The Dead Line (audio story)

The Dead Line was an original BBC Radio 4 audio play. It was broadcast the week prior to series three of Torchwood. It was adapted by Phil Ford from his own unproduced TV story, Deadline.

Publisher summary
When a hospital is inundated with patients that have fallen into coma-like trances, Torchwood move in to investigate. They find that the trances were triggered by phone calls, all of which were made from a number that hadn't been active for over 30 years. Determined to find out who's been calling the unfortunate victims, Jack rings the mysterious number — two, zero, five, nine — nothing. It's a dead line. Until it calls Jack back, he answers — and falls into a deep trance. The team race against time to find the source of the "infection" and save the patients.

Plot
Bob Roberts and twenty other people enter a coma-like trance after answering answering their telephones and are taken to St Helen's Hospital. Jack, Gwen and Ianto deduce that there is something in the telephone network and Jack calls the number, a four digit one as would have been the norm in the 1970s, which turns out to be a dead line. When he answers an incoming call on a disconnected telephone, he too enters a trance and Gwen and Ianto invite Stella Courtney, a neuroscientist he dated in 1975, to St Helen's to examine him. Gwen warns Rhys against answering his telephone and visits him whilst Ianto and Stella stay with Jack.

Gwen and Rhys break into Madoc House, the deserted former office of Cardiff and West Building Society that the number was registered to, and follow the sound of a ringing telephone to the corpse of a man who starved to death in a trance. They visit Mr Tyler and are taken to Cardiff and West's private nursing home where thirteen employees were cared for after entering trances in 1976 after Madoc House was hit by lightning and the telephones rang all at once. These same telephones are the ones that the twenty patients answered and, when another twenty are afflicted, Stella finds that the calls were made at the same time as spikes in the patients' brain activity.

Every phone in Cardiff rings and Ianto rigs an MRI scanner to the Hub to release an electromagnetic pulse to repulse the phenomenon, which he likens to a computer virus. Although he is worried that he might lose Jack, he sends out the pulse with a direct connection to the virus through one of the Madoc House telephones and the afflicted are restored. Jack confirms that he heard Ianto talking to him about his worries whilst he was in a trance and assures him that he will not be a simple blip in his immortal life.

Cast

 * Jack - John Barrowman
 * Gwen - Eve Myles
 * Ianto - Gareth David-Lloyd
 * Rhys - Kai Owen
 * Stella - Dona Croll
 * Jan - Eiry Thomas
 * Bob - Matthew Gravelle
 * Tyler - Brendan Charleson

Worldbuilding

 * Ellie Roberts is Bob and Jan's daughter.
 * Rhys says that Captain Jack is similar to Captain Scarlet in that they both cannot die.
 * Gillian worked at Cardiff and West. She was seventeen when she entered a trance.
 * Thirteen Cardiff and West employees answered the telephone on 24 September 1976 at three o'clock and entered trances.
 * The Cardiff Rift is capable of interfering with weather and causing freak meteorological events to occur that others do not foresee.
 * Stella says that Jack might start dancing, "and you were never John Travolta." "Hey! I was the Saturday Night Fever!"

Download and CD release

 * The story is also available as a download from the AudioGo website.
 * 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

 * Rhys mentions going undercover for Gwen TV: Meat and fighting off a creature at their wedding Something Borrowed.
 * Ianto's comments to the comatose Jack about not expecting to live very long foreshadows his fate in TV: Children of Earth.
 * Rhys and Gwen discuss buying a new home; this leads into TV: Children of Earth: Day One which shows Rhys in the process of house-hunting.
 * Ianto comes to term with the fact that Jack has had and will have other lovers in his long life. (TV: The Empty Child, Small Worlds, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, The End of Time, Dead of Night, Immortal Sins; AUDIO: Golden Age, One Enchanted Evening, R&J)