Embrace The Darkness
A science station on the distant world of Cimmeria IV is plunged into darkness. Its three-person crew can’t see, but they can feel - and what they feel, at the hands of whatever has attacked the station, is intense pain. The Doctor arrives by chance, having always wondered how the sun of the Cimmerian system went dark at some point in the future, but when he and Charley pay a visit, things go horribly wrong, including Charley encountering the science station’s crew…who have been relieved of their eyes. The same fate then befalls Charley when she’s separated from the Doctor - and the Time Lord is getting no help from ROSM, an artificial intelligence whose inflexible thinking may not only doom an entire species inhabiting Cimmeria IV, but may also force the time travelers to be present for the death of the sun.
written by Nicholas Briggs
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Nicholas BriggsJim MortimoreCast: Paul McGann (The Doctor), India Fisher (Charley),
Timeline: after Seasons Of Fear and before The Time Of The Daleks
Review: Well, this is definitely a Nick Briggs script, all right - the claustrophobic feel, the intensely small cast, and a story that would’ve been impossible to do on TV simply because most of it is played out in pitch blackness. Oh, and don’t forget that Doctor Who staple ingredient, the demented computer. (more…)
After numerous misadventures, the TARDIS finally brings Charley to Singapore in 1930, right on time to make her appointment with a young man who she had originally stowed away aboard the R-101 to meet. While she is away, the Doctor meets a man named Sebastian Grayle - a man both blessed and cursed with immoirtality, a man who knows that the Doctor is a Time Lord, and a man who claims to have killed him some with the help of his masters at some point in the Doctor’s future. When Charlie returns, the Doctor once against whisks her away, urgently setting out to find out how Grayle came to be immortal, and who he serves who might want the Doctor dead. They travel back in time to the third century A.D. and meet Grayle in his original form: a naive priest who has made a tenuous pact with an alien power beyond his understanding. If the Doctor cannot stop Grayle from gaining immortality, his new nemesis will grow in power and cunning through the centuries until, at least, he does have the means to defeat a Time Lord.
The TARDIS lands in the well-stocked larder of what appears to be an Edwardian-era house. As Charley and the Doctor explore the house, they find numerous recent signs of life, but little or no evidence of the occupants. Gradually, Charley hears the voices of the people living in the house - and, for a moment, sees and speaks to one of them. Nothing the time travelers do or move stays permanent. When they’re suddenly able to communicate with the house’s occupants, the clock strikes and one of those occupants turns up horribly murdered. Far from being considered suspects, the Doctor and Charley are instantly “recognized” as London’s greatest amateur sleuths by the servants and staff. Another murder happens when the clock strikes eleven - and the victim of the previous slaying seems to have been erased from the memories of everyone except the Doctor and Charley. And so continues a horrifying, never ending cycle of life and death, a paradoxical cycle which can only end with the death of one of the house’s visitors.
The Doctor and Charley arrive in Manhattan just before Halloween, 1938. One of the first things Charley encounters upon her first visit to New York City is the body of a recently murdered private detective. When a woman arrives at the gumshoe’s office to hire him, the Doctor impersonates him and agrees to take on the case of her missing uncle (to Charley’s alarm). But things aren’t as they seem - Charley is kidnapped by mobsters, and even the Doctor’s new client isn’t who she seems. As Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater Players prepare to broadcast their infamous panic-inducing radio adaptation of “The War Of The Worlds”, a very real alien invasion is taking place - and the Doctor hopes to use one to fight the other.