Lost Souls (audio story)

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Lost Souls is an original BBC Radio 4 audio play written by Joseph Lidster. It aired on 10 September 2008 in the Afternoon Play slot as part of Radio 4's Big Bang Day. It celebrated the switching on of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, that day. Andrew Marr introduced the audio play live from CERN. An MP3 version of the audio play was made available for seven days after broadcast. It was released on CD on 18 September 2008.

Publisher's summary

When scientists start to disappear prior to the activation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland, Dr Martha Jones of UNIT asks her friends at Torchwood 3, still grieving over the recent death of two colleagues, to investigate.

Plot

Martha invites Jack, Gwen and Ianto to Geneva where she explains that her friend, Julia, has gone missing after finding that eleven people suffering from inexplicable symptoms at CERN vanished after supposedly being sent to an off-site hospital. Whilst Jack and Martha examine Leon, the latest to fall into a coma, Gwen and Ianto go to check the facility's databases in the main computer room and confirm that everybody who has fallen ill had entered the Large Hadron Collider tunnels. Martha deduces that Leon is disintegrating from the inside because his neutrons have been taken, a phenomenon that Jack once saw whilst working at the Time Agency.

Jack confronts the project leader Professor Johnson, who claims to have no knowledge of any missing persons, and Gwen and Ianto cycle different ways down the tunnel in search of anything out of the ordinary. Ianto encounters an entity which claims to be the ghosts of Owen, Tosh and Lisa and Martha finds Dr Harrington, head of UNIT's medical team, in a building absent from the site plans with the twelve missing people. Professor Johnson is unable to put a stop to the LHC demonstration but, with Jack's help, decides to send out antiprotons to stop the protons from colliding and opening a portal for the entities.

Gwen finds Ianto glowing and unconscious and carries him towards the exit. Dr Harrington holds Martha hostage to force Jack and Professor Johnson into allowing the demonstration and explains that he heard the voice of his late wife when the LHC was tested, leading him to believe that the portal is to Heaven and that she and those killed by the entity will return. He activates the tunnel lockdown and helps Gwen get Ianto out before the door closes, locking himself inside and dying with the entity after it confirms its deception. Ianto and the other victims are restored and Torchwood heads back to Cardiff.

Cast

Worldbuilding

Notes

Download and CD release

  • Lost Souls was released by BBC Audio in both CD and MP3 download formats on 18 September 2008, only a week after broadcast. Straight after initial broadcast, for one week only, internet users could download the radio serial free from the BBC website. The CD also includes the BBC Radio Wales feature Torchwood: All Access. Presented by Julian Carey and aired to coincide with the debut of Series 2, this is a 25-minute documentary on the Welsh aspects of the program, featuring interviews with Russell T Davies, Eve Myles, Gareth David-Lloyd, Kai Owen and behind-the-scenes personnel. The mastering of the track contains an error that results in several minutes of discussion regarding the Hub set and its construction being repeated.
  • Lost Souls, Asylum, Golden Age and The Dead Line were released, both individually, and together as a four-disc collected box set, entitled The Radio Adventures.

Continuity

External links