Among Us: Moderation

"They're trying to kill her."

Writer: James Goss

Format: Audio

Released: May 2023

Series: Torchwood 7.04

Featuring: Tyler, Mr Colchester 

Synopsis 

Tyler Steele has a job moderating the comments section of a website. His old friend Petra is a star reporter for the newspaper. And Tyler realises the newspaper is going to kill her.

Verdict  

Moderation was a decent story to conclude the Aliens Among Us seventh series of Torchwood. I fully appreciate that the intention with this opening boxset was to have four individual episodes and that was certainly achieved, but this did feel slightly underwhelming as a finale. It was still a good episode as my rating reflects, but this definitely felt like more of a setup for the boxsets to come which I’m not sure is right for a finale! Regardless, it was a good story and it highlighted Tyler Steele fresh off a great cameo in Beyond Bannerman Road which makes a lot more sense now with him employed at a news organisation. He was the perfect fit to be Rani’s secret source! Barry Beans was a pretty terrible person and that made him a fun character because I was anticipating his downfall throughout. He was essentially a modern Nazi with his far right views not exactly hidden. All of the employees that left his news outlet were of a diverse background and the fertility clinic was having an 86% strike rate on producing children that were blonde and blue eyed. That was pretty frightening! Almost as much as the AI technology he’d been using that called a cab when he performed the Nazi salute and heiled. Horrific. He was just a bit of knob throughout. Petra on the other hand was a really likeable character and I’d actually be in favour of her replacing Tyler in the Torchwood team. She was really good as a journalist and she wasn’t afraid to tackle the norm or reveal the truth. Big pharma didn’t like her and that meant she was probably onto something. After getting involved in the controversial subject of vaccinations, she’d been reduced to the more whacky news stories but she embraced it. The way she questioned protestors and fact checked them outside a school after they were chanting against the teaching of homosexuality was wonderful. The power of media is frightening in our digital society and this was highlighted so well here. Following the story of Charlie and the experimental science to try and bring him back to something of a functioning human seemed odd at first, but the moment where the AI interface actually started to work was triumphant and felt big. I actually felt glad so the reveal at the end that it wasn’t Charlie at all was tremendous and certainly gets me excited for the next boxset. Just what is the AI? It’s obviously going to be linked to the voice on the phone at the end of Aliens Next Door and it’ll be fun to tie everything together as the series goes on. Before we got there, Tyler would bring down Barry Beans and his organisation but I wasn’t massively in favour of him. I’ve never been a huge fan of his and that didn’t change here with his drunkenness and desire to take drugs. He just wanted to forget and not feel anything for a few hours. I’m not a fan of people who do that so I just can’t relate to him and he’s everything I’m not. I thought Mr Colchester was severely under-utilised in the episode too and it was a big shame that he was literally reduced to being a taxi driver for Tyler. That was a really lacklustre follow up to his triumphant emergence in Colin Alone, where was the follow up? I thought that was very poor. As a whole though, it was a good episode and whilst the discussions on algorithms and code were a bit beyond me it was still interesting. Overall, a decent story!

Rating: 7/10