The Black Knight (audio story)

The Black Knight was the fiftieth story in the Torchwood - Monthly Range by Big Finish Productions, replacing Absent Friends. It was written by Lizbeth Myles.

Publisher's summary
A brilliant scientist detects an asteroid destroying any craft entering the Earth's orbit. Is it protecting the human race or imprisoning it?

Only one person believes her. That person is from Torchwood. Norton Folgate is taking Lynne Sharman on the journey of her life.

Plot
After another British rocket is destroyed entering the magnetosphere, Sir Christopher Grey gives Professor Lynne Sharman one final opportunity to prove that the project is not a complete failure. She detects an asteroid which she calls the Black Knight and which seems to be responsible for causing the rockets' destruction, a claim that only Norton Folgate believes. He arranges another launch after frightening Sir Christopher and blasts off with Lynne and Freddie Talbot to investigate, soon receiving a transmission in Russian from the asteroid despite the unlikelihood of the Soviet Union managing to land a rocket on a moving object.

The rocket is pulled into the asteroid where Norton, Lynne and Freddie find an alien spaceship, a Soviet capsule and its deceased occupant and an oxygen atmosphere. They break into the alien spaceship, which Freddie, wanting to take its interstellar engines, believes could lead to the restoration the British Empire, and find the unarmed corpse of the pilot before accessing the computer. Whilst Freddie looks around near the control centre, Norton and Lynne head deeper and wonder if the asteroid is stopping spacecraft from reaching Earth as well as keeping humans from entering space.

Norton and Lynne come to Freddie's rescue when he gets his hand stuck in a device and the trio follow music to what seem to be giant pearls. Freddie is killed trying to push his way through an energy barrier put around him when he removes one of the artefacts and, on the way back to Earth, Norton removes the shielding around the rocket's reactor to kill Lynne with radiation and reveals that he has been using a hard light pharadyne projector. He does not believe humans are ready to go into space and looks at the view of the stars with Lynne as she dies, apologising for being cruel and for having to kill her.

Cast

 * Norton Folgate - Samuel Barnett
 * Lynne Sharman - Safiyya Ingar
 * Freddie Talbot - Jacob Dudman
 * Sir Christopher Grey - Russell Bentley

Crew

 * Music - Blair Mowat
 * Senior Producer - David Richardson
 * Additional Themes - Ben Foster
 * Cover Art - Sean Longmore
 * Director - Scott Handcock
 * Executive Producers - Nicholas Briggs and Jason Haigh-Ellery
 * Producer and Script Editor - James Goss
 * Sound Designer - Simon Power
 * Writer - Lizbeth Myles
 * Theme Music - Murray Gold

Worldbuilding

 * Lynne studied at the University of Oxford.
 * Supposedly, Barker is sick and McDonald refuses to go in the rocket.
 * Norton is fluent in Russian.
 * Lynne mentions Sputnik, Pioneer 4 and Luna 1.
 * Norton uses the pharadyne hard light projector.

Continuity
to be added