Iceberg

"Every night we have bad dreams."

Writer: Grace Knight

Format: Audio

Released: May 2020

Series: Torchwood Monthly 38

Featuring: Owen

Synopsis

Dr Owen Harper's called to the hospital. There's a ward full of remarkable coma patients and more are coming in. Each patient came in with a dead relative as their imaginary friend.

Has Owen really discovered a bridge between the living and the dead?

Verdict

Iceberg was a tremendous story to continue my way through the monthly adventures of Torchwood from Big Finish! Owen is a very strong character and can more than handle being the main character in his own episode, and it’s interesting to learn more about his past. We get to meet Amira who was a really fun character and the past she shared with Owen wasn’t what I was first expecting. Knowing what we do about Owen, I was convinced she would be an old flame in the quick fling kind of style we might expect from the Torchwood doctor. That was far from the case and there was actually a deep emotional connection there with a shared tragedy. She was a colleague of Owen’s before he went to Torchwood and she had been cut off after Katie’s death. Placing the episode for Owen somewhere in Series One was good and I love the ability of Big Finish to utilise information we wouldn’t learn until Fragments at the end of Series Two. We know how Owen joined Torchwood and the circumstances as such, but now having Amira allowed us to see the aftermath. She was left behind and cut off after Katie’s funeral and Owen’s outburst about having to do that so he didn’t have to deal with the death was brilliant. It was a strong emotional pull. Owen being called into the hospital to look into Lucy as a patient was really good. He reluctantly accepted but it’s a good job he did! Lucy couldn’t have been any more Welsh and her conversing with Ella was intriguing because she was her recently deceased sister. Amira seemed to believe that Ella wasn’t imaginary but she was playing dumb as she was actually the big bad of the alien spores. Amira being the titular iceberg was fascinating and I really enjoyed the concept of seeing one’s memories in complete life form from start to finish. Oh to have that ability! Except the usage here was in a way most unexpected. Amira was using Lucy to give life to her own sister who she was seeing as Ella. Except it wasn’t Ella at all. It was another spore parasite. The conversation between the fake Amira and Owen was really powerful stuff and I loved the emotion. We don’t always get this with Owen in particular so it was great to explore that side of his character. He had deep rooted emotional feelings with everything going on here and it seems like everything regarding Katie’s loss came out here in quite emphatic stye! His use of the delta waves and realising that he could take use of them was really clever and highlighted his medical knowledge very nicely. The fact he could kill both Amira and the Ella was a fitting finale and quite a powerful conclusion! Overall, a really strong story. 

Rating: 9/10