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The Mind’s Eye and Mission of the Viyrans is one of those Big Finish releases that makes you wonder if the production team had a collective nap halfway through scripting and just decided to record their dreams instead. Which, unfortunately, is basically what happens in the first story.
The Mind’s Eye is three episodes of pure narrative NyQuil. The setup sounds fun enough — killer alien plants release a hallucinogenic gas, trapping Peri, and Erimem in shared dream worlds. Except it’s not fun. It’s beige. It’s paint sample beige. It’s like someone put Inception in a blender with Gardeners’ World and forgot to turn it on. Erimem dreams she’s back to being a queen, ruling over some sort of pseudo-historical nothing kingdom, while Peri gets trapped in a sitcom version of her own life — a soap opera where she flirts, cries, and narrates like she’s auditioning for Days of Our Lives in Space.
Now, that could have been genius. Peri’s sequence actually brushes against something interesting — that she dreams of triviality, of ordinary domestic chaos, instead of cosmic adventure. It’s a fun peek at her subconscious, the part that just wants normalcy instead of death vines and moral philosophy. But it never digs in. The script keeps cutting away every time something starts to feel alive. The Doctor, meanwhile, spends most of the runtime stumbling through dream logic and mumbling about rescue plans that sound like PowerPoint notes.
By the end, you don’t care who wakes up, who dies, or who’s still hallucinating because you’re praying you’ll wake up first. It’s an oddly hollow story, one that feels like filler even though it’s technically about the mind itself. It’s a real shame too, because Peter Davison, Nicola Bryant, and Caroline Morris are doing everything they can to make this material sing, but you can only do so much when you’re acting opposite metaphorical ferns.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 alien ferns gasping “boo” in your subconscious.
Then comes Mission of the Viyrans, and suddenly — blessedly — the pulse returns. It’s one episode long, sharp, weird, and stylishly uncanny. The Viyrans are these antiseptic alien medics who think they’re saving the universe by performing involuntary “virus clean-ups,” which sounds like both a bad IT policy and a moral horror story. Peri gets interrogated via memory surgery, flashing through disjointed, surreal images that feel straight out of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s late-era “psychological bottle show” phase — you know, that weird liminal stuff they did right before the credits rolled.
It’s good. It’s really good, but way too short. You can see the skeleton of something great underneath — a dissection of memory, autonomy, and medical ethics in space — but then it’s over before it can breathe. Still, it’s a small triumph after the slog of the previous story.
Rating: 3 out of 5 brain probes misfiring stylishly in the dark.
Final Thoughts:
Half tranquilizer, half spark of brilliance. The Mind’s Eye sedates you into oblivion, while Mission of the Viyrans jolts you awake just in time to remember why you love Big Finish at all.