This feels obvious but

[beccaelizabeth]

I just listened to three different Torchwood audios because after each I had a thought about the next
The Crown
Five People You Kill
Lincolnshire Poacher
and I realised that they don't fit together, for instance in how The Crown works, but, that doesn't cause messes with canon, because all three are unreliable narrator messes where someone is lying to someone with the full connivance of the soundtrack.

Which is interesting because audios that lie to the listener feel rare? Like that isn't the rule with Doctor Who audios, you're just listening to The Doctor doing things, it's not playing with truth value, so you can trust him.

But a lot of these Torchwood ones layer it up with stories about stories.


And then sometimes they are audios *in the archive*, so it is the archive's recording of stories about stories.

I keep seeing people be happy about the audio where Jack and Ianto have a dog, but the dog is called Untitled, the audio is *about* the archive, and I figure the dog is a Clue. The more recent audio with not!Ianto makes it clearer, the archive itself can talk in all of their voices, and chooses them in order to persuade. So it wasn't a future computer heaven for Jack or Ianto, it was a faked up set of interactions meant to get humans to Trust The Archive.

That's the box set I think is called The Torchwood Archive.

I'm thinking about it and I'm not sure how much Torchwood audio stuff should go in the wiki without a Lot of caveats.

Like, when I check the Big Finish page for the title by searching Archive, I get the other Torchwood audio, Restricted Items Archive. And that is a clever story about Ianto telling a story when he knows the tape is recording and he has an audience. So to what extent is anything vaguely trustworthy there? It feels like it would be wasting our time if it was Nothing, but they certainly do that in one of Mr Colchester's Postcards.

Torchwood audios are unrestricted, by internal truth value. The people in them are often telling stories and those can be lies that we get a sountrack to. It's interesting.

But it's just one possibility out of many, other stories do seem to be just the audience listening in on the Whoniverse.

But add it to the layer after layer of lies, not all of them cover ups, the imitations of loved ones, the occasional spot of possession, the memory alteration with both retcon and Adam, and how many times people find out their own brains are lying to them... Torchwood audios really cram a lot of unreliable into a tiny slice of story.



Interesting sort of horror.

Comments

[lokifan]

Jeez. No wonder Torchwood's always had so much horror in its sci-fi.