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Embrace the Darkness

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So apparently the Eighth Doctor’s latest holiday idea was “eyeless death base orbiting a dead sun,” which is very on-brand for him. In Embrace the Darkness, the TARDIS slams headfirst into a mining station at the arse-end of nowhere, orbiting a star that’s forgotten how to shine. There’s a rescue team on the way and a whispering alien voice in the dark that sounds like it just crawled out of a broken ASMR tape labelled “do not trust.”

This one’s a tonal pivot from the usual Big Finish buffet of genre samplers. Here, we’re in full-on horror mode. But not in the Hammer-wink way—no, this one commits. It’s grungy, wet, tactile. There are noises in the dark that should not be making noises. It’s Alien meets Event Horizon meets “don’t touch your face.”

The Cimmerians, our eye-slurping gribblies, are terrifying… until they aren’t. Because in true Who fashion, the endgame involves the monsters turning out to be healers, afraid of sunlight, misunderstood, and basically accidentally scooping out a few ocular systems like it’s a cultural faux pas. Classic misunderstanding plot twist. “Oh, we didn’t mean to eat your eyeballs! We’re just sensitive!” is very Season 17-core, and it works, sort of. Still, there’s a faint scent of tonal whiplash. Like being chased by a bear only to find out he just wanted to ask for directions.

The side characters? Surprisingly solid. Commander Orllensa, played by Nicola Boyce, radiates exhausted lesbian commander energy. She feels like she’s one failed mission away from saying “screw this” and opening a candle shop. And the ROSM—military-grade rescue AI with the personality of a bullet—becomes an accidental highlight. Every line it delivers feels like it was programmed by a bureaucratic demon. The scenes where McGann argues with it are pure therapy-bot meets divorce lawyer energy.

Speaking of McGann, he’s still operating on that buttery-throated cusp between Byronic dreamboat and weary old god. His dynamic with Charley continues to deepen, and there’s this lovely, prickly thread running through the story: the Doctor taking too much responsibility. It’s subtle, but you can feel him slipping into the emotional habits we’d later see sharpen in the 2005 revival—shouldering guilt, pushing people away “for their own good,” monologuing to robots about sacrifice like he’s auditioning for Les Mis. And Charley? Still excellent, still underappreciated, and very much the emotional spine of this whole arc.

But here’s the problem: it just doesn’t linger. The setup is grim and unsettling, the execution tight, but once the mystery resolves, it doesn’t leave a psychological bruise. It’s a good story, but not a haunting one. You remember the eye trauma, not the resolution.

Final Thoughts:
This one’s bold. It wants to get under your skin—and for a while, it does. But it never quite brings it home emotionally. There’s no lasting sting, no haunting afterglow. Just a chill that passes once the credits roll. It’s got teeth, but they’re mostly decorative. Still, for anyone craving a good audio scare with a sci-fi twist and an accidental therapy session between a Time Lord and a bureaucracy bot, it’s worth the listen.

3.5 out of 5 tasty, tasty eyes

Seasons of Fear

So here’s a story that walks into the bar wearing a trench coat made of myth, paradox, and deep-time melodrama, orders a drink called High Concept, and then mostly spills it on the floor while explaining how clever it is.

Let me be blunt. Seasons of Fear is not bad. It’s not even average. It’s one of those deeply competent stories, which somehow makes it harder to talk about because it almost works. You want to pat it on the shoulder and say, “You’re doing great, sweetie,” but also quietly direct it back to dramaturgy school.

It kicks off in 1930s Singapore—already weirdly underused as a setting, so bonus points—where the Eighth Doctor and Charley run into Sebastian Grayle: a sleazy little man with the confidence of a Bond villain and the death certificate of a Highlander. He’s got beef. And receipts. Apparently, at some nebulous point in their mutual tangle of timelines, the Doctor kills him, and everything goes kablooey. Big Terminator energy, minus the commitment.

What follows is a kind of greatest hits tour through Earth history—Ancient Rome, Saxon England, 19th-century smugness—each chapter revealing more about Grayle’s rise from pissbaby Roman lackey to universe-bothering megalomaniac. It’s episodic. It’s swashbuckling. There’s a swordfight that is SO sharply sound-designed you can almost smell the testosterone.

But for all that, nothing sticks. Each era is just a vibe—interesting, but forgettable. They don’t build tension so much as tread water in different fonts. Like, I’m not sure why I’m supposed to feel anything beyond “oh cool, that’s a new outfit.” It’s a temporal chase sequence with delusions of grandeur, which would be fine, except the climax wants emotional weight it hasn’t earned.

And yet. And yet. There’s that ending.

The Doctor, in a move that’s equal parts Machiavelli and Mister Rogers, goes back in time and gives Young Grayle the financial stability he needs to not become an immortal hate-ghoul. That’s right. The solution isn’t a showdown or a reset button. It’s early intervention. Genuinely moving. Actually kind of radical. The Doctor uses time travel for therapy and social reform. More of this, please.

Also, Zagreus gets a subtle shout. Second time in the audios. Back then it was a whisper. Not a capital-P Plot Thread, just… ambience. Like a shadow watching the story from a few timelines over. Love that. Love restraint. Miss it.

And Charley? Charley’s paradox continues to bubble under the surface—like Schrodinger’s plus-one—quietly poisoning the timestream, but the script trusts us to remember that without screaming “LOOMING CONSEQUENCES” every five minutes. Imagine!

Final Verdict:
Seasons of Fear is not unforgettable. But it’s respectable, atmospheric, and has a few emotional zingers hidden between the overcooked bits. A gentle paradox story with a blade tucked in its boot.

3.5 out of 5 inexplicably immortal colonialists

The Chimes of Midnight

There are haunted houses, and then there’s The Chimes of Midnight—a story that doesn’t just creak with ghosts but is a ghost. A ghost of trauma. A ghost of social rot. A ghost of Christmas Eve looping forever inside the walls of some horrible Edwardian purgatory where death is just something that happens to maids before pudding is served.

The Eighth Doctor and Charlie land in this temporal knot on what should be a festive evening, and within about eight seconds you realise the festive cheer has been quietly strangled in the pantry. Everything’s wrong here. The air feels thick. The clocks don’t chime right. The characters—if you can call them that—repeat themselves like corrupted Sims. Welcome to hell. It’s upstairs-downstairs and no one has any agency.

This is gothic horror, sure, but not in the usual ‘ooh there’s a candle in the fog and someone’s wearing lace’ kind of way. This is existential horror, coated in the aesthetic of murder-mystery radio theatre. And it’s so absurdly, effortlessly good at what it’s doing that you barely even realise you’re holding your breath for entire scenes.

Robert Shearman’s script is a layered, cruel, exquisite little Matryoshka doll of class criticism, identity, and emotional suppression. It pretends to be an Agatha Christie murder loop, but that’s just the sugar on the razor blade. What it really wants to talk about is what happens when you’re so defined by the role society forces on you that you forget how to be a person. And what it really wants is to put Charlie front and centre and tear her wide open, lovingly, brutally, and completely.

India Fisher is absolutely unreal in this. Charlie starts the story confused and cheeky, as usual, but by the time the loop is tightening and the deaths are hitting too close to home, she’s cracked open. Her performance goes from charming companion to someone being methodically unmade. And Paul McGann? He’s sublime. One part romantic poet, one part panicked parent. His Doctor is clearly terrified of what this place is doing to her, but he never quite lets the mask fall. It’s more heartbreaking that way.

The sound design deserves awards. Not metaphorically. Like, actual awards. Every tick of the clock, every echoing footstep, every dribble of blood or whisper behind the wall is placed with surgical precision. It doesn’t feel like you’re listening to it—it feels like the house is whispering to you directly.

If there’s one flaw, it’s that Chimes is so effective it might ruin other audios for you. It sets a bar most stories never reach, and it does it without yelling. It just creeps in through the servant’s door and sits beside you in the dark.

Final Verdict:
This isn’t just one of Big Finish’s best. This is Doctor Who at its most daring, most devastating, and most deeply human. A perfect ghost story. A perfect tragedy. A perfect Christmas treat.

5 out of 5 Very Naughty Plum Puddings

Invaders from Mars

Imagine a detective noir, a gangster flick, a spy thriller, a tongue-in-cheek alien invasion saga—all dumped into a blender stuck on pureed chaos. That, my friends, is Invaders from Mars. It’s got style and energy in spades, but it’s so bloated it forgets who it’s even meant to entertain.

Let’s start with the good: Mark Gatiss clearly knows his 1930s New York pulp. The dialogue crackles like radio static, and Paul McGann’s Eightie Doctor slips into gumshoe mode with irresistible gusto. India Fisher’s Charley meanwhile… gets lost in the shuffle, which is a shame—she’s sidelined early and underused, never given room to shine. Honestly, her character deserves better.

The cast is stacked—Simon Pegg as gangster Don Chaney, Jessica Stevenson’s sultry Glory Bee, Orson Welles (yes, the Orson) voiced by David Benson—and they all turn in performances that nearly save the tsunami of subplots. There’s Captain Cosmo Devine, Moscow agents, secret labs, Nazis, mob bosses, spies, martians, atomic secrets—and soldiers dying from dropped script threads like caramel popcorn in a blender. The audio even punctuates every reveal with trumpets like it’s chewing through a comic strip, and while that can be fun, here it just becomes audio wallpaper after the third act.

And the plot? Think of a heist movie on crack: the Doctor and Charley dive in after a dead PI and a crashed UFO, entangling themselves with gangsters who stumbled onto alien tech. Then there’s the Russian scientist, the flamboyant Nazi columnist—whose “secret sympathies” feel half-baked—and Orson, who goes from aloof radio star to conspiratorial cameo. Meanwhile, the aliens (the Lederplacker species) are flying in to grab their gizmo back. Everything careens, gallops, and eventually crashes through Soviet plotlines, gangster diplomacy, Nazi intrigue, Orson radio theater… you name it.

At its core? A clever premise: what if the real invasion happened during Welles’s broadcast? But as the narrative careens, that anchoring joke gets buried. By the final act, characters are biting it left, right, and center—mere casualties in the writer’s rush to defuse unresolved storylines. Far from tension, it feels like story fatigue. Nothing is given room to breathe or hit emotionally.

This would’ve been a slick triple-act radio caper as long as they’d trimmed the fat and held onto a couple of storylines. Instead, it’s got more threads than a knitting convention—and none of them finish cleanly. The production design still sparkles with 1930s radio drama nostalgia: jazzage FX, cast laughter, crackling static. But style can only paper over so much.

Final Verdict:
Gutsy, audacious, occasionally hilarious—but overstuffed and undercut by its own ambition. A classic “too much, too late” scenario.

2 out of 5 narrative transmission failures