I’m a little bit glad
that Night Thoughts wasn’t ever
included in the late McCoy era on television, not because it is a bad story,
but because it is tonally similar and has a similar setting when compared to Ghost Light. It is this similar tone and setting that
would most likely have caused viewers to overlook just how different these
stories actually are. Where Ghost Light is a story about evolution
and stopping change driven very much by its characters while Night Thoughts is a very different sort
of character driven story. It is a story
of pride and how one man’s pride can lead others to ruin. I am going to remain intentionally vague
about this story’s plot as there are a very many twists and turns in this story
that just deserve to be heard as you go along.
Much like And Then There Were None
every character has a deep, dark secret that they may be holding to their grave
and the murderer is trying to bring it out of them before they get torn down. The Doctor, Ace and Hex arrive on a remote
Scottish island whose inhabitants in a mansion are performing time travel
experiments when of course the power goes out and a murderer starts killing
people. That’s all the plot is as Ace
and Hex start to unravel the mysteries of the house while the Doctor is the one
who is in the background leading people on to the mysteries and trying to solve
the problems with the time travel experiments before anything bad could happen.
Let’s take a minute to
talk about the supporting characters of this story, starting with Sue played by
Lizzie Hopley, who is an orphan working in the house who is quite mentally disturbed. She wants to know where she came from, but
due to a muddled psychosis can only process her emotions through her creepy toy
rabbit, Happy, who constantly reminds her “Mother dead, Father gone, we think
your sister’s drowned” which is something that she cannot get away from. Sue has several moments of clarity but when
things go a bit sour she reverts behind her toy rabbit and being plain
creepy. Ace ends up becoming the only
one who gets Sue to give up her darker secrets as they both had bad
relationships with their families. Of course
these secrets have to do with the main antagonist of the story Major Dickens
played by Bernard Kay, who is the epitome of a prideful bastard who only cares
that his own good name gets spread and almost wants to bring everything down
around him. Yet he still has more
complexities as he doesn’t really want to see the people he is working with die
as although he has bear traps spread around the mansion, he is aghast when he
finds out Ace and Hex could have been trapped in them. He’s still completely evil and does get his
just desserts in the end, he still has a well-developed character.
The other two characters
in the supporting cast of this story of any real note are the Bursar who is the
woman who owns the mansion and is leading the experiments and the Deacon who
allows the secrets of the past to cause her to become depressed. They both are a bit one note yet Edward Young
writes the story in a way to make you care about almost all the characters
which I feel is mainly down to the setting of a remote island in the middle of
nowhere. There really is this sense of
hopelessness that permeates the area.
You can almost feel the freezing rain falling on the island and the
foggy danger in the distance. Sadly this
audio’s biggest fail is that it tries to explain that the experiments worked
which while it is a brilliant final scene, it isn’t necessary as the ambiguity
of whether the experiments worked and history was changed, but that just makes
relistening to this story impossible as you know exactly how it is going to end
and any dramatic tension is lost.
To summarize, Night Thoughts is a lost classic that
really should have been made in Season 27 with most of its actors on hand and
emulating the feelings of the Virgin New Adventures. Hex was integrated into the plot brilliantly
and Ace and the Doctor are both great along with most of the supporting cast of
the story. Young however has the problem
of giving too much away at the end when he really should have just left it
vague enough to have the possibility of it working, but going the other
way. 80/100
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