust, in both rampant and straightforward and furtive and misdirected versions, all of which boils the lives of the employees of Matthews and Small down to an increasingly sticky, convoluted mess which makes for intense and enthralling listening.

And, sure, there’s also the ticking time bomb of whatever the hell went wrong on Floor 3, because this is after all Torchwood, and Norton has to actually solve the sciencey problem, while prrrrobably leaving the normies to their own devices.

Did we mention not everyone survives? 

Those are quite some devices. Just sayin’.

Let’s Do The Twist

But just when you think you have a handle on what’s happened, what’s happening, and to at least some extent why in this story, Shaw and Goss pull one extra trick out of their timey-wimey bag of storytelling embuggerances, which leaves Norton significantly less sure than usual that he knows what’s going on –  or that he can get out of it. 

Whiiiich, to tortuously prove a point, is where the end of TV Sapphire and Steel comes in. The rug is pulled out from under Norton’s feet just when he thinks he’s got everything under control, and we leave him in a state of considerable – not to say delicious – uncertainty, which undercuts the last scene of him in his previous outing, where he was somewhat valedictory and not a little marvellous.

Never let it be said that Torchwood let anything rest on its laurels – we’re never sure whether Everyone’s Dead On Floor 3 is supposed to come after the last episode of Torchwood Soho: Ascension or before it – but whatever your headcanon decides is the truth could define the destiny you ultimately ascribe to Norton Folgate.

So there’s that to chew on.

Shaw and Goss have created an intense, emotionally sticky human story with a strongly science fictional external plot, which grows in depth and richness as it goes along and leaves you with a slapped face of “What the hell just happened?”

An Inspector Calls meets the end of Sapphire and Steel in a Fifties office building. You know you want to hear what that sounds like. Tony Fyler

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