MR 031: Embrace the Darkness

I guess "proceedural" is a great word for this one as well? Just like Sword of Orion, most of the interesting stuff happens at the end. And just like Sword of Orion, it could have benefited from being cut down to an hour episode. This is where the classic who format of four episodes hurts the story.

The Doctor is curious about a solar system whose sun disappeared and is immersed in total darkness. There's a station in that system already with people on it working towards creating an artificial sun, but the natives of this system who nobody knew existed, the Cimmerians, are unhappy with that and seem to be attacking.

The Doctor gets wrapped up with a very belligerant army of robots who are trying to rescue the crew while the Cimmerians extract the crew's eyes in an effort to put out the light. "Embrace the Darkness."

The Cimmerians are actually great healers who have psychic abilities for healing. They can take away and restore sight and probably other things. They are extremely sensitive to the light.

In their ancient past, a group called the Solarians sought out their help because of a devestating plague. The Cimmerians' tried to help as many people as they could but their telekenetic abilities for healing nearly killed them all so they fled. The plague victims tried to follow and beg for help, but the Cimmerians literally blotted out the sun so that the Solarian solar sail ships couldn't follow. Which is insane. And now the Solarians are coming back as archeologists and are suprised to find anyone living here.

Other than this mildly interesting story, at the end, most of the story involves the standard running around in corridors, misunderstandings, ect ect. The most interesting part to me is the robots contiued belligerance. I wonder if there's anything to that. If they are being programmed to be unhelpful.
But yeah, not a generally interesting episode. Though there was a sequence I enjoyed with Charley calling the Doctor out on his penchant for noble self-sacrifice after he makes a mistake. She's not content to just sit while he goes off and gets himself killed. "You brought me here and you're going to leave me with these people I don't know in god knows what century for what?" Good stuff. All in all though, definitely very C tier coded.

Oh. Written by Nick Briggs. And nobody at all was shocked.