Start to Finish: 4.11 - Night's Black Agents

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

It's time for a tie-in, with a Companion Chronicle which forms part of the trilogy (or rather, with this episode added, tetralogy) of main release plays featuring the Sixth Doctor and an older, wiser Jamie McCrimmon.

The Doctor and Jamie cross the Highlands in search of the stolen TARDIS. It's like old times, except for the kelpie and the witches and the demons.

In Marty Ross's Night's Black Agents, we join the Doctor and Jamie at the end of City of Spires, traveling from the now-destroyed anachronistic, dystopian sprawl of Grangemouth to retrieve the TARDIS, only to be attacked by a water demon of Scottish lore and taken in by the sinister Reverend Merodach and his beautiful wife Lucy.

Frazer Hines as Jamie, a man - as he reminds us - of little learning, narrates this story in a flamboyantly Gothic style. The pace and action is that of the Gothic genre, as is the dyad of a monstrous, ugly man and a pure, beautiful bride. Yet, far from being flaws in the story, these are features; not that one might realise this until, at the end of the following adventure, The Wreck of the Titan (spoilers), it has become clear that this is a story which takes place in the Land of Fiction, with supporting characters taken from the pages of Scottish literature (The Brownie of the Black Hags and The Bride of Lammermoor respectively).

Hines is a fine narrator - and manages a passable Sixth Doctor - and Hugh Ross positively revels in the role of the fiendish Merodach. The unrelated Marty Ross, a connoisseur of his country's folklore, weaves a rich, Gothic script full of vivid imagery, if lacking in pulse-pounding action. An oddity on first listening, in the context of the complete trilogy of main series plays, Night's Black Agents is revealed as a strange delight.

The final play in series four brings the Eighth Doctor to the Companion Chronicles, as Charley Pollard plays for the Doctor's life in Solitaire.