Episode 6: Wintertime
January
2019. The UK is caught in an unprecedented wave of cold, with snowfalls, ice
storms, frozen rivers and the whole gamut of wintry weather phenomena, leaving
experts baffled. Only the Torchwood Cardiff team knows the truth behind this
aberrant climate shift: it came through the Rift, from a long, long time ago. Winter
is coming - time to call the Time Lady!
So, despite what I
announced last time (about “taking a break for a few months”), I couldn’t
resist the lure of running my own New Year’s Day special (well, sort of, since
this was played on the 5th of January) for Lady Penelope – an
episode with some nostalgic echoes from the Russell T. Davies era (Torchwood,
Cardiff, the Rift…).
And despite what the above
blurb may suggest, most of the action took place in 1895 (but still in
Cardiff), during another of Britain’s “great winters” – at a time where the
Cardiff Rift already existed… but NOT the all-too convenient Rift Manipulator!
The main antagonist for
this story was directly inspired by Kim Newman’s “Time and Relative” Telos
novella: primeval, prehistoric Cold as a sentient entity trying to reclaim its
lost dominion on our post-Ice Age planet. At first, I had contemplated using the
Great Intelligence as my main villain (see HERE) but as I was working with this
idea, I kept on ending up with something that felt like a remake of Steven
Moffat’s “The Snowmen”, with no real extra element of interest. This episode
also gave me a wonderful opportunity to reunite Penelope with her present-day
friends at the Cardiff Torchwood Hub, including Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, one
of her very first time-travelling companions…
The basic idea behind the
whole Cold / Rift thing was as follows: the Cardiff Rift allowed the Cold from
Earth’s Ice Age to “travel” (or disseminate itself) to various times in our
history (including, for instance, the great winter of 1962-63), with January
1895 acting as its most potent “open window through time”. There, the Cold
entity managed to possess and manipulate a naïve, pious Psychic, using her as
an entry point and interface with reality. Of course, being blinded by faith,
the poor soul thought that the visions and commands sent to her “from beyond”
by some seemingly eternal, disembodied “whiteness” could only come from God,
heralding His new divine reign on Earth. Through the powers invested in her,
she even created the Angel of Frost, a terrifying, immaterial being embodying
her “righteous wrath” against unbelievers and sinners…
In the end, Penelope could
only defeat / banish the Cold by calling on the supreme power of the Sun - yes,
in our campaign, suns are actually sentient beings, as Penelope discovered a
few lives ago, in the reign of pharaoh Akhenaten (back in Season 5)…
