Lost Souls (audio story)

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

 * Captain Jack Harkness - John Barrowman
 * Gwen Cooper - Eve Myles
 * Ianto Jones - Gareth David-Lloyd
 * Martha Jones - Freema Agyeman
 * Professor Johnson - Lucy Montgomery
 * Dr Harrington - Stephen Critchlow
 * Leon Foiret - Mark Meadows
 * Flight Attendant - Lucy Montgomery

Worldbuilding

 * The team are heard in pursuit of Weevils.
 * CERN is located in Geneva.
 * Jack once flew from Venus to Mars.
 * CERN are looking for the Higgs particle.
 * The Large Hadron Collider is twenty-seven kilometres round and goes through Switzerland and France.
 * Martha attended Owen and Tosh's funeral.
 * Owen was working on adapting a Bekaran deep-tissue scanner.
 * Martha wishes she had a sonic screwdriver when she tries to open a locked door.
 * Ianto and Gwen ride bikes to help them navigate the underground passages at CERN. Ianto is delighted to learn his bike has a bell and rings it.
 * Gwen mentions the Bahamas.

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

 * The Torchwood team are still grieving the deaths of their colleagues Owen Harper and Toshiko Sato. (TV: Exit Wounds)
 * When greeting Martha, Jack welcomes her with the words "voice of a nightingale", the phrase he used on her arrival in TV: Reset and again when she telephoned him in TV: The Stolen Earth.
 * Martha is still working for UNIT. (TV: The Sontaran Stratagem, et al)
 * Julia Swales was first seen working alongside Martha in TV: Smith and Jones.
 * The Large Hadron Collider would later show up in TV: Extremis, as well as CERN itself.
 * An alien creature poses as the ghosts of Owen, Toshiko and Ianto's deceased girlfriend, Lisa Hallett. (TV: Exit Wounds, Cyberwoman)
 * Evidently this isn't the first time that CERN was involved with creating a black hole, as K9 Mark IV was tasked with fixing a black hole created by an earlier experiment in Switzerland. (TV: Invasion of the Bane)
 * Liz Shaw joined CERN after leaving UNIT in the 1970s. (PROSE: Country of the Blind)