The BF Time Warp 031: Embrace the Darkness

[SiHart]

The Doctor and Charley travel to the remote Cimmerian System to unravel the mystery of its sun. But darkness has already embraced the scientific base on Cimmeria IV in more ways than one. In a fight for survival, the Doctor must use all his wits against a deadly artificial life-form and an ancient race whose return to the Cimmerian System threatens suffering and death on an apocalyptic scale.

A dark folly or bright shining release?

[Lissa]

It's a story which has a really great idea in it but doesn't quite know how to tell it. Using "particles" as an explanation for everything pseudo-scientific feels like the cop-out it is and most of the stuff with the robot is padding. There is definitely a lot of good in it and the business with the eyes may well be the best horror Big Finish has produced but it takes too many short cuts to be the classic it might otherwise be.

[Rob McCow]

It's not the tops, this one! I agree that the robots are pretty damn cool! Charley loses her eyes, doesn't she? I also remember it being fairly atmospheric.

It may have been let down by some rather silly aliens and the fact that Charley's eyeballs magically grow back.

[Paul Monk]

I listened to this recently and I agree about the robots being padding. The supporting characters are very like the ones in Sword of Orion which it bears a few similarities to. But if you ignore the pseudo science it has quite a few moments of genuine creepiness, especially if you listen in the dark.

[Rob McCow]

You know, I would listen to more audio plays in complete darkness with my eyes shut, but as I listen to most of them in the car I rather fear it would compromise my driving.

Actually, there are certain roads that I associate with certain BF stories. Embrace The Darkness is inextricably linked with the M1 and Scratchwood Services (like quite a few BF plays of the time). But I remember listening to it on a specific rainy morning, pulling up in the car park as they were menaced by the robots.

[Anthony Williams]

This is a bit of an odd beast. After two excellent plays, we're lumbered with a Briggs. Good old reliable Nick Briggs - he who can write Who-by-numbers. Yet, this isn't his usual fare. It's really quite different.

But is it any good?

There's something here that just doesn't click. Perhaps it's that this would've been far better as a 45 minute story in the Eighth Doctor and Lucie series (which, of course, they had no idea of predicting would happen at this point). There's just so much padding here - ROSM being the first real example of this that we come across. But the whole story is littered with it. There's just not enough here to fill four 25 minute episodes.

One of the best moments here is the Doctor going to the Sumerian system just because he doesn't know what happened there. That was just SO quintessentially The Doctor - doing something to fill in the gap in his knowledge. But that's not the only good idea here. I love the idea of the Sumerians and their back story. This is another story that could only ever be done on audio - having it on TV just wouldn't work, with a good part of the story being in the pitch black.

Ultimately, though, this story disappoints. The resolution is that... well, there was no danger whatsoever. It feels like I've just wasted an hour and a half of my life on something where no-one was in any real danger. Oh, and I pretty much hated every single supporting character. Particularly Orlenza. I know she reforms later in the story, but her stroppy sarcasm just turned me off of her early on, and I was unwilling to even try to like her when she gets better - I still thought of her as the sarcy bitch. But she's not the only one - all of them shift in their characters, and at various points in the story go from being the best of friends to colleagues who hate each other and then back again. Yuck.

Of course, the hints of what are to come in Neverland are here - Time Lords patrolling the Vortex for... well, we don't quite know what at this point. But it's not long until we find out. I love the arc that's going on here, and I really get the sense that it's building up to something truly epic.

This COULD have been a great story. There were some great ideas here, but the format for this just couldn't do them justice, and they were lost in amongst all the padding. Shame, really - it's seemingly rare at this stage of Big Finish's output that Briggs put out something different. This gets a distinctly average 3/5 from me.

[Si Hunt]

I really liked this one - one of his best, and most original, stories I think.

Si.

[Nyder]

Finished this yesterday - the eyes have it! Or not. The first cliffhanger was good with the eyes going AWOL - but it the story was a bit padded. And the woman with the Russian accent seemed to be a totally stock character.