In ‘A Kill to a View’, Mr. Colchester and his husband move into a great new apartment with a nice view. It should be a safe place. Instead, they bump into a very old enemy of Torchwood…
Bilis Manger is back! Out of the all the episodes advertised in Torchwood: Aliens Among Us Part 2, A Kill to a View was the episode I had been looking forward to the most. It’s strange to think that the character had only two appearances in the show. Perhaps stranger is that he hasn’t returned since End of Days, the finale to season one. But he had cast such a shadow in those episodes, and was brilliantly portrayed with sinister charm by Murray Melvin.
Like his previous appearances, he once more seems to be hidden and working in the background. As caretaker of Ritz Towers, he seems keen to be very gracious and polite to all of the building’s tenants. Unsurprisingly, this just makes the character all the more sinister and mysterious.
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If there’s one thing I possibly enjoyed more than Bilis’s return, however, it’s how much A Kill to a View focuses on Mr. Colchester. Before I had listened to Part 1 of Aliens Among Us, I was admittedly rather worried about the new character. Specifically, that a potentially stuffy civil servant would be a bad fit for the team.
I was so happy to have been proven wrong. Mr. Colchester has emerged as possibly my favourite character of the new team, due to both consistently strong writing and a great performance by Paul Clayton. So I was very happy when listening to A Kill to a View to discover how much the episode focused on his home life. Especially as we finally got to meet his husband, Colin Colchester-Price!
Darker themes
Another enjoyable element of this episode were the themes it explored. Across the whole of Aliens Among Us so far, racial tension has been an important element. Not just in a purely allegorical sense either with the Sorvix, the main alien race of the series. The series doesn’t shy away from presenting a modern city with an increasing level of xenophobia to ordinary humans.
The idea that Colin is a Muslim isn’t necessarily important to the character, but it is important to the episode. Mr. Colchester is desperate to keep his husband safe. A high-rise place like Ritz Towers seems like the perfect place to do so, at least at first.
It was fantastic that A Kill to a View didn’t shy away from such major issues as racism or hate crime, and treated it in such a way that made it a problem too close to home for one of our main characters.
The episode is also fantastic as allegorical sci-fi, perhaps even a satire. Without giving too much away, a key point of the episode’s plot is the following question: just how far would you go to obtain the perfect home? How this question was answered with the story’s many distinctive characters was sometimes horrifying, sometimes thrilling, and sometimes hilarious. It’s a very grounded allegorical story that works wonderfully well.
A Kill to a View just might be my favorite episode of Aliens Among Us yet. It’s a great look at some of our favorite characters, it brings back one of the show’s best villains very effectively, and it explores difficult themes in a grounded yet entertaining way.
Next: Confusing Storylines: The Immortal Technology
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