Night Thoughts by: Edward Young directed by: Gary Russell: Requiem for a Dream

Night Thoughts stars Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor with Sophie Aldred as Ace and Philip Olivier as Hex.  It was written and adapted for audio by Edward Young, directed by Gary Russell and released in February 2006 by Big Finish Productions.

 

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