Start to Finish: 3.06 - The Darkening Eye

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

 For the sixth release of the third series, The Companion Chronicles revisits an era not of Doctors no longer available, but of companions. This Fifth Doctor adventure features Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, in the period when the Doctor also traveled with Tegan and Adric, played by Janet Fielding and Matthew Waterhouse, both of whom had at the time ruled out ever returning to the roles, although both of whom have now recorded audio plays for Big Finish.

On board a crippled starship, the TARDIS crew encounter the sinister Dar Traders. The traders salvage the dead, and they have a peculiar interest in the Doctor. Yet they may not be the greatest threat present, as Nyssa and her comrades encounter the immortal assassin Damasin Hyde, who also has an interest in the Doctor.

The framing narrative of Stewart Sheargold's The Darkening Eye is superficially simple, picking up an older Nyssa working to cure Richter's Syndrome, as per her departure story in Terminus, albeit with something of a twist ending.

The story itself revisits a number of ideas from the original series - Damasin Hyde's capsule is made from dwarf star alloy, first seen in Warrior's Gate and making a guest appearance in The Family of Blood in the new series; Adric's non-human biology; and the strange abilities of the Trakenites - as well as tying into Big Finish's own The Death Collectors. It skirts the borders of the mystical in that way that a lot of material involving Nyssa does, positing a technology that borders on magical.

Having worked with Peter Davidson on numerous audio plays, Sutton catches his tone well without attempting to mimic his voice, and invokes Tegan and Adric convincingly. Derek Carlyle plays the terminal patient she is speaking to, as well as the wheezing Dar Traders. The Traders are wonderfully sinister, but Sutton matches them with the silky, amoral poise of the deadly Hyde.

There is a lot going on in The Darkening Eye, almost too much, as a bloody planetary war slides by almost unnoticed, but the meat of the adventure is good. It works better in the claustrophobic confines of spaceships, the close nature of the story losing something in the open sweep of a planet surface, but the core story is tight and effective.

A bit of a blast from the past next time, as The Companion Chronicles assays its first pure historical, as William Russell's Ian Chesterton recounts how he almost saw The Transit of Venus.