The Red List

"Your country is burning."

Writer: James Goss

Format: Audio

Released: November 2021

Series: Torchwood Monthly 56

Featuring: Ace, Mr Colchester 

Synopsis

At first it was lights in the sky. Then the country started falling apart. Torchwood has come to help. So has A Charitable Earth. But there's a problem. 

Mr Colchester and Ms McShane find themselves trapped in a quarantine hotel in the middle of an alien invasion. 

Can they save the world without leaving their rooms?

Verdict

The Red List was a very good audio to continue my way through the monthly Torchwood range from Big Finish! I never imagined that we would be getting Ace popping up in Torchwood but with her A Charitable Earth charity it makes a great amount of sense! We know from At Childhood's End and The Power of the Doctor that she is a big charitable figure in the modern day so to have her getting mixed up with Torchwood should not come as any surprise. In fact I should be asking why hasn't it happened sooner! I thought the pairing of her alongside Mr Colchester was very fun and whilst they weren't entirely working together given his thoughts toward charity and hers towards Torchwood, I thought the development of their relationship was pretty strong. There was good humour that came from them being confined and this story reflecting thoughts and feelings on the pandemic was done brilliantly. I imagine a lot of the details were very close to home if you listened close to release date with things being very fresh in the memory. This still resonated with me here and I definitely got that sense of confinement which was important to the story. I think things would have been helped if we actually had the country named and whilst it is indicated to be somewhere in Latin or Southern America with the references to El Presidente, I didn't really like not having a definitive answer on where Mr Colchester and Ace were. Even if it was somewhere made up as we saw in The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion, that would have been beneficial in my opinion. The lines about locking visitors up were certainly on the nose in terms of being political but it was hard to argue against them. The indoctrination of the quarantine hotel was fascinating and it was done really subtly over the course of the episode. I thought it did a really good job for over an hour in presenting how long Mr Colchester and Ace had been stuck in the hotel. One newspaper and one television channel. The banter that came from them competing the crossword together much to Colchester's annoyance was really fun but all of the answers were leading towards a certain way of thinking which I liked. By the end of the ten days, the pair were both very much against El Presidente and wanted to see him dethroned in any form or fashion. That came as a surprise to Ace and Colchester which I enjoyed. I thought these two being together was also fun for the simple fact of them both hating their first names. Ace playing on Colchester's in particular was great banter. Xavier was a fun little character and with Colchester now alone following Colin's death, he was out for some fun. He needed fixing. And he probably wasn't far wrong! The flirtatious building of their relationship with each maintenance visit was good and it was painfully obvious that they were going to work something out together. After all of the brainwashing efforts, Ace and Colchester not actually definitively guaranteeing that they weren't the copied versions of themselves was quite the ambiguous way to end the episode! They knew what had been trying to be achieved against them for assassination and things clearly got in the way like bodies falling from the twelfth floor, but I do wonder if this is something we may come back to in the future. I would love to get another go around with this pairing, especially if they're questioning their own existence! Overall, a really strong listen. I love this range.

Rating: 8/10