Written by Christopher Cooper and directed by Scott Handcock.

Spoiler-free verdict: A solid Torchwood vs. Autons mashup, with strong themes making up for deliberately unsatisyfing plotting.

Recommended pre-listening: None.

***

What do you want out of a story? That’s the question to ask with Sargasso, the latest audio drama from Big Finish’s monthly Torchwood range, pitting Rhys Williams against the Nestene Consciousness in the form of plastic pollution at sea. If you want a plot with a beginning and a tidy end, some likeable, developed characters, and a general good time, you’d be better off spending on something else. But that doesn’t mean Sargasso isn’t a tight script worth existing. It’s just one that only is interested in functioning on certain levels.

The premise is quite forward with the ambitions of the story: this is a story first and foremost about the environment. Nearly everyone has heard of the so-called “garbage patches” of the ocean, places where human plastic debris accumulates in gyres and swirls around and around, refusing to go away and hurting so many animals. Marrying that to the Nestene, Doctor Who’s plastic-animating squid from space, is an elegant match. We already live in a world where plastics threaten us, and it isn’t a large leap to turn it into a monster.

"Think of the environmental impact!"
"What, versus the impact on us?" 

The ending clarifies these themes beautifully. Rhys and guest character Kaitlin Russell burn the plastic to attempt a quick escape from the alien-augmented environmental apocalypse, only for Rhys to unknowingly fail to solve the problem. Kaitlin, revealed out of earshot to be under Nestene influence, reveals her plan to control microplastics — tiny fragments produced when the trash in the sea starts to weather away, building up in fish, and eventually even in people. It’s all very sharp, an indictment of how we try to forget the problem or brush it off with cheap tricks, while all the while it lurks, ready to destroy us in a very real way. Rhys failing to resolve the plot is the best possible choice when the plot is a problem that exists outside the world of aliens, and I like using storytelling to highlight how poorly those real problems are being solved, even if it takes space squid to achieve that.

This is all very good, and what’s more, it’s necessary. Which is fortunate, because the story’s lack of interest in examining other things means there isn’t much more to get from it. Kaitlin is something of a symbolic cipher even before she’s revealed to be under Nestene control, a guilty figure of privilege trying to rectify things by becoming an environmentalist. She exists in these broad political strokes, a person to be engaged as an idea rather than an emotional figure. Rhys, on the other hand, mostly serves as an identification character. There are some strong moments with him, such as his obsession with safety videos as a parent, and a few nice beats suggesting what his life is like following Gwen’s departure in Aliens Among Us, but no deeper insights to be found.

Beyond them, characters purely serve plot support, and the plot itself is fairly boilerplate. There’s a lot of being chased around by plastic monsters, but nothing ever threatens to be as delightful as an early incident with rubber ducks; the action peaks early. That’s a fair enough failing, action storytelling is a hard genre to sustain on audio, but this story doesn’t innovate throughout most of the midsection. It’s never boring, nor bad, but the escalation of tension never quite lands. Instead, there’s a big nothing of a second act, all just holding time to get to the excellent punchline of the third. It’s difficult to see a reason for this story to last the full 50 minutes it does, beyond that being the standard for the range.

Overall, then, Sargasso is both satisfying and frustrating. It’s an easy script to admire for its loftier ambitions, and it more than succeeds at saying the things it needs to say. And yet it’s a hard story to fall in love with, an intellectual exercise that never quite cuts deeper or goes further. This is a story for people who think commenting on sea plastics with Doctor Who monsters is an inherently good idea.

Fortunately, I’m one of them.

6/10