Suzie Costello is callous and calculating, but she’s also inherently emotional and vulnerable.
Her life in Big Finish’s main range of Torchwood releases has primarily involved being partnered with a stranger and gaining their trust while usually wanting to manipulate them to her own means for the greater good. All part of the job. Previous examples have included Alex in Moving Target, Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen in Sync, and Emlyn Crook on the other end of the phone in the award-nominated Bad Connection.
In Child Free, penned by first-time Big Finish writers Holly Robinson and George Fletcher, Suzie has to look after a baby alongside a man called Hywel she has only just met.
The story kicks off in a nightclub, with Suzie scanning for alien energy and frustrated at both her apparatus and the environment she’s in. Hywel then drops a tray of drinks after they collide into each other on the dance floor, and like the ‘Sambuca fairy’, she magically refills them. He’s on his stag do and wearing a dress, and before you know it, the titles are kicking in and Suzie has invited him around to her flat.
That’s a pretty confident move from Suzie, and, as soon as her confidence slips, Hywel goes in for a smooch as he thinks it will boost it. A common trend of strangers being able to read Suzie quicker than she recognises her own insecurity.
Then the baby appears.
They hand it to the authorities, get home, and the shagging and snogging is left to the listener’s imagination before they wake up the next morning and digest their actions from the night before. What kind of man on his stag do picks up a woman? And what kind of woman picks up a man knowing he’s on his stag do? And what kind of baby reappears at will?
Before Hywel gets married at the end of the day, he and Suzie need to solve their baby problem. Suzie doesn’t care for its welfare at first, while Hywel does, but she doesn’t want to be seen as a totally bad person as they attempt to hand it in to the police again.
Suzie treats their conversations almost as interrogations of Hywel, but he likes her and opens up straight away. She switches between wanting to be seen as not a nurturing individual to being nice and caring, with the baby’s presence actually bringing out her darker side as he returns to work mode. Whenever the baby is gone, she’s more concerned about how Hywel perceives her.
It takes 15 minutes for either of them to even think about naming the baby, and Suzie goes for Sambuca when a friend of Hywel’s wife-to-be questions the pair in a supermarket as they look for baby food. Then the rift opens and alien blobs invade the baby aisle. They’re after the baby, and Suzie is happy to give it to them “for the greater good”, but Hywel won’t let her. The question is, how cold is Suzie? Does the rest of the story bring her closer to the baby and less willing to give it to alien blobs, or does she remain stubborn, focused and willing to execute her plan no matter what?
Initially, she hardens, calling the baby ‘it’ and belittling Hywel continually as he divulges more of the life that he was living before the baby turned up. Possibly in response, the baby throws up and proves to be increasingly radioactive.
Then Chester, a man who Suzie may be in a ‘situationship’ with, turns up at her flat and a scene similar to the one in the supermarket occurs; this time, it goes very differently, but no spoilers, aside from Chester not being impressed that Suzie has shared more with Hywel in the space of a few hours than she ever did with him. In fact, they start to mirror each other a lot.
It appears Suzie had been running away from entering a more serious relationship with Chester, and now Hywel’s interest in solving the problem of Sambuca the baby is making him run away from a wedding he really should be preparing for. But neither of them can run away from the baby, so what’s the solution? Some lovely character development, and returning alien blobs. And actually maybe more running away.
It can be easy to forget that this story is filled with comedy, because it’s played very seriously rather than with surrealness, and it explores two characters in great depth.
And to cap it all off, Hywel gets to his wedding just in time… for the alien blobs to come through the rift again and try to kill Sambuca and assorted wedding guests.
Indira Varma nails all the different tones she has to take her dialogue as Suzie, and Arthur Hughes makes Hywel a believable and likeable man despite the whole ‘cheating the night before his wedding’ introduction. It’s clear from the behind-the-scenes interviews that both leads put a lot of thought into the story, and it leads to another superb release in one of Big Finish’s strongest ranges.
There is a lot of heart in Child Free, but never forget Suzie has a manipulative streak…
