Torchwood: Lost Souls is the fourth Torchwood audio drama I've listened to, even though I've seen almost nothing of the TV show. I didn't know the two characters who died, but I could still feel sympathy for the cast.

I enjoyed the silliness of the pretending-to-be-the-ambassador-from-Cardiff scenes and it was nice to hear the voice of Dr. Martha Jones. As for the science of this episode being rubbish, I'm 61. I have spent decades being exposed to rubbish science in fiction. My brain survived watching the SilverHawks cartoon in the 1980s without being discombobulated. Compared to that, this episode's end didn't rate more than a tiny snort of disbelief.

By the way, what really happened to the Large Hadron Collider during initial testing in 2008 may have lacked the menace of the lost souls calling, but it was dramatic enough.

I liked the later audio dramas better, but this one didn't bore me. ( )

Never listened to a story of Torchwood before but I have watched most of the BBC series. Good thing I had, there were several references to an event that happened on the show. For the most part, this felt like an episode of the show with no pictures to go with it. Having the actors do the voices made the visualization of the characters really easy. The story was a basic Torchwood suspence, sci-fi, drama. It was not one of the greatest stories I have seen of Torchwood, but it was a good distraction for almost an hour. I would be willing to listen to another "Audio Drama" again - at the right price (it was really short as far as audio books go). ( )

An entertaining audiobook, bringing old friends from Torchwood and Dr Who into our car as we drove to Myrtle Beach. Plot was okay, but not wildly compelling. Takes place between season 1 and 2 of the BBC series and gives some different insight into characters. Best bit was the bonus section hearing Russel T Davies and cast talk about the series and Cardiff. ( )

First off, let me say this was really, really bad. Second, I completely and utterly loved it because it was bad. I started listening to this while folding laundry and I couldn't stop laughing. The acting was bad, the plot was bad, the sound effects were bad. Well, okay, Gareth David-Lloyd was by far and away the best actor of the cast (which included the cast of the TV show). I know that Lidster tried to use the story to sort out the events at the end of season two, but he failed. I couldn't take it seriously. But, in the end, I didn't mind at all because it was really, really fun. Just also, you know, terrible. ( )

I think it is the first time since Slipback that a radio play has been broadcast which fits directly into the continuity of the Whoniverse (with perhaps a nod also to Whatever Happened to Susan?). It is the first time that a Whoniverse drama has been written to fit into current affairs as far as I know (unless you count Halley's Comet in Attack of the Cybermen, or the Christmas episodes of 1966 and the years since 2005).

Most Torchwood fans will (and should) love this - written by Joe Lidster, bringing the surviving members of the team together with Martha Jones to face an alien threat. Lots about dealing with the deaths of Owen and Toshiko, and (in a nod to series 1 continuity) Lisa the Cyberwoman. The plot is fairly standard, and certainly I worked out what was going on long before the characters did, but it is nice to hear our old friends again doing what they do best.

I was amused by a couple of environments referenced in the play which would be alien to many listeners but with which I am actually very familiar - the aeroplane flying to Geneva, and the ambassadorial reception. Who has a long history of association with Geneva, going back to The Tenth Planet, and later as the global headquarters of UNIT (oddly not mentioned as such here; one gets the impression that Martha and her boss have come into CERN from elsewhere). But this is the first Whoniverse story to be substantially set in Switzerland.

The ambassadorial reception scene was basically there for a couple of funny lines. I attend them once or twice a month, on average; Brussels is well supplied with such events, since many countries have separate missions to Belgium, NATO and the EU. In Geneva I should think things are more complex, since most countries will have relatively small missions to cover a vast range of activities - ranging from the World Trade and Health Organisation to the UN High Commissioners for Refugees and Human Rights, to the little-known disarmament conferences. I imagine the Geneva diplomatic corps gets to cover CERN too.

SPOILERY SCIENCE BITS

As more than one person has noted, the two key science points of the play are total rubbish. If you remove neutrons from an atom (let alone a person), it will disintegrate catastophically rather than just glow in the dark (Isaac Asimov tries a similar line in The Gods Themselves, but with slightly better handwaving). And ramming a beam of anti-protons into a beam of protons isn't exactly the opposite of ramming two proton beams into each other. But since the story basically revolves around these two crucial bogus scientific points, I think the sane and sensible thing to do is treat them along the lines of the Rocky Horror Picture Show's "laser capable of emitting a beam of pure anti-matter". And anyway this is a tale of evil cross-dimensional beings pretending to be the souls of the recently departed, so insistence on scientific accuracy isn't a very sensible starting point. ( )